mehouse Hole, and followed the river streets
both east and west. It was easy enough to trace the course of Mortimer
Lightwood and Eugene Wrayburn, as they walked under the guidance of
Riderhood through the stormy night from their rooms in The Temple, four
miles away, past the Tower and the London Docks, and down by the slippery
water's edge to Limehouse Hole, when they went to cause Gaffer Hexam's
arrest, and found him drowned, tied to his own boat. The strictly
commercial aspect of the Docks--the London Docks above and the West India
Docks below--shades off by slight degrees into the black misery of the
hole. The warehouses are succeeded by boat-builders' sheds; by private
wharves, where ships, all hidden, as to their hulls, behind walls and
close fences, thrust unexpected bowsprits over the narrow roadway; by
lime-yards; by the shops of marine store-dealers and purveyors to all the
wants and follies of seamen; and then by a variety of strange
establishments which it would be hard to classify.

Close by a yard piled up with crates and barrels of second-hand bottles,
was a large brick warehouse devoted to the purchase and sale of broken
glass. A wagon loaded with that commodity stood before the door, and men
with scoop-shovels were transferring the glass into barrels. An enclosure
of one or two acres, in an out-of-the-way street, might have been the
original of the dust-yard that contained Boffin's Bower, except that
Boffin's Bower was several miles distant, on the northern outskirt of
London. A string of carts, full of miscellaneous street and house rubbish,
all called here by the general name of "dust," were waiting their turn to
discharge. There was a mountain of this refuse at the end of the yard; and
a party of laborers, more or less impeded by two very active black hogs,
were sifting and sorting it. Other mounds, formed from the sittings of the
first, were visible at the sides. There were huge accumulations of broken
crockery and of scraps of tin and other metal, and of bones. There was a
quantity of stable-manure and old straw, and a heap, as large as a
two-story cottage, of old hoops stript from casks and packing-cases. I
never understood, until I looked into this yard, how there could have been
so much value in the dust-mounds at Boffin's Bower.

Gradually the streets became narrower, wetter, dirtier, and poorer.
Hideous little alleys led down to the water's edge where the high tide
splashed over the stone step