beds I had heard a baby crying! What was this baby, a Junk or
a Docker? And who were these people who lived under flowers? To me they
sounded suspiciously like the goblins in my goblin book. Once when I was
sick in bed, Sue came shrieking into the house and said that a giant had
heaved up that great lid from below. Up had come his shaggy head, his
dirty face, his rolling eyes, and he had laughed and laughed at the
flowers. He was a drunken man, our old nurse Belle had told her, but Sue
was sure he was a giant.

"You are wrong," I said with dignity. "He is either a Junk or a Docker."

The lid was spiked down after that, and our visitor never appeared
again. But I saw him vividly in my mind's eye--his shaggy wild head
rising up among our flowers. Vaguely I felt that he came from the
harbor.

As the exciting weeks of my life went on I discovered three good holes
in that ivy-covered fence of ours. These all became my secret holes, and
through them I watched the street below, a bleak bare chasm of a street
which when the trucks came by echoed till it thundered. Across the
street rose the high gray front of my father's warehouse. It was part
of a solid line of similar gray brick buildings, and it was like my
father, it was grim and silent, you could not see inside. Over its five
tiers of windows black iron shutters were fastened tight. From time to
time a pair of these shutters would fly open, disclosing a dark cave
behind, out of which men brought barrels and crates and let them down by
ropes into the trucks on the street below. How they spun round and round
as they came! But most of the trucks drove rumbling into a tunnel which
led through the warehouse out to my father's dock, out to the ships and
the harbor. And from that mysterious region long lines of men came
through the tunnel at noontime, some nearly naked, some only in shirts,
men with the hairiest faces. They sat on the street with their backs to
the warehouse wall, eating their dinners out of pails, and from other
pails they took long drinks of a curious stuff all white on top. Some of
them were always crossing the street and disappearing from my view into
a little store directly underneath me. Belle spoke of this store as a
"vile saloon" and of these men as "dockers." So I knew what Dockers were
at last! In place of the one who lived under our garden and had burst up
among the flowers, I saw now that there were hundreds and thousands of
men like him down there