Much has already been said of the dangers of the Goodwins, but they are not altogether evil. Like human beings, they are compact of good and ill. Their useful and beneficent function is to provide a kind of natural breakwater forming the roadstead famous for centuries in naval and mercantile shipping annals as “the Downs”: “All in the Downs the fleet lay moored,” as the song goes, in Gay’s “Black-eyed Susan.” Here, in the comparatively smooth water of this anchorage, stretching from Walmer, past Deal, nearly to Sandwich, the navies of Rodney’s and Nelson’s times gathered, either for strategical reasons or in stress of weather. The Downs--whose name comes from _dunes_, referring to the Goodwin Sands and the wild wastes of sand-dunes between Deal and Sandwich--are safe and sheltered in all winds, except a southerly gale; and thus in old times, when tempests blew from any other quarter, all the shipping in the Channel made haste to ride out the storm in these waters. In those times four hundred vessels were often seen at once sheltering here; but steamships are less dependent upon the weather, and, now that sailing-vessels are comparatively few, the Downs are never so crowded as of yore. The days when the Downs were crowded with many a ship that in the fine old descriptive phrase--which really was description and not imagination--“walked the water like a thing of life,” are long since done, and now the vessels that in fewer numbers ride out the worst of the Channel gales here are things of iron that sit deep and wallow in the water like the tanks they really are; things of steam, with a walking-stick by way of mast and quite innocent of bowsprit. They are vessels in the truest and most exact form of the word, floating tanks, made to hold things, not ships that sit upon the water, as the old sailing-ships did, like swans, or, as the poet says, “walked the water.” There are walks and walks, and I figure the gait of an old frigate, or even of a barque or brigantine, under full canvas, not as a pedestrian’s stride, but as the graceful carriage of a lady in a spacious drawing-room.