were shouted to us from nowhere. Sirens blared out of dark voids. And
there was the skipper on the bridge, the lad who caused us amusement at
home, with this confusion in the dark about him, and an immense
insentient mass moving with him at his will; and he had his hands in
his pockets, and turned to tell me what a cold night it was. The
pier-head searchlight showed his face, alert, serene, with his brows
knitted in a little frown, and his underlip projecting as the sign of
the pride of those who look direct into the eyes of an opponent, and
care not at all. In my berth that night I searched for a moral for
this narrative, but went to sleep before I found it.

VI. The Ship-Runners

1

The _Negro Boy_ tavern is known by few people in its own parish, for it
is a house with nothing about it to distinguish its fame to those who do
not know that a man may say to his friend, when their ships go different
ways out of Callao, "I may meet you at the _Negro Boy_ some day." It is
in a road which returns to the same point, or near to it, after a
fatiguing circuit of the Isle of Dogs. No part of the road is better
than the rest. It is merely a long road. That day when I first heard of
Bill Purdy I was going to the tavern hoping to meet Macandrew, Chief of
the _Medea_. His ship was in again. But there was nobody about. There
was nothing in sight but the walls, old, sad, and discreet, of the yards
where ships are repaired. The dock warehouses opposite the tavern
offered me their high backs in a severer and apparently an endless
obduracy. The _Negro Boy_, as usual, was lost and forlorn, but resigned
to its seclusion from the London that lives, having stood there long
enough to learn that nothing can control the ways of changing custom.