I ended this by rising, and we soon afterwards left the house. It was a clear, cold afternoon, with a bright blue sky for London. We took a coach to Limehouse and then a boat. There is no change in the East India Docks in all these years. I went down to them for memory’s sake not very long ago, and all was the same, it seemed to me, saving the steamers. The basins were full of ships of many sizes and of all rigs; the air was radiant with the flicker and tremble of scores of flags; strange smells of distant countries loaded the atmosphere--sweet oils and spices, wool and scarlet oranges and scented timber. When I was a child my father had sometimes brought me to these docks when he came to them on business; I thought of him as I looked, and felt a little girl again with the odd wonderment and delight of a child in me as I stared at the shipping and the complicated heights of spar and rigging, at the grinding cranes heavily lifting cargo in and out, as I breathed the odours of the littered quays, as I hearkened to the shouts, to the songs of the seamen at the winch or capstan, to the voices of the wind in the gear, soft in the fabric of the taller ships as the gay whistlings of silver pipes heard afar. We walked leisurely along the quays. Will’s ship lay in a corner at a distance, and he was for enthusiastically pressing forward to arrive at her. His ardent pace kept him ahead, and he often turned to invite us to come on. But I was listening to Captain Butler and was in no great hurry. At last we came to Will’s ship, the _Childe Harold_. Oh, my great God, when I think of it! When I think of standing beside Captain Butler and looking at that ship with my cousin at my elbow calling my attention to points of her with a young sailor’s pride! She was a very handsome vessel of her kind, and a big ship according to the burden of those days. Though she was receiving cargo fast, her sides towered high above the wall; she had been newly coppered, and her metal glanced sunnily upon the soup-like water she floated on. Captain Butler took my hand, and we followed Will up the gangway plank and gained the ship’s deck. A man with a beard stood at the yawn of the great main hatch; Will touched his cap and whispered that he was the mate of the ship. Captain Butler went up and shook hands with him and rejoined us, saying that he had made the man’s acquaintance at Callao. A quantity of cases were being swung over the rail, and as they were lowered down the hatch I heard a noise of voices below--calls and yells, and the kind of language you expect to hear arising from the hold of a ship that is populous with lumpers. Will took us into the cuddy, which you will now call the saloon; a fine cabin under the poop-deck, with some sleeping berths on either hand. He then walked us forward to show us the apprentices’ quarters.