stead of furnishing an illustration of the prime val curse. There are the officers who seem never tired of looking on and checking the delivery of cargo told out for them as it goes overboard; there are the piles of bales under the sheds which seem to grow larger and larger; there are rows of the inexhaustible ships which are for ever pouring out their contents. Young Nick knows better than to venture near one of the vessels which are loading or unloading. He stands afar off and watches these; well out of the reach of men who, if boys get in their way, are capable of a cuff which not only hurts, but also humiliates, as well as of an oath which may even please if it be of strange and novel construction. Now, mates of merchantmen show great ingenuity in blasphemy. He walked slowly round the Docks till he came to a ship which he knew-a ship which brought home indigo, and was now waiting to take cargo before going off again, outward bound. He ran across the plank which served as a bridge to the wharf, and jumped upon the deck. Nobody was on board except a quartermaster who knew him, and grinned a salute. "Ay, ay, sir!" replied the man, without a smile. Young Nick, well pleased with his official inspection of the steamer, returned to the wharfs, where for a quarter of an hour or more he wandered among those sheds which receive dates, tamarinds, and sugar. If a stray date found its way to his mouth, he stood in the critical attitude of a taster while he ate it. When it was gone he shook his head sadly, as if dates were no longer what he remembered dates to have been before he went on. All these acres covered with merchandise; all these ships, perpetually coming home laden and going out laden; everything wanting the hand of the merchant before it can be moved or sold, or even grown. "Hope you're well, Master Nick," said the House has nowadays, if he knows how to take it. man, touching his hat. "Quite well, thank you, quartermaster," replied the boy. Here was dignity! To be saluted on the hurricane-deck: what a pity that there was no one by to witness this gratifying mark of respect! What sort of a voyage did you have?" Fortunately, most of them are blind and deaf, owing to having had too much Latin subjunctive, which is enough to make any man a fool. 'Balbus feared that it would be all over- Bah! Wait till my turn comes." He finishes his tour of inspection through the Docks by visiting the great house of many stories "So-so, sir! Weather terrible bad in the in which he is most interested. He always ends She draws seven-and-twenty feet when she's loaded," said the boy. "Twenty-seven feet deep, all full of indigo for Anthony Hamblin and Company. What a heap of money they must be making!" He returns to the deck, and nods encouragingly at the quartermaster. "All right below," he says, as officially as if he were an Elder Brother of the Trinity House. "All right below." Then he shuts one eye, and turns the other up aloft, to inspect the rigging and the masts. 66 with this house, just as a Chinaman, working his way through a pile of rice, tasteless and uninteresting by itself, ends with the bonne bouche, the morsel of "snook," which lies at the top. It is the Indigo House. The dyes are arranged together, in a sort of order of merit, if you can make it out. Beyond the indigo shed are sheds in which are long, oblong, brick-like parcels, brown in color, oozing clammy juices and irrepressible moistnesses through the pores of their wrappers. Close to the Indigo House itself one becomes aware of strange men. They bring to the mind, at first sight, a reminiscence of St. Alban's Church. That is because they wear cassocks and a biretta-cap. But they are not Ritualistic clergy, not at all; nor are they officially affiliated to guild, brotherhood, or mopus-mock-monkery of any kind whatever. Look again. Your mind, if you be differently constituted from young Nick, finds itself ravished backward up the stream of time. You forget the ecclesiastical man-milliners. You are far away in sunny Castile; you are assisting at a 'A serviceable craft, quartermaster. A 1, grand Function, blessed by Church and Pope. first class, and well found." The purification of doctrine is presented to your eyes by the outward and visible ceremony of burning heretics. The garments and the cap worn at the auto-da-fé seem to have descended to the employees of the indigo-storehouses. They are no longer painted over with devils, it is true. One misses, and regrets the loss of, the devils; but they are of the same cut. I believe that, when the Inquisition came to a sudden and untimely end, some commercial adventurer bought up all its stage properties, and sold them to the Directors of St. Katharine's Docks. If research were properly endowed, as it should be, I would investigate the history of those caps and smocks. The sight of them always filled the heart of the boy with a sort of painful yearning. He loved them and he could not as yet feel, as he would if he entered the House, as if they partly belonged to himself. 