You must not, however, imagine that he never learns anything. It is impossible for any boy to grow up in a crowded street in complete ignorance. Something he must learn; some views of life he must be forced to frame, though unconsciously. He will grow up in ignorance of the things which form actual life in other circles, but it is with a riverside lad as with a village lad. The latter, brought up in the country, acquires insensibly a vast mass of information and knowledge about the things of the country—the fields, the hedges, the woods, the birds, the creatures—without book, without school, without master; so the riverside lad, by running about on the Stairs and the foreshore, acquires a vast mass of information about the port and the river and the ships and the ways of those who go down to the deep. He knows the tides, he knows the jetsam and the flotsam of the tides, he trudges and wades in the mud of the foreshore to pick up what the tide leaves for him; he knows all the ships, where they come from, whither they are bound, the great liner which puts in at the West India docks, the packet boats, the coasters, the colliers, the Norwegian timber ships, he knows them all; he knows their rig, he knows their names and when to expect them—the river and all that floats upon it are known to him as a book is known to the student. Were it not for the work, the physical activity, the discipline, the obedience, expected of the man before the mast, he would be a sailor. Concerning the imports and the exports of London he knows more than any official of the Board of Trade—that is to say, figures concern him not, but he knows the bales and the casks and the crates and the boxes: are not his friends engaged every day in discharging cargo and taking it in? All this, you will acknowledge, means a good, solid lump of knowledge which may occupy his brain and give him materials for thought and conversation—if he ever did think, which is doubtful, and if he could converse, which is not at all doubtful. There is another kind of knowledge which the riverside lad picks up. It is the knowledge of the various ways, means, tricks, craft, and cunning by which many of his friends and contemporaries get through life without doing any work. It is with him as with men in other lines; he knows how things are done, but he cannot do them himself; he lacks courage, he lacks the necessary manner, he lacks the necessary quickness; he would be a rogue if he could; he admires successful roguery, but he is unable to imitate or to copy or to practise roguery. Not everyone can defy the law even for a brief spell between the weary periods of “stretch.” [Illustration: The Barges that Lie Down the Thames.]