Opposite Poverty Corner there is, or used to be, an archway into a courtyard where in one old office the walls were hung with half-models of sailing ships. I remember the name of one, the _Winefred_. Deed-boxes stood on shelves, with the name of a ship on each. There was a mahogany counter, an encrusted pewter inkstand, desks made secret with high screens, and a silence that might have been the reproof to intruders of a repute remembered in dignity behind the screens by those who kept waiting so unimportant a visitor as a boy. On the counter was a stand displaying sailing cards, announcing, among other events in London River, "the fine ship _Blackadder_ for immediate dispatch, having most of her cargo engaged, to Brisbane." And in those days, just round the corner in Billiter Street, one of the East India Company's warehouses survived, a sombre relic among the new limestone and red granite offices, a massive archway in its centre leading, it could be believed, to an enclosure of night left by the eighteenth century, and forgotten. I never saw anybody go into it, or come out. How could they? It was of another time and place. The familiar Tower, the Guildhall that we knew nearly as well, the Cathedral which certainly existed, for it could often be seen in the distance, and the Abbey that was little more than something we had heard named, they were but the scenery close to the buses. Yet London was more wonderful than anything they could make it appear. About Fenchurch Street and Leadenhall Street wagons could be seen going east, bearing bales and cases, and the packages were port-marked for Sourabaya, Para, Ilo-Ilo, and Santos--names like those. They had to be seen to be believed. You could stand there, forced to think that the sun never did more than make the floor of asphalted streets glow like polished brass, and that the evening light was full of glittering motes and smelt of dust, and that life worked itself out in cupboards made of glass and mahogany; and suddenly you learned, while smelling the dust, that Acapulco was more than a portent in a book and held only by an act of faith. Yet that astonishing revelation, enough to make any youthful messenger forget where he himself was bound, through turning to follow with his eyes that acceptance by a carrier's cart of the verity of the fable, is nowhere mentioned, I have found since, in any guide to London, though you may learn how Cornhill got its name.