different
policeman; and whatever improbable world the dock and the policeman of
midnight had visited, there they had left his ship, inaccessible,
tangled hopelessly in a revolving mesh of saloon lights and collapsing
streets. Now he had no name, no history, no character, no money, and
he was hungry.

We went into a coffee-shop. It stands at the corner of the street
which is opposite the _Steam Packet_ beerhouse. You may recognize the
place, for it is marked conspicuously as a good pull-up for carmen,
though then the carmen were taking their vans steadily past it. The
buildings of a shipwright's yard stand above it, and the hammers of the
yard beat with a continuous rhythmic clangour which recedes, when you
are used to it, till it is only the normal pulse of life in your ears.
The time was three in the afternoon. The children were at school, and
alone the men of the iron-yard made audible the unseen life of the
place. We had the coffee-shop to ourselves. On the counter a jam roll
was derelict. Some crumpled and greasy newspapers sprawled on the
benches. The outcast squeezed into a corner of a bench, and a stout
and elderly matron appeared, drying her bare arms on her apron, and
looked at us with annoyance. My friend seized her hand, patted it, and
addressed her in terms of extravagant endearment. She spoke to him
about that. But food came; and as he ate--how he ate!--I waited,
looking into my own mug of tepid brown slop at twopence the pint.
There was a racing calendar punctuated with dead flies, and a picture
in the dark by the side of the door of Lord Beaconsfield, with its
motto: "For God, King, and Country"; and there was a smell which comes
of long years of herrings cooked on a gas grill. At last the hungry
child had finished scraping his plate and wiping his moustache with his
hands. He brought out a briar pipe, and a pouch of hairy skin, and
faded behind a blue cloud. From behind the cloud he spoke at large,
like a confident disreputable Jove who had been skylarking for years
with the little planet Earth.

At a point in his familiar reminiscences my dwindling interest
vanished, and I noticed again, through the window, the house fronts of
the place I knew once, when Poplar was salt. The lost sailor himself
was insignificant. What was he? A deck hand; one who tarred iron, and
could take a trick at the wheel when some one was watching him. The
place outside might have been any dismal neighbourh