66 "We import," he said, with a smack of his lips, as if he was detailing a list of things good to eat, we import indigo" (smack); "then myrobolans" (smack), “and cochineal" (smack). "Great profits in all the departments: but give me indigo." The Indigo House is a great fire-proof building, with massive stone staircase. The steps, of course, were once white; the walls were once whitewashed; both walls and steps are now a deep, permanent blue; the ceiling is believed to have been originally white-that, too, is now a dark and beautiful blue. At every stage a door opens upon a vast, low hall, every one filled, or gradually filling, with boxes and cases containing indigo, and every one provided with an open window, or door, at which the indefatigable crane delivers its messages in the shape of boxes. The floor of each is blue, the walls are blue, the ceiling is blue; the very desk at which the clerks enter the number of packages is blue, and they spread a fresh sheet of brown paper over it every morning, so that the writer may lay his book upon it without making that blue as well. Where there is a knot in the wood, either in the floor or in the desks, it stands out, shining, as if it were a cobble of blue-stone used for washing. Young Nick climbs steadily and gravely up the stairs, looking into every room. There are six or seven floors; each is exactly like the one below it, except that each one seems bluer than the one below, probably because the eye itself becomes gradually incapable of seeing any other color. The top floor of all is the salesroom, only used four times a year. Once young Nick had been privileged to behold it on one of the great days. Long tables ran from side to side, provided with little paper trays, each with its wall an inch and a half high, containing samples. The merchants and buyers went up and down curiously studying the contents of the trays, com paring them with a sample they had in a box, and every now and then making an entry in a catalogue. That was real responsibility, Nick thought, sighing for the timetwhen he too might be trusted to purchase for the firm. Outside the salesroom, on that day only, cooks were frying toothsome chops and succulent steaks for the luncheon of the buyers. Ah! happy, grand, glorious, and enviable lot, to be a merchant of London City and port—and, happiest lot of all, to be a merchant in the indigo trade. The Docks had no more to show the boy, who descended the stairs slowly and came out into the sunshine, which for a while was blue, like the walls of the place he had left. He had seen the loading and the unloading; he had overhauled a ship entirely by himself, and on his own responsibility; he had seen the smocks and biretta caps again, and had visited once more those vast halls of the Indigo House which, gloomy and dark as they were, seemed to him more delightful than the Crystal Palace, more sunny than Clapham Common. As he approached the gates, the three merry policemen who guarded them winked each with his left eye, and ranged themselves before the portals. "Now, sir," said the first, "we'll see what you're carrying out, if you please.” "Ah!" said the second jocular one, dred-weight or so of cigars, I dessay." " a hun "Yes," said the third mad wag, or a hogshead o' brandy, I shouldn't wonder. Now, sir." Young Nick was not frightened, not at all: he was delighted. This was an adventure which he had not suspected. It would be grand to tell the boys next day. He feigned terror. "O Lord!" he cried, "this is dreadful. You don't think, really, I've got any cigars, do you, gentlemen?" He was so thin, and his trousers and jacket were so tight, that even a solitary cigarette would have been detected in any of his pockets. The policemen scowled: the merry policemen frowned. "We shall see," they said. 66 And brandy, too?" asked young Nick. "Oh! what would they do if you found I had brandy?” "Fifteen years for brandy," said the first jester; "come, young sir, we must search you." "This way, young gentleman," said the second, leading the way into the lodge. "What will you take to square it?" asked the boy, with earnest eyes under his white eyelashes. "Square it?" replied the third policeman; "that's bribery and corruption. Your words must be took down, young gentleman." "Must they?" said Nick; "then there's nothing for it "he gathered himself together for a spring-"but to cut it." Here he darted under the arm of the third policeman, and scudded swiftly down the street, turning to the right for about a hundred yards, when, finding that no one followed, he stopped running, and began to whistle. CHAPTER XXI. are not eagerly bought up by a voluptuous aris- HOW YOUNG NICK MADE A MOST SURPRIS- and a collection of bamboo-canes. QUITE sure that no one was following him, the boy recollected that he was hungry. It was half-past two, a good hour beyond his regular dinner-time. He resolved on looking about for a place where he could dine. He was in a district interesting to many kinds of people-the clergyman, the policeman, the philanthropist, the total-abstinence man, and the doctor. The street was as much given over to mercantile Jack as any Quartier in a mediæval city was given over to a special trade. Every other house was devoted to the interests of eating or drinking, or both, outside the office of the Board of Trade. These houses were all full of the "splendid fellows" whose appearance had afforded young Nick such unfeigned satisfaction. They had finished their dinner, and were now sitting over their wine"-that is, they were drinking and smoking. Young Nick could not go into one of those houses, that was quite certain. Besides, the sailors were not alone: with them were women who frightened the boy; it was not so much that their complexions were purple, red, or ghastly pale, nor that their eyes rolled horribly like the eyes of a hungry wild beast; but they were swearing loudly, drinking copiously, and their voices were hoarse and rough. To all conditions of men, at any age, such women are a terror. I believe that even mercantile Jack regards their companionship as one of the horrible circumstances attending his joyless lot. Young Nick held on, and presently found himself in a long and narrow street called Cable Street, where the presence of the sailor was less overwhelming. The street was full of shops and of people going up and down buying or pretending to buy. It is quite a leading street, a sort of Westbourne Grove to the district. The things offered for sale are calculated, as in all markets, according to the demand. The