in its frame. On warm evenings some of the women would be sitting on
their doorsteps, watching with dull faces their children at play, as if
experience had told them more than they wanted to know, but that they
had nothing to say about it. Beyond this street there was emptiness.
It ended, literally, on a blind wall. It was easy for a wayfarer to
feel in that street that its life was caught. It was secluded from the
main stream, and its children were a lively yet merely revolving eddy.
They could not get out. When I first visited Mr. Pascoe, as there was
no window ornament to distinguish his place from the others, and his
number was missing, I made a mistake, and went next door. Through a
hole drilled in that wrong door a length of cord was pendant, with a
greasy knot at its end. Underneath the knot was chalked "Pull." I
pulled. The door opened on a mass of enclosed night. From the street
it was hard to see what was there, so I went inside. What was there
might have been a cavern--narrow, obscure, and dangerous with dim
obstructions. Some of the shadows were darker than others, because the
cave ended, far-off, on a port-light, a small square of day framed in
black. Empty space was luminous beyond that cave. Becoming used to
the gloom I saw chains and cordage hanging from the unseen roof. What
was faintly like the prow of a boat shaped near. Then out from the
lumber and suggestions of things a gnome approached me. "Y' want ole
Pascoe? Nex' dore, guv'nor!" At that moment, in the square of bright
day at the end of the darkness, the apparition of a ship silently
appeared, and was gone again before my surprise. That open space
beyond was London River.

Next door, in a small room to which day and night were the same, Mr.
Pascoe was always to be found bending over his hobbing foot, under a
tiny yellow fan of gaslight which could be heard making a tenuous
shrilling whenever the bootmaker looked up, and ceased riveting. When