The river now begins to be properly buoyed. There is a black buoy with an experimental gas light occulting off Ovens Flat, and black continues to be the colour of the buoys which mark the channel on the "port "" or Essex side all the way round to Harwich. The entrances to the various rivers seem to cause a little confusion in this system, but, generally speaking, should the weather be thick and we pick up a black buoy we shall know we are getting shorewards on the east side.

There is a good place to bring-up in on the Kent side below Gravesend, off Milton, opposite the Lobster Inn and Denton's Wharf, in 6ft. of water.

East Tilbury Church and Coalhouse Point.

Ovens Buoy.

Sailing down the Lower Hope we soon open up Lower Hope Point, on which there is a beacon. Give this point a wide berth, and then steer towards the Mucking Light on the Essex shore. It stands 40ft. above high-water mark, and is visible eleven miles. A slight pier joins it to the land. From the Ovens Buoy it bears N.E. E. The light is occulting, three seconds in every thirty-three, white, but showing red to the North of bearing W. by N. N. and with a red sector bearing N. by W. over the West Blythe Buoy. About opposite this light the black-and-white-chequered buoy, marking the west end of the Blythe sand, will be noticed. This sand lies a good

way out from the Kentish shore, but is well buoyed. The middle Blythe Buoy comes next, painted black with white stripes, and then the East Blythe, chequered black and white. Opposite the middle of the West Blythe bank is Thames Haven, a place devoted to the unloading of such kinds of petroleum as are of too dangerous a character to bring farther up the Thames. There are powder and gasogene works close by, so that all things are handy for a rise. The place, however, is four miles from anywhere, and only the shipping on the chanced to be passing, would suffer. So let us in mid-stream all the way down Sea Reach.

river, if any get on. Keep The river is

Lower Hope Point.

Sea Reach, off Mucking Light.

BARGES DRIFTING UP WITH THE TIDE.

broadening fast, and the sea breeze is really beginning to freshen up.

Opposite the middle Blythe Buoy is the entrance to Hole Haven, a retired creek, which gives good shelter from all winds, and where we can lie afloat in 9ft. of water comfortably. Keep well over to the Canvey Island shore, and towards the southwest point of it, where is the sluice-house and coastguard station, and a road thence leading across the island to Benfleet, crossing the channel between Canvey Island and the mainland by a ford or causeway only dry at low water. It is possible for craft not drawing more than 3ft. to sail all round this island, and

water at

so get into the river again at Leigh; but the channel is very narrow and the water does not remain long. The creek also runs up to Pitsea-a station on the Tilbury and Southend line. There is very little water here also, only about 5ft. at high water spring tides; there is hardly any neaps, and the channel is very narrow in places. All the mud uncovers at low water; so unless we are prepared to stay it is better not to try the navigation beyond Benfleet Ray. There is one this peculiar feature in creek; about half-a-mile from the entrance a low island divides the channel into two branches. At about a cable's length from the entrance of the southern arm there is a deep hole, which it seems odd the mud has not filled up. The soundings are, at the point where the channel divides, 9ft., 4ft., then suddenly it drops to 23ft., followed

by an abrupt shelving to 4ft. again.

There are generally several barges and other craft here, as this is a convenient anchorage if the wind should get up strong from the east, south-east, or south-west, and Canvey Island has a certain attractiveness from its very quaintness; it is so wonderfully flat. This Dutch-like country was saved from the sea by Dutchmen. In 1622 there was danger of the land becoming nothing but a sand-bank. The proprietors agreed to give a third of the lands to John Croppenburgh if he would keep the sea out; so the Dutchman invited other Dutchmen, and they raised for themselves a succession of little islands, just big enough to build octagonal cottages on, and so fought the sea with the same indomitable energy they had displayed against it in their own country. No wonder the Spaniards and the French could never make any impression on the Hollander; the long fight with the ocean was a good training for resistance to foreign invasion.

A timber chapel was built, which is now represented by the building at Church Hill, a mound perhaps 6ft. high-for they had their humour these Dutchmen—and after all height is merely a matter of comparison; an ordinary man does not get quite done up with climbing Church Hill.

It is two miles across the island from the sluice-house to Waterside Farm opposite Benfleet. The channel between is called Hadley Ray, Ray being the east-coast name for channel. The learned say derived from Rie, a NormanFrench word for bank; though why a channel should be called a bank does not seem quite clear.

Certainly this little out-of-the-way Essex village is the last place which one would connect with Italy or Florence, yet the Lady of the Manor was daughter of that remarkable English "tailor and great master in the art of war, and of a disposition vulpine and crafty like the rest of his countrymen," who ranks with the Dukes of Marlborough and Wellington, and Lord Nelson, as being one of the few Englishmen whom foreign nations have regarded as great warriors.

Sir John Hawkwood, an Essex man, is not nearly enough appreciated by his countrymen, and yet he is undoubtedly

the original of all those nursery stories which tell how a little tailor became a great warrior and married the king's daughter. Here was an adventurer truly. The son of a tanner of Sible Hedingham, himself apprenticed to a merchant tailor, so the Italians say, becomes son-in-law of the Great Duke of Milan, and thus related to the Royal Houses of France and England. The Gonzaga, the Viscontis, Podesta of Florence, what visions these names suggest. Romance and history are nearly allied. After all, as Hawkwood's father-in-law had thirty-six children, fifteen of them being by one lady, his wife, no doubt he was hard put to it to find husbands for all, and, besides, this "vulpine" gentleman was vermin worthy to be snared if he could not be run down; so Messire Bernabo Visconti, father of thirty-six children, marries his daughter, the fair Lady Donnina, to the great, noble, and very puissant knight and captain, Johannes Acutus (or Hawkwood) Miles, and a magnificent wedding it was; two years afterwards, Sir William Coggeshall, Lord of the Manor of Benfleet, marries the Lady Antiocha, daughter of the great captain of the White Company, and brought her to live in the Manor across the Hadley Ray. England was made by adventurers. We have thought of Drake and his million-and-a-half. Here we have another really astonishing man—a man who was a born ruler of men; who, among the crafty, accomplished, elegant, utterly unscrupulous Italians of the age of Petrarch and Boccaccio, Giotto and Masaccio, Ghiberti and Taddeo Gaddi, the Visconti and Malatesta, exhibited all the qualities which have made Englishmen the successors of Imperial Rome.

Tu regere imperio populos, Romane, memento,

There is something wonderfully picturesque about this stalwart Essex soldier of fortune. Always with a keen eye to the main chance, full of determination, wary, as well as prompt in action, for this commander of the White Company was the first to restore war to the science of the Macedonian and Roman discipline. He even improved upon it. Quick to see the use of infantry, he thoroughly understood the advantage of rapidity. The precursors