grey streets, sometimes grim, often decayed, and always reticent and
sullen, that might never have seen the stars nor heard of good luck;
and the light would be, when closely looked at, merely a high gas
bracket on a dank wall in solitude, its glass broken, and the flame
within it fluttering to extinction like an imprisoned and crippled moth
trying to evade the squeeze of giant darkness and the wind. The narrow
and forbidding by-path under that glim, a path intermittent and
depending on the weight of the night which is trying to blot it out
altogether, goes to Wapping Old Stairs. Prince Rupert once went that
way. The ketch _Nonsuch_, Captain Zachary Gillam, was then lying just
off, about to make the voyage which established the Hudson's Bay
Company.

It is a path, like all those stairs and ways that go down to the River,
which began when human footsteps first outlined London with rough
tracks. It is a path by which the descendants of those primitives went
out of London, when projecting the original enterprise of their
forbears from Wapping to the Guinea Coast and Manitoba. Why should we
believe it is different today? The sea does not change, and seamen are
what they were if their ships are not those we admired many years ago
in the India Docks. It is impossible for those who know them to see
those moody streets of Dockland, indeterminate, for they follow the
River, which run from Tooley Street by the Hole-in-the-Wall to the
Deptford docks, and from Tower Hill along Wapping High Street to
Limehouse and the Isle of Dogs, as strangers would see them. What
could they be to strangers? Mud, taverns, pawnshops, neglected and
obscure churches, and houses that might know nothing but ill-fortune.

So they are; but those ways hold more than the visible shades. The
warehouses of that meandering chasm which is Wapping High Street are