Lightwood, it's enough to make me give
way in a different manner. But he always WAS a cheat, con-found him!
He always was a infernal cheat, was Gaffer. Nothing straightfor'ard,
nothing on the square. So mean, so underhanded. Never going through with
a thing, nor carrying it out like a man!'

'Hallo! Steady!' cried Eugene (he had recovered immediately on
embarking), as they bumped heavily against a pile; and then in a lower
voice reversed his late apostrophe by remarking ('I wish the boat of my
honourable and gallant friend may be endowed with philanthropy enough
not to turn bottom-upward and extinguish us!) Steady, steady! Sit close,
Mortimer. Here's the hail again. See how it flies, like a troop of wild
cats, at Mr Riderhood's eyes!'

Indeed he had the full benefit of it, and it so mauled him, though he
bent his head low and tried to present nothing but the mangy cap to it,
that he dropped under the lee of a tier of shipping, and they lay there
until it was over. The squall had come up, like a spiteful messenger
before the morning; there followed in its wake a ragged tear of light
which ripped the dark clouds until they showed a great grey hole of day.

They were all shivering, and everything about them seemed to be
shivering; the river itself; craft, rigging, sails, such early smoke as
there yet was on the shore. Black with wet, and altered to the eye by
white patches of hail and sleet, the huddled buildings looked lower
than usual, as if they were cowering, and had shrunk with the cold. Very
little life was to be seen on either bank, windows and doors were shut,
and the staring black and white letters upon wharves and warehouses
'looked,' said Eugene to Mortimer, 'like inscriptions over the graves of
dead businesses.'

As they glided slowly on, keeping under the shore and sneaking in and
out among the shipping by back-alleys of water, in a pilfering way
that seemed to be their boatman's normal manner of progression, all
the objects among which they crept were so huge in contrast with their
wretched boat, as to threaten to crush it. Not a ship's hull, with its
rusty iron links of cable run out of hawse-holes long discoloured with
the iron's rusty tears, but seemed to be there with a fell intention.
Not a figure-head but had the menacing look of bursting forward to run
them down. Not a sluice gate, or a painted scale upon a post or wall,
showing the depth of water, but seemed to hint, like the dreadfully
facetious