butchers' shops contain chiefly what are known to the trade as ornamental blocks," with sheeps' heads and those less-esteemed portions of the animal which At the end of Cable Street the boy turned to the left and found himself in a very respectable and even genteel street. It was broad and clean: it had no shops, or hardly any; the houses were small, but the tenants seemed to take pride in their appearance. Considerable variety was shown in the painting of the doors, which were red, yellow, or green, according to the taste of the tenant; all of the houses had clean white blinds. In the East End there are hundreds of streets like this: who the people are, where they find employment, one can not even guess. In the window of every tenth house one sees an announcement that dressmaking in all its branches is carried on there: this is an open confession of poverty. Occasionally a card proclaims the fact that a room is to be let, which is another open acknowledgment of insufficiency. Yet most of the houses are rented by responsible people, who are able to pay their rent out of their incomes. If, again, it is difficult to imagine how so many hundreds of thousands do somehow pick up a little income, the brain reels when one tries to understand what the amusements of these people can be. They have no theatres, except, perhaps, the Whitechapel house for melodrama; they have no picture-galleries, no concert-halls, no parks; they have not only no means of acquiring the civilization of the West End, but they have absolutely no means of instituting comparisons, and so becoming discontented. I believe that these people, provided they earn enough for beef and beer, are absolutely contented. In the summer they run down to Southend by cheap excursions; they throng the pleasure-boats for Gravesend. In the winter they vegetate: go to the daily work, come home in the evening, smoke a pipe, and go to bed. On Sundays they have the Church and Chapel, the latter for choice. Except for the organization of their chapels, they have no society at all, and know no one except their own relations. No country town is so dull, none so devoid of society, distraction, and amusement, as the East End of London. There ought to be a prefect of the East End: he should be one of the royal princes; he should build a palace among the people; there should be regiments of soldiers, theatres, picture-galleries, and schools, to wake them up and make them dismally discontented about their mean surroundings. The first step in the elevation of a people is to make them discontented. Another thing-the East End covers a level which stretches for miles; it includes all those places which, not being so squalid as Whitechapel and the neighborhood of Cable Street, are yet as destitute of the means of artistic grace. From the East End of London there has never come any prophet at all, either in art, in music, in preaching, in acting, in prose, in poetry, or in science. Prophets can not come from a level so dead and a society so dull. Country towns, the fields, the hillside, can show prophets; the West End has produced prophets by hundreds; only the East End has no one. Perhaps if one were to arise, he would be so little understood, so rudely reminded that he was out of the grooves of respectability, that he would speedily cease to prophesy, and presently droop and die, before the world was able to become aware of him. Lastly, if one wanted to hide, to go away for a term of years, or altogether, what better place could be found than a quiet street south of Whitechapel? It is not an Alsatia-not at all: it is a highly respectable place. There are no habitual criminals, unless you reckon in that class the sailors, who are habitually drunk when they are at home. People would not begin by suspecting a stranger who could show that he had means of earning a livelihood; he might live among them for years without being known or inquired after; none of his West End friends would ever come near the place; no one would seek for him here. Later on young Nick would always declare that such thoughts as these were running through his brain on that day. But I doubt. Mankind is apt to remember little things which are too picturesque, and group themselves too easily to be altogether probable. Nature is generally flat in her composition, and a clever arrangement is not so common with her as quite inartistic grouping. So that I suspect young Nick of romancing when he narrates the events of this remarkable day. blind in the window; before it, three eggs in a plate, a lump of butter, a piece of streaky bacon, and two mutton-chops uncooked. There was also suspended before his eyes a tariff of prices. The boy read it carefully. He had his eighteen pence intact. He could have a mutton-chop for fivepence, potatoes for one penny, bread for the same, an egg for twopence, butter for one penny, and so on. He hesitated no longer, but opened the door and walked in. The place was empty except for one man, who was sitting in the box opposite to that in which young Nick sat down. The man was reading the paper, and was leaning back in the corner with the sheet before him, so that Nicolas did not see his face. He sat down, looked about him, took off his hat, rapped the table with his stick, and called “Waiter!" as loud as he dared. The waiter was a girl, neat and quick. "Bring me, if you please," said Nicolas, “as quickly as you can, a chop-yes "-ticking up the cost mentally-" and potatoes, and bread, and an egg to follow, and butter—that makes ten pence, and a cup of coffee, that will be a shilling." He remembered afterward that it looks shabby to add up the bill for yourself out loud while you are ordering the meal. However, the great thing was not to go beyond that eighteen pence. “And bring me to-day's paper-the half