s. I turned into several of them, and I always
found two or three muddy men lounging at the bottom; often a foul and
furtive boat crept across the field of view. The character of the shops
became more and more difficult to define. Here a window displayed a heap
of sailor's thimbles and pack-thread; there another set forth an array of
trumpery glass vases or a basket of stale fruit, pretexts, perhaps, for
the disguise of a "leaving shop," or unlicensed pawnbroker's
establishment, out of which I expected to see Miss Pleasant Riderhood come
forth, twisting up her back hair as she came. At a place where the houses
ceased, and an open space left free a prospect of the black and
bad-smelling river, there was an old factory, disused and ruined, like the
ancient mill in which Gaffer Hexam made his home, and Lizzie told the
fortunes of her brother in the hollow by the fire.

I turned down a muddy alley, where 12 or 15 placards headed "Body Found,"
were pasted against the wall. They were printed forms, filled in with a
pen. Mr. Forster tells us in his life of Dickens that it was the sight of
bills of this sort which gave the first suggestion of "Our Mutual Friend."
At the end of the alley was a neat brick police-station; stairs led to the
water, and several trim boats were moored there. Within the station I
could see an officer quietly busy at his desk, as if he had been sitting
there ever since Dickens described "the Night Inspector, with a pen and
ink ruler, posting up his books in a whitewashed office as studiously as
if he were in a monastery on the top of a mountain, and no howling fury of
a drunken woman were banging herself against a cell-door in the back yard
at his elbow." A handsome young fellow in uniform, who looked like a cross
between a sailor and a constable, came out and asked very civilly if he
could be of use to me. "Do you know," said I, "where the station was that
Dickens describes in 'Our Mutual Friend'?"

"Oh, yes, sir! this is the very spot. It was the old building that stood
just here: this is a new one, but it has been put up in the same place."

"Mr. Dickens often went out with your men in the boat, didn't he?"

"Yes, sir, many a night in the old times."

"Do you know the tavern which is described in the same book by the name of
The Six Jolly Fellowship Porters?"

"No, sir, I don't know it; at least not by that name. It may have been
pulled down, for a lot of warehouses have been built along here, an