Down near the West India Dock I came upon a young fellow staring
disconsolately at the muddy water. A fireman's cap was pulled down
across his eyes, and the fit and sag of his clothes whispered
unmistakably of the sea.

"Hello, mate," I greeted him, sparring for a beginning. "Can you tell me
the way to Wapping?"

"Worked yer way over on a cattle boat?" he countered, fixing my
nationality on the instant.

And thereupon we entered upon a talk that extended itself to a public-
house and a couple of pints of "arf an' arf." This led to closer
intimacy, so that when I brought to light all of a shilling's worth of
coppers (ostensibly my all), and put aside sixpence for a bed, and
sixpence for more arf an' arf, he generously proposed that we drink up
the whole shilling.

"My mate, 'e cut up rough las' night," he explained. "An' the bobbies
got 'm, so you can bunk in wi' me. Wotcher say?"

I said yes, and by the time we had soaked ourselves in a whole shilling's
worth of beer, and slept the night on a miserable bed in a miserable den,
I knew him pretty fairly for what he was. And that in one respect he was
representative of a large body of the lower-class London workman, my
later experience substantiates.

He was London-born, his father a fireman and a drinker before him. As a
child, his home was the streets and the docks. He had never learned to