depends upon the fact that the arches of the "aqueduct are only some 5 feet in height, and carry not a waterway, but an iron pipe.

Another picturesque spot is the neighbourhood of the old farmhouse marked in the Ordnance Survey as Cabborns, but now known as Manor Farm. From Mucking Church it

C

lies across the upper extremity of the creek, where the water diminishes to a stream running through pasture. At spring tides these fields are often flooded, and the farm appears to be on the edge of a broad river.

The old house has four gables, some of it being built in the fifteenth century. It was altered and rebuilt later in the sixteenth or early in the seventeenth century.

I made the sketch and retraced my steps to the Claudian Aqueduct, which is not very far away from the back of this farmhouse, and then struck out along the railway line,

a single track connecting

Thames Haven with the line to Tilbury.

The sun was now low, and the mists were rising. Hull-down behind the seawall, which I could just discern across the level land, moved sails and funnels and masts and fantastic trails of hanging smoke.

The western sky behind me was growing into red and gold, and the dim distance before me to the east was

glowing in
in a shimmer of
misty blue. And then a
great wonder happened. There

before me, out of the blueness, rose the walls of a mighty city, a vast metropolis of amber touched with gold. No sight of Babylon or Tyre, even in the days of their glory, could vie with it in solemn splendour. Yet it seemed real enough and at the end of the railway line. It might be only where the rainbow ended, or it might be a mirage that would fade. Whatever it was, I was determined to probe the mystery, and so hurried forward, picking my way from sleeper to sleeper in the direction of this city of light.

I have seen mirages, and these flat lands of dyke and level pasture are frequently mirage-haunted, but this I felt instinctively was no ordinary mirage. It may have been caused by a trick of light, but it was based upon something

which was undoubtedly there. No less an authority than Shakespeare tells us that not only these things but the whole earth itself shall fade like some unsubstantial pageant.

I was not, therefore, very surprised when it began to tone down and lower itself, and slowly but surely, as the magic light died away, resolve itself into the semblance not of a city of light but of oil tanks, and became Thames Haven.

They still made an intriguing picture, these works, with the sentinel beacon-light standing on legs like some visiting Martian stuck in the mud, giving them still an unusual character. I should like to have sketched it, but the light was gone, so I pursued my way, and after some negotiation at the entrance to the oil city, succeeded in finding some one in authority who gave me permission to wander about.

LOW TIDE.