about it. Beyond this street there was emptiness.
It ended, literally, on a blind wall. It was easy for a wayfarer to
feel in that street that its life was caught. It was secluded from the
main stream, and its children were a lively yet merely revolving eddy.
They could not get out. When I first visited Mr. Pascoe, as there was
no window ornament to distinguish his place from the others, and his
number was missing, I made a mistake, and went next door. Through a
hole drilled in that wrong door a length of cord was pendant, with a
greasy knot at its end. Underneath the knot was chalked "Pull." I
pulled. The door opened on a mass of enclosed night. From the street
it was hard to see what was there, so I went inside. What was there
might have been a cavern--narrow, obscure, and dangerous with dim
obstructions. Some of the shadows were darker than others, because the
cave ended, far-off, on a port-light, a small square of day framed in
black. Empty space was luminous beyond that cave. Becoming used to
the gloom I saw chains and cordage hanging from the unseen roof. What
was faintly like the prow of a boat shaped near. Then out from the
lumber and suggestions of things a gnome approached me. "Y' want ole
Pascoe? Nex' dore, guv'nor!" At that moment, in the square of bright
day at the end of the darkness, the apparition of a ship silently
appeared, and was gone again before my surprise. That open space
beyond was London River.

Next door, in a small room to which day and night were the same, Mr.
Pascoe was always to be found bending over his hobbing foot, under a
tiny yellow fan of gaslight which could be heard making a tenuous
shrilling whenever the bootmaker looked up, and ceased riveting. When
his head was bent over his task only the crown of a red and matured
cricketing cap, which nodded in time to his hammer, was presented to
you. When he paused to speak, and glanced up, he showed a face that
the gas jet, with the aid of many secluded years, had tinctured with
its own artificial hue, a face puckered through a long frowning intent
on old boots. He wore an apron that had ragged gaps in it. He was a
frail and dingy little man, and might never have had a mother, but
could have been born of that dusty workroom, to which he had been a
faithful son all his life. It was a murky interior shut in from the
day, a litter of petty tools and nameless rubbish on a ruinous bench, a
disorder of dilapidated boots, t