Were I asked to choose a subject which would most gratify my own fancy I believe I would choose the docks and piers of New York. Nowhere may you find a more pleasingly encouraging picture-life going on at a leisurely gait, but going, nor one withal set in a lovelier framework. And, personally, I have always foolishly imagined that the laborers and men of affairs connected with them must be the happier for that connection. It is more than probable that that is not true, but what can be more interesting than long, heavily-laden piers jutting out into the ever-flowing waters of a river? And those tall masts adjoining, how they rock and swing! Whistler had a fancy for scenes like these; they appealed to his sense of line and background and romance. You can look at his etchings of collections of boats along the Thames at London and see how keenly he must have felt the beauty of what he saw. Networks of ropes and spars; stout, stodgy figures of half-idle laborers; delicious, comforting, homey suggestions of houses and spires behind; and then the water. How the water sips and gurgles about these stanchions and spiles and hulls! You stand on the shore or on the hard-cobbled streets of the waterfront, crowded with trucks and cars, and you realize that the too, too solid substance of which they are composed is to be here for years. But this water at your feet, this dark, silent current sipping about the boats and rocking them, the big boats and the little boats, is running away. Here comes a chip, there goes a wisp of straw. A tomato box comes leisurely bobbing upon the surface of the stream, and now a tug heaves into view, puffing and blowing, and then a great “liner” being towed to her dock. And then these nearer boats fastened here--how they rest and swing in the summer sunshine! No rush, no hurry. Only slow movement. Yet all are surely and gradually slipping away. In an hour your ship will be a mile or two farther down stream. In a day or two or three your liner will be once more upon the bosom of the broad Atlantic or, later even, the Pacific. The tug you saw towing it will be pulling at something else, or you will find it shoving its queer stubby nose into some quaint angle of the waterside, hardly earning its skipper’s salt. Is it not a delicious, lovely, romantic picture? And yet with the tang of change and decay in it too, the gradual passing of all things--yourself--myself--all.