Always the benign sun-and-smoke clothes them with softness and harmony; it softens their vermilion advertisements to harmony with the tinted azure of the sky and the vague grey-brown of the water. Brutal business built them, to ship and unship, and be as crass and crude as they would, but the smoke turns them into the semblance of sleepy monsters basking by the river they love. Presently the tall sky-line breaks and drops; let in between the monsters appears a terrace of tiny riverside houses, huddled together as in a miniature. There is a tiny tavern with a plank-built terrace rising on piles out of the water, a tiny shop all aslant, a tiny brown house with a pot-belly of a bow-window. It all babbles of Jack and Poll, of crimps and tots of rum, and incredible yarns in the bar-parlour. Next, between the dusky wharves, an Italian church-tower soars up out of a nest of poor houses; the sun catches its white face and transfigures it. Then, the dearest sight of all--ships appearing out of the land, fore and main and mizzen, peak and truck, halliards and stays, and men like flies furling top-gallant sails above the roofs of London. As we open the region of the docks we are in a great city of ships--big steamers basking lazily with their red bellies half out of water, frantic spluttering tugs, placid brown-sailed barges, reckless banging lighters--and behind all this, clumps and thickets and avenues of masts and spars and tackle stretching stretching infinitely on every side. The houses have melted all away, and London is become a city of ships. Here we go on shore from Father Thames, that [Illustration: THE MEADS, FARNHAM.] sober and steady as he looks, leads so many a British stream to end its skittish, froward, and headstrong youth by running away to sea:-- And round about him many a pretty page Attended duly, ready to obey; All little rivers which owe vassalage To him, as to their lord, and tribute pay: The chalky Kennet and the Thetis grey; The moorish Colne, and the soft sliding Breane; The wanton Lea, that oft doth lose his way; And the still Darent, in whose waters clean Ten thousand fishes play and deck his pleasant stream. Further on in his catalogue of rivers, Spenser gives the Mole a whole couplet to itself, well known to guide-book writers in search of copy. But one rubs one's eyes to find him omitting Surrey's principal tributary, so compliant, too, in yoke of rhyme,--the Wey, a clansman of the Welsh Wye, and also of that disguised "Thetis grey," which turns out to be the stream flowing into the Thames at Cookham, on maps styled Wye, though a high authority suspects that it adopted this good old British name only by suggestion from its course beside Wycombe, even as the men of some broken clan might wrap themselves in the tartan of Campbell or Macdonald. III