recognized as characters in the novels of Charles Dickens. By arrangement
with, and by permission of, the publishers, Houghton, Mifflin Co.
Copyright, 1881.]

BY JOHN R.G. HASSARD


I took a steamboat one day at Westminster Bridge, and after a voyage of 40
minutes or so landed near Limehouse Hole, and followed the river streets
both east and west. It was easy enough to trace the course of Mortimer
Lightwood and Eugene Wrayburn, as they walked under the guidance of
Riderhood through the stormy night from their rooms in The Temple, four
miles away, past the Tower and the London Docks, and down by the slippery
water's edge to Limehouse Hole, when they went to cause Gaffer Hexam's
arrest, and found him drowned, tied to his own boat. The strictly
commercial aspect of the Docks--the London Docks above and the West India
Docks below--shades off by slight degrees into the black misery of the
hole. The warehouses are succeeded by boat-builders' sheds; by private
wharves, where ships, all hidden, as to their hulls, behind walls and
close fences, thrust unexpected bowsprits over the narrow roadway; by
lime-yards; by the shops of marine store-dealers and purveyors to all the
wants and follies of seamen; and then by a variety of strange
establishments which it would be hard to classify.

Close by a yard piled up with crates and barrels of second-hand bottles,
was a large brick warehouse devoted to the purchase and sale of broken
glass. A wagon loaded with that commodity stood before the door, and men
with scoop-shovels were transferring the glass into barrels. An enclosure
of one or two acres, in an out-of-the-way street, might have been the
original of the dust-yard that contained Boffin's Bower, except that