the law, and they know Inspector Field and Co. too well.
We leave bully Bark to subside at leisure out of his passion and
his trousers, and, I dare say, to be inconveniently reminded of
this little brush before long. Black and Green do ordinary duty
here, and look serious.
As to White, who waits on Holborn Hill to show the courts that are
eaten out of Rotten Gray’s Inn, Lane, where other lodging-houses
are, and where (in one blind alley) the Thieves’ Kitchen and
Seminary for the teaching of the art to children is, the night has
so worn away, being now
almost at odds with morning, which is which,
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that they are quiet, and no light shines through the chinks in the
shutters. As undistinctive Death will come here, one day, sleep
comes now. The wicked cease from troubling sometimes, even in this
life.
DOWN WITH THE TIDE
A VERY dark night it was, and bitter cold; the east wind blowing
bleak, and bringing with it stinging particles from marsh, and
moor, and fen – from the Great Desert and Old Egypt, may be. Some
of the component parts of the sharp-edged vapour that came flying
up the Thames at London might be mummy-dust, dry atoms from the
Temple at Jerusalem, camels’ foot-prints, crocodiles’ hatchingplaces,
loosened grains of expression from the visages of bluntnosed
sphynxes, waifs and strays from caravans of turbaned
merchants, vegetation from jungles, frozen snow from the Himalayas.
O! It was very, very dark upon the Thames, and it was bitter,
bitter cold.
‘And yet,’ said the voice within the great pea-coat at my side,
‘you’ll have seen a good many rivers, too, I dare say?’
‘Truly,’ said I, ‘when I come to think of it, not a few. From the
Niagara, downward to the mountain rivers of Italy, which are like
the national spirit – very tame, or chafing suddenly and bursting
bounds, only to dwindle away again. The Moselle, and the Rhine,
and the Rhone; and the Seine, and the Saone; and the St. Lawrence,
Mississippi, and Ohio; and the Tiber, the Po, and the Arno; and the
– ‘
Peacoat coughing as if he had had enough of that, I said no more.
I could have carried the catalogue on to a teasing length, though,
if I had been in the cruel mind.
‘And after all,’ said he, ‘this looks so dismal?’
‘So awful,’ I returned, ‘at night. The Seine at Paris is very
gloomy too, at such a time, and is probably the scene of far more
crime and greater wickedness; but this river looks so broad and
vast, so murky and silent, seems such an image of death in the
midst of the great city’s life, that – ‘
That Peacoat coughed again. He COULD NOT stand my holding forth.
We were in a four-oared Thames Police Galley, lying on our oars in
the deep shadow of Southwark Bridge – under the corner arch on the
Surrey side – having come down with the tide from Vauxhall. We
were fain to hold on pretty tight, though close in shore, for the
river was swollen and the tide running down very strong. We were
watching certain water-rats of human growth, and lay in the deep
shade as quiet as mice; our light hidden and our scraps of
conversation carried on in whispers. Above us, the massive iron
girders of the arch were faintly visible, and below us its
ponderous shadow seemed to sink down to the bottom of the stream.
We had been lying here some half an hour. With our backs to the
wind, it is true; but the wind being in a determined temper blew
straight through us, and would not take the trouble to go round. I
would have boarded a fireship to get into action, and mildly
suggested as much to my friend Pea.
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‘No doubt,’ says he as patiently as possible; ‘but shore-going
tactics wouldn’t do with us. River-thieves can always get rid of
stolen property in a moment by dropping it overboard. We want to
take them WITH the property, so we lurk about and come out upon ’em