The corner edifice wi' the red blinds in the window."

During this conversation the two had been threading their way through
the intricate and dirty lanes which lead up from the water side to the
outskirts of Stepney. It was quite dark by the time that they reached a
long thoroughfare, lined by numerous shops, with great gas flares
outside them. Many of these belonged to dealers in marine stores, and
the numerous suits of oil-skin, hung up for exhibition, swung to and fro
in the uncertain light, like rows of attenuated pirates. At every
corner was a great public-house with glittering windows, and a crowd of
slatternly women and jersey-clad men elbowing each other at the door.
At the largest and most imposing of these gin-palaces the mate and
Dimsdale now pulled up.

"Come in this way," said McPherson, who had evidently paid many a visit
there before. Pushing open a swinging door, he made his way into the
crowded bar, where the reek of bad spirits and the smell of squalid
humanity seemed to Tom to be even more horrible than the effluvium of
the grease-laden hold.

"Captain Miggs in?" asked McPherson of a rubicund, white-aproned
personage behind the bar.

"Yes, sir. He's in his room, sir, and expectin' you. There's a gent
with him, sir, but he told me to send you up. This way, sir."

They were pushing their way through the crowd to reach the door which
led behind the bar, when Tom's attention was arrested by the
conversation of a very seedy-looking individual who was leaning with his
elbows upon the zinc-covered counter.

"You take my tip," he said to an elderly man beside him. "You stick to
the beer. The sperits in here is clean poison, and it's a sin and a
shame as they should be let sell such stuff to Christian men.
See here--see my sleeve!" He showed the threadbare cuff of his coat,
which was corroded away in one part, as by a powerful acid. "I give ye
my word I done that by wiping my lips wi' it two or three times after
drinkin' at this bar. That was afore I found out that the whisky was
solid vitriol. If thread and cotton can't stand it, how's the linin' of
a poor cove's stomach, I'd like to know?"

"I wonder," thought Tom to himself, "if one of these poor devils goes
home and murders his wife, who ought to be hung for it? Is it he, or
that smug-faced villain behind the bar, who, for the sake of the gain of
a few greasy coppers, gives him the poison that maddens him?" He was
still pondering o