ever saw. They eat too much, and they have an
enormous appetite for beer; but they know the river, and they know their
business, and they will do anything within the fair game if they are
paid for it, and aren't asked to hurry.'

That night, just after dark, Theodore Racksole embarked with his new
friend George Hazell in one of the black-painted Customs wherries,
manned by a crew of two men--both the later freemen of the river, a
distinction which carries with it certain privileges unfamiliar to
the mere landsman. It was a cloudy and oppressive evening, not a star
showing to illumine the slow tide, now just past its flood. The
vast forms of steamers at anchor--chiefly those of the General Steam
Navigation and the Aberdeen Line--heaved themselves high out of the
water, straining sluggishly at their mooring buoys. On either side the
naked walls of warehouses rose like grey precipices from the stream,
holding forth quaint arms of steam-cranes. To the west the Tower Bridge
spanned the river with its formidable arch, and above that its suspended
footpath--a hundred and fifty feet from earth.

Down towards the east and the Pool of London a forest of funnels and
masts was dimly outlined against the sinister sky. Huge barges, each
steered by a single man at the end of a pair of giant oars, lumbered
and swirled down-stream at all angles. Occasionally a tug snorted busily
past, flashing its red and green signals and dragging an unwieldy tail
of barges in its wake. Then a Margate passenger steamer, its electric
lights gleaming from every porthole, swerved round to anchor, with its
load of two thousand fatigued excursionists. Over everything brooded an
air of mystery--a spirit and feeling of strangeness, remoteness, and
the inexplicable. As the broad flat little boat bobbed its way under
the shadow of enormous hulks, beneath stretched hawsers, and past buoys
covered with green slime, Racksole could scarcely believe that he was in
the very heart of London--the most prosaic city in the world. He had a
queer idea that almost anything might happen in this seeming waste of
waters at this weird hour of ten o'clock. It appeared incredible to him
that only a mile or two away people were sitting in theatres applauding
farces, and that at Cannon Street Station, a few yards off, other people
were calmly taking the train to various highly respectable suburbs whose
names he was gradually learning. He had the uplifting sensation of being
in an