with the moneymarket intelligence, please; I am anxious to read the money-market news." The man with the newspaper started when he heard the boy's voice, and glanced furtively from behind his paper. Then his fingers, when they held the paper, began to tremble. The paper brought, Nicolas took a great deal of time and trouble to fold it, so that it should rest easily against the cruet-stand, and thus allow itself to be read while he was taking his dinner. He was not really so oppressed with a craving for intellectual food as to want to read while he was eating, but he had frequently observed the clerks in Crosby Hall take dinner and the "Daily Telegraph" at the same time, the murders with the meat and the paragraphs with the pudding, and he thought the eagerness to lose no time helped to distinguish the complete clerk. So he spread out the paper with the money-market news outside, and had just got it fairly in position when the chop came. It was a generous five-pennyworth, that chop; it must have been cut from a larger and nobler specimen of the mutton-providing animal than ordinary-Nicolas felt grateful to the sheep-a chop with a due proportion of fat, not a lump as big as your fist to be cut away, and then nothing but a bit of lean the size of a pigeon's egg. He made to himself these The place looked clean: there was a white observations as he went on: "The potatoes He was really getting quite wonderfully hungry he tightened his waistband, having heard that it affords relief to shipwrecked mariners, when they have been without food for a month or two, to do so. He was desperately hungry, and wondering how much farther he would have to go it was already close on three o'clock when he passed a coffee-house. might be mealier," he murmured, "but when a man's hungry, what odds does a waxy one make? None at all." He forgot the money-market news in his hunger, and cleared off the whole of that chop down to the bone without reading a word. Then he waited two minutes or so for the egg *and coffee, and began to read half aloud, for the benefit of the stranger opposite to him. Hum! Russians down. Don't wonder. Why do they keep up at all? Great Westerns up again, and Brighton A's firm-ha!” He enjoyed this little comedy because he had perceived, with those sharp eyes of his, that the stranger was interested in him, and, when he was not looking that way, was taking hurried glances at him from the corner of his paper. Now, the interest which young Nick everywhere excited as an albino made him callous as regards these little attentions, but he was in hopes that by the wisdom of his remarks he might cause the stranger to admire his business qualities as much as he did those physical attributes, of which he felt that it would be wrong to be too proud. Then the egg and the coffee were brought and dispatched. When the repast was quite finished, young Nick laid down the paper and called the waiter. "My bill," he asked grandly. It amounted, as he had estimated, to one shilling. He still had sixpence left. Should he walk home, and so leave himself free to spend that sum in cakes, or should he-which would be a more sensible course-make his way back to London Bridge, and then take the omnibus to Clapham ? While he turned this difficulty over in his mind, a rustling of the paper showed him that the other occupant of the coffee-house was watching him again. This became more interesting. Nicolas had no objection to be watched if the scrutiny meant admiration. It is not every boy of fourteen who has white hair, white eyebrows, and a delicately pink complexion. These things are not so common, if you please: a boy who owns them must as much expect to be looked at wherever he shows himself, as a reigning beauty when she goes to a garden-party. He was pleased to be able to gratify this laudable curiosity. If he (To be continued.) had been asked to do so, he would even have stood upon a chair, so that everybody might see him. But this furtive curiosity, this sneaking behind a copy of the Daily Telegraph," this prying over a corner when he himself was looking another way, was disquieting. Why couldn't the stranger lay down the paper and look at him as one man at another ? And this modest Paul Pry, whether he had taken his dinner or not, called for nothing, and yet seemed in no hurry to go away. Nicolas, for his part, felt that it was high time for him to go, and yet was loath to go without, to some extent, solving the mystery of the stranger. They were quite alone now, because the girl, seeing they had taken and paid for all they were likely to want, had left the room and gone away. The man wore a tall and rather seedy hat, which was visible above the paper; his fingersthose of them, at least, which were visible—were white, not at all the fingers of a workingman; and his boots were worn down at heel. Presumably he was some quite poor clerk. But why did he go on in that ridiculous fashion, holding the paper before him? Presently the boy was seized with an inspiration. He gently took his penknife from his pocket and opened it noiselessly. The paper was held, stretched out tight, well up before the mysterious reader's face. Young Nick put on his hat, took his stick in the left hand and his penknife in the right. He then carefully measured with his eye the space between himself and the door, and concluded that, being already in the passage between the tiers of boxes, he had a sufficient start. This decided, he advanced cautiously to the stranger, and, without saying one word, ripped the paper with his penknife from top to bottom. That's the way with these penny papers" he said coolly. They go at the least thing. All made up of old paper and Esparto-grass! Give me the 'Tim—'” Here the stranger raised his head, and the boy reeled backward, faint and sick. |