ime the figures on the street grow fewer and fewer.
Strolling policemen test the locks of the great dark-fronted stores.
Nighthawk cabs whirl by the cars on their mysterious errands. Finally
the cars themselves depart in the way of the citizen, and for the few
hours before dawn a new sound comes into the still thoroughfare--the
cable whirring in its channel underground.

THE ASSASSIN IN MODERN BATTLES.

THE TORPEDO BOAT DESTROYERS THAT "PERFORM IN THE DARKNESS. AN ACT WHICH
IS MORE PECULIARLY MURDEROUS THAN MOST THINGS IN WAR."

In the past century the gallant aristocracy of London liked to travel
down the south bank of the Thames to Greenwich Hospital, where venerable
pensioners of the crown were ready to hire telescopes at a penny each,
and with these telescopes the lords and ladies were able to view at a
better advantage the dried and enchained corpses of pirates hanging from
the gibbets on the Isle of Dogs. In those times the dismal marsh was
inhabited solely by the clanking figures whose feet moved in the wind
like rather poorly-constructed weather cocks.

But even the Isle of Dogs could not escape the appetite of an expanding
London. Thousands of souls now live on it, and it has changed its
character from that of a place of execution, with mist, wet with fever,
coiling forever from the mire and wandering among the black gibbets, to
that of an ordinary, squalid, nauseating slum of London, whose streets
bear a faint resemblance to that part of Avenue A which lies directly
above Sixtieth Street in New York.

Down near the water front one finds a long brick building,
three-storeyed and signless, which shuts off all view of the river. The
windows, as well as the bricks, are very dirty, and you see no sign of
life, unless some smudged workman dodges in through a little door. The
place might be a factory for the making of lamps or stair rods, or any
ordinary commercial thing. As a matter of fact, the building fronts the
shipyard of Yarrow, the builder of torpedo boats, the maker of knives
for the nations, the man who provides everybody with a certain kind of
efficient weapon. One then remembers that if Russia fights England,
Yarrow meets Yarrow; if Germany fights France, Yarrow meets Yarrow; if
Chili fights Argentina, Yarrow meets Yarrow.

Besides the above-mentioned countries Yarrow has built torpedo boats for
Italy, Austria, Holland, Japan, China, Ecuador, Brazil, Costa Rica, and
Spain. There is a keeper