slow drift, quite proper to those at large in eternity. But
this, I was told, was the beginning of Bugsby's Reach. It was first a
premonition, then a doubt, and at last a distinct tremor in the
darkness ahead of us. A light appeared, grew nearer, higher, and
brighter, and there was a suspicion of imminent mass. "Watch her,"
warned the skipper. Watch what? There was nothing to watch but the
dark and some planets far away, one of them red. The menacing one
still grew higher and brighter. It came at us. A wall instantly
appeared to overhang us, with a funnel and masts above it, and our
skipper's yell was lost in the thunder of a churning propeller. The
air shuddered, and a siren hooted in the heavens. A long, dark body
seemed minutes going by us, and our skipper's insults were taken in
silence by her superior deck. She left us riotous in her wake, and we
continued our journey dancing our indignation on the uneasy deck of the
_Lizzie_.

The silent drift recommenced, and we neared a region of unearthly
lights and the smell of sulphur, where aerial skeletons, vast and
black, and columns and towers, alternately glowed and vanished as the
doors of infernal fires were opened and shut. We drew abreast of this
phantom place where names and darkness battled amid gigantic ruin.
Charon spoke. "They're the coal wharves," he said.

The lights of a steamer rose in the night below the wharves, but it was
our own progress which brought them nearer. She was anchored. We made
out at last her shape, but at first she did not answer our hail.

"Hullo, _Aldebaran_," once more roared our captain.

There was no answer. In a minute we should be by her, and too late.

"Barge ahoy!" came a voice. "Look out for a line."

III. A Shipping Parish

What face this shipping parish shows to a stranger I do not know. I
was never a stranger to it. I should suppose it to be a face almost
vacant, perhaps a little conventionally picturesque, for it is grey and
seamed. It might be even an altogether expressionless mask, staring at
nothing. Anyhow, there must be very little to be learned from it, for
those bright young cultured strangers, admirable in their eagerness for
social service, who come and live with us for a time, so that they may
understand the life of the poor, never seem to have made anything of
us. They say they have; they speak even with some amount of assurance,
at places where the problem which is us is examined