t known in the days of this story as Folly Ditch. It is a
creek or inlet from the Thames, and can always be filled at high water
by opening the sluices at the Lead Mills from which it took its old
name. At such times, a stranger, looking from one of the wooden
bridges thrown across it at Mill Lane, will see the inhabitants of the
houses on either side lowering from their back doors and windows,
buckets, pails, domestic utensils of all kinds, in which to haul the
water up; and when his eye is turned from these operations to the
houses themselves, his utmost astonishment will be excited by the scene
before him. Crazy wooden galleries common to the backs of half a dozen
houses, with holes from which to look upon the slime beneath; windows,
broken and patched, with poles thrust out, on which to dry the linen
that is never there; rooms so small, so filthy, so confined, that the
air would seem too tainted even for the dirt and squalor which they
shelter; wooden chambers thrusting themselves out above the mud, and
threatening to fall into it--as some have done; dirt-besmeared walls
and decaying foundations; every repulsive lineament of poverty, every
loathsome indication of filth, rot, and garbage; all these ornament the
banks of Folly Ditch.

In Jacob's Island, the warehouses are roofless and empty; the walls are
crumbling down; the windows are windows no more; the doors are falling
into the streets; the chimneys are blackened, but they yield no smoke.
Thirty or forty years ago, before losses and chancery suits came upon
it, it was a thriving place; but now it is a desolate island indeed.
The houses have no owners; they are broken open, and entered upon by
those who have the courage; and there they live, and there they die.
They must have powerful motives for a secret residence, or be reduced
to a destitute condition indeed, who seek a refuge in Jacob's Island.

In an upper room of one of these houses--a detached house of fair size,
ruinous in other respects, but strongly defended at door and window:
of which house the back commanded the ditch in manner already
described--there were assembled three men, who, regarding each other
every now and then with looks expressive of perplexity and expectation,
sat for some time in profound and gloomy silence. One of these was
Toby Crackit, another Mr. Chitling, and the third a robber of fifty
years, whose nose had been almost beaten in, in some old scuffle, and
whose face bore a fr