The Mersey is at its widest in the neighbourhood of Ellesmere Port, the stretch across from here to Dungeon Point, on the Lancashire side, being about three miles. Gradually narrowing in its progress to the sea, it is only some 1,250 yards wide at the entrance. The passage outwards, between Liverpool and Birkenhead down to the bar, has been compared to a bottle-neck, and it is this feature of the stream, added to the fact that, although a river of the west coast, it turns round and takes a northerly direction, which gives it its commercial importance. Through the narrow passage, the tidal flow is rapid enough to maintain an open channel into the inlying estuary, and to clear a passage for the largest vessels well out into the open sea. One source of danger lies at the bar. Here sand is apt to silt up; and if this were allowed to go on, the result would be that large vessels would have to wait on either side for high water in order to get in or out. The remedy has been found in extensive and frequent dredging, the effect of which is not only to make entrance to the river accessible at all states of the tide, but also to increase the inrush and the outrush of water, to the manifest improvement of the inner channels. The estuary has the further advantage of natural protection. The Wirral Peninsula, as a glance at the map will show, serves as a magnificent break-water, and the harbour has of course a great out-lying safeguard in the barrier Ireland presents between it and the Atlantic. It is where Mersey is at its widest and best--at the places where it affords safe and capacious anchorage for the merchantmen of all nations--that its story begins to unfold itself; and, as has been indicated, it is not an ancient recital, by any means. Elsewhere along its course are references to places and persons that take one back as far as the written history of this island can go, but in the neighbourhood of Liverpool the references are all of them comparatively modern. Here there is trace neither of Roman nor of Norman. Yet if Liverpool and Birkenhead do not figure in the Domesday pages, they are by no means creations of yesterday, though, as we now find them, both are very much the outcome of nineteenth-century enterprise. Liverpool got a charter as far back as the year 1173, and about a century and a half later the enterprising Prior of Birkenhead obtained a licence to build hospices for travellers, and secured at the same time the right of ferryage, of which the Monk's Ferry of to-day is an interesting reminiscence.