Poplar is always picturesque with the glimpses it gives of ships' masts rising out of the Docks above the roofs of houses. With Crooks as guide, this rambling district of Dockland, foolishly imagined by many people to be wholly a centre of squalor, becomes as romantic as a mediæval town. It was not always grey and poor, as so many parts of it are to-day, though even these are not without their quaint and pleasant places. We wended through several of its grey streets, making for the river at Blackwall. Everywhere women and children, as well as men, whom we passed greeted Crooks cheerily. "Can you wonder so many of our people take to drink?" And he pointed to the shabby little houses, all let out in tenements, in the street where he was born. "Look at the homes they are forced to live in! The men can't invite their mates round, so they meet at 'The Spotted Dog' of an evening. During the day the women often drift to the same place. The boys and girls cannot do their courting in these overcrowded homes. They make love in the streets, and soon they too begin to haunt the public-houses." He changed his tone when we entered the famous old High Street that runs between the West India Docks and Blackwall. He pointed out the house where he spent many years of his boyhood after his parents moved from Shirbutt Street. The old home is associated with his errand-boy experiences. In those days he finished work at midnight on Saturdays, and knowing that his parents would be in bed, he often lingered in the High Street into the early hours of Sunday, playing with other lads who, like himself, had just finished work. As we continued our way down the High Street together, he surprised me by his wonderful knowledge of the neighbourhood. Here was a Poplar man proud of Poplar. He told me that the now silent High Street was at one time a sort of sailors' fair-ground, like the old Ratcliff Highway. It was there, he said, that Poplar had its beginning, according to the historian Stow. There shipwrights and other marine men built large houses for themselves, with small ones around for seamen. Not for these people alone were the houses built. Worthy citizens of London lived down there. Sir John de Poultney, four times Lord Mayor, lived in a quaint old house in Coldharbour, at Blackwall, that stood until recently. This same house once formed the home of the discoverer, Sebastian Cabot. It was there that Cabot made friends with Sir Thomas Spert, Vice-Admiral of England, who also had a house at Poplar, and promised Cabot a good ship of the Government's for a voyage of discovery. And, later still, Sir Walter Raleigh is said to have been the tenant, and of course legend credits him with having smoked one of his earliest pipes there.