The long summer afternoon is waning, and the western sky, flaming with fading fires, floods broad Chelsea Reach with waves of dusky gold. The evening mist rises slowly, as yet hiding nothing, but transforming even commonplace objects in a weird unwonted way. Those pretentious blocks of new mansions loom almost lordly now; that distant railway bridge is only a ghost of graceful glimmering arches; money-making factory chimneys and commercial wharves pretend to picturesque possibilities; clumpish barges, sprawling on the mud, are no longer ugly; and a broad-bottomed coasting schooner, unloading stone at a dock, is just what we would choose to see there. And here at the end of this bridge is a fragment of “real old Chelsea,” left intact for our delectation—a cluster of drooping trees on the bank, an unaccountable boat-house, stone steps leading down to the bit of beach, whereon are skiffs drawn up, and cordage lying about, and sail-wrapped spars. Out on the placid Reach there is but little movement; the river steamboats are anchored in a dark mass near the shore, and the last belated one edges up to its mooring beside them for the night; a burly barge drifts slowly by under its dusky brown sails, or a “dumb-barge” floats with the tide, its crew of one man busied with his long sculls and his not-dumb blasphemy; a puffing tug with a red light in its nose drags tortuously a long line of tarpaulin-covered canal boats. As each of these moving objects breaks the burnished waves into bits of golden gloom, the whole still surface of the stream becomes alive for us with a fairy flotilla, born of the brain, yet real enough to our vision. There float ancient barges, six and eight-oared, gorgeous with gilding or severely simple; those of brilliant noblemen, of the City guilds, of Royalty itself. We seem to see Henry VIII. rowing up, on a visit to More; Elizabeth coming to call on Lord Charles Howard of Effingham, him who scattered the “Spanyard’s Invinsable Navye” for her; the first Charles, impatient to dote on his “dear Steenie.” Even the commonest of these curious craft is freighted, for our fancy, with a nameless cargo, not on its bills of lading. So do we gaze across the river of Time that flows between us and the group of famous men and historic women, moving in the twilight of the past on Chelsea’s shore. And we ask, with Marcus Piso, friend of the younger Cicero: “Is it by some mutual instinct, or through some delusion, that when we see the very spots where famous men have lived, we are far more touched than when we hear of the things that they have done, or read something that they have written? It is thus that I am affected at this moment.” [Picture: Turner’s last dwelling-place]