OF DOGS

As the police beat left Limehouse Pier, a clammy south-easterly breeze
blowing up-stream lifted the fog in clearly defined layers, an effect
very singular to behold. At one moment a great arc-lamp burning above
the Lavender Pond of the Surrey Commercial Dock shot out a yellowish
light across the Thames. Then, as suddenly as it had come, the light
vanished again as a stratum of mist floated before it.

The creaking of the oars sounded muffled and ghostly, and none of the
men in the boat seemed to be inclined to converse. Heading across stream
they made for the unseen promontory of the Isle of Dogs. Navigation was
suspended, and they reached midstream without seeing a ship's light.
Then came the damp wind again to lift the fog, and ahead of them they
discerned one of the General Steam Navigation Company's boats awaiting
an opportunity to make her dock at the head of Deptford Creek. The
clamor of an ironworks on the Millwall shore burst loudly upon their
ears, and away astern the lights of the Surrey Dock shone out once more.
Hugging the bank they pursued a southerly course, and from Limehouse
Reach crept down to Greenwich Reach.

Fog closed in upon them, a curtain obscuring both light and sound.
When the breeze came again it had gathered force, and it drove the mist
before it in wreathing banks, and brought to their ears a dull lowing
and to their nostrils a farmyard odor from the cattle pens. Ghostly
flames, leaping and falling, leaping and falling, showed where a
gasworks lay on the Greenwich bank ahead.

Eastward swept the river now, and fresher blew the breeze. As they
rounded the blunt point of the "Isle" the fog banks went swirling past
them astern, and the lights on either shore showed clearly ahead. A
ship's siren began to roar somewhere behind them. The steamer which they
had passed was about to pursue her course.

Closer in-shore drew the boat, passing a series of wharves, and beyond
these a tract of waste, desolate bank very gloomy in the half light
and apparently boasting no habitation of man. The activities of the
Greenwich bank seemed remote, and the desolation of the Isle of Dogs
very near, touching them intimately with its peculiar gloom.

A light sprang into view some little distance inland, notable because
it shone lonely in an expanse of utter blackness. Kerry broke the long
silence.

"Dougal's," he said. "Put us ashore here."

The police boat was pulled in under a rickety wooden struc