Connected also with the sea is that old and famous institution, Morden's College, Blackheath. In the middle of the seventeenth century Sir John Morden was a member of the great Turkey Company, trading in the Mediterranean. He had a "fair estate," numerous ships, and all things that in his day made up the prosperous trader. In the City of London his name stood high. But the tenure of riches and prosperity was more precarious in those days than in our own. The whole of his fleet perished on one voyage, either by pirates or storm. But honest Sir John did not relax his energy because he found fortune his foe. Steadily plodding on, he again commenced to rise in the world, until at last, like the patriarch Job, he was even greater and wealthier than before. Misfortune had taught him a lesson in charity which he never forgot. When at the lowest depths of his calamity he had vowed that if ever the Almighty again crowned his efforts with success he would provide a shelter for merchants who, like himself, had fallen upon hard times and lost their estates "by accidents, dangers, and perils of the seas." The College is a spacious red-brick building, with two wings that form a central quadrangle, which is surrounded by piazzas. It was built according to the designs of Sir Christopher Wren. At the present day it houses within its hospitable walls forty pensioners, while one hundred out-pensioners receive sums varying in amount up to £80 per annum. The inmates, with £120 each, are very comfortably off. In 1844 a fine dining-hall was added, in which hang the portraits of the baronet and his lady, painted by Sir Peter Lely. The new library was bequeathed by the will of a son of a former inmate of the College. With the increasing value of property, the income of Morden's College is now little short of £18,000 a year. The generous action of the founder well merited the praise of an old member of the institution, who wrote in his gratitude a poetic effusion thus concluding: "What need is there of monument or bust, With gift so noble and a cause so just? It seeks no aid from meretricious art, It lives enshrined in every member's heart!" [Illustration: (_Photo: Cassell and Co., Ltd_.) HUGGENS' COLLEGE, NORTHFLEET.]