An ancient mariner who frequents the beach below the boat-house feels, I am convinced, thoroughly persuaded that his occupation is strictly professional, that he is himself a necessity, not of amusement, but business. He will tell you that when the wind veers round like that, “suddenways, off Kensington Gardens, you may look out for squalls;” that “last Toosday was an awful wild night, and some on ’em broke from their moorings afore he could turn out. The _Bellerophon_, bless ye, was as nigh lost as could be, and that there _Water Lily_, the sweetest thing as ever swam—she sprang her boom, damaged her bowsprit, and broke her nose. He was refitting all Wens’day, he was, up to two o’clock, and a precious job he had!” Every one who constantly “takes his walks abroad” in the Great City, becomes a philosopher in spite of himself, of the Peripatetic School, no doubt, but still a philosopher; so you sympathise mildly with the mariner’s troubles; for to you no human interests are either great or small, nor does one pursuit or person bore you more than another. You hazard an opinion, therefore, that the _Water Lily_ is somewhat too delicate and fragile a craft to encounter boisterous weather, even on such an inland sea as this, and find, to your dismay, that so innocent an observation stamps you in his opinion as not only ignorant, but presumptuous. He considers her both “wholesome,” as he calls it, and “weatherly,” urging on you many considerations of sea-worthiness, such as her false keel, her bulwarks, her breadth of beam, and general calibre. “Why, she’s seven-and-twenty,” says he, rolling a peppermint lozenge round his tongue, just as a real seaman turns a quid; “now look at the _Sea-Sarpent_ lying away to the eastward yonder, just beyond the point where the gravel’s been washed adrift. She’s fifty-two, she is, but I wouldn’t trust her, not in lumpy water, you know, like the schooner. No. If I was a-building of one now, what I call, for all work and all weathers, thirty would be my mark, or from that to thirty-five at the outside!” “Thirty-five what? Tons?” you ask, a little abashed, and feeling you have committed yourself. “Tons!” he repeats, in a tone of intense disgust—“tons be blowed! h’inches! I should have thought any landsman might ha’ knowed that—h’inches!” and lurching sulkily into his cabin under the willow-tree, disappears to be seen no more. Later, when September has begun to tinge the topmost twigs with gold, and autumn, like a beautiful woman, then indeed at her loveliest, who is just upon the wane, dresses in her deepest colours, and her richest garments, go roaming about in Kensington Gardens, and say whether you might not fancy yourself a hundred miles from any such evidences of civilisation as a pillar-post or a cab-stand.