train at Limehouse station, and began the exploration of the unsavory
district which fringes the docks.

Through street after street of dingy, squalid houses he passed; some
broken up by dirty little shops, some presenting the dull uniformity of
row after row of mean, stunted brick buildings, the broken windows of
many of which were mended with brown paper, or else not mended at all.
Here and there a grimy public house, each with its group of loafers
about the doors, made, with the lights in its windows, a spot of
comparative brightness.

Many of the streets were narrow and tortuous, roughly paved, and both
difficult and dangerous to traverse by the unaccustomed foot passenger,
who found himself now slipping on a piece of orange peel, the pale color
of which was disguised by mud, now risking the soundness of his ankles
among the uneven and slimy stones of the road.

Max had to ask his way more than once before he reached the Plumtree
Wharf, the entrance to which was through a door in a high wooden fence.
Rather to his surprise, he found the door unfastened and unguarded. And
when he had got through he looked round and asked himself what on earth
he had expected to find there.

There was nothing going on at this late hour, and Max was able to take
stock of the place and of the outlook generally. Piles of timber to the
right of him, the dead wall at the side of a warehouse on the left, gave
him but a narrow space in which to pursue his investigations. And these
only amounted to the discovery that the troubled waters of the Thames
looked very dark and very cold from this spot; that the opposite bank,
with little specks of light, offered a gloomy and depressing prospect,