Gone are the old houses now, with the old traditions, the old gaiety, the old mad enthusiasm for the sea. In his day the Blackwall seaman was a dare-devil, efficient man, eagerly coveted by shipowners and captains alike. Never did a ship sail from Blackwall during Crooks's schooldays without most of the boys staying away from school, regardless of results to their skins the next morning, in order to join in the farewell cheering from the foreshore. The welcome home to the Blackwall ships was something to remember. It was always a bitter disappointment to the boys, since it robbed them of an opportunity of playing truant, if a ship came home and docked during the night, having come up, as the old tide-master used to say, and brought her own news. Little remains to suggest the sea in Poplar High Street to-day. The old highway has lost its old glory. The old folks have forsaken the old homesteads. Of the few old buildings that remain, nearly every one has been cut up into small shops and tenements. One or two general dealers still pose as ships' outfitters, and an occasional shop remains as a marine store, as though in a final feeble struggle to preserve the old traditions. Crooks recollected well the period that costermongers thronged this riverside highway. They came about the time seamen were deserting it, so that the street for some time lost nothing of its noise or bustle. The day came when they, too, departed, seeking a more profitable field in Chrisp Street, on the northern side of East India Dock Road, where to this day they still hold carnival. That they carried away something of the seafaring character of their former highway is borne out by the nautical turn they give to some of their remarks. "Here," cried a fish-dealer of their number the other day, holding aloft a haddock, "wot price this 'ere 'addick?" "Tuppence," suggested a woman bystander. "Wot! tuppence! 'Ow would you like to get a ship, an' go out to sea an' fish for 'addicks to sell for tuppence in foggy weather like this?" As we passed down that portion of the High Street that skirts the Recreation Ground, Crooks pointed out the quaint old church of St. Matthias. He told me it was the oldest church in Poplar, built as a chapel-of-ease to the mother church of East London, St. Dunstan's. Then it was that all the parishes that now go to make up the teeming Tower Hamlets were comprised in Stepney. As the Port of London in those days was confined to the Pool and lower reaches and to the riverside hamlets of the East End, that was why people born at sea were often entered as having been born in the parish of Stepney.