United States or Hungary ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
He had taken refuge in an old, disreputable uninhabited house, known to his accomplices, which stood right over the Thames, in Jacob's Island, not far from Dockhead; but the pursuit was hot, and the only chance of safety lay in getting to the river.
I have known a donkey by sight; we were not on speaking terms who lived over on the Surrey side of London-bridge, among the fastnesses of Jacob's Island and Dockhead. It was the habit of that animal, when his services were not in immediate requisition, to go out alone, idling.
Maybe ye think ye can fill a ship with gold and sail to the dockhead and lift it out and let it go at that they'll take the gold and hang you, that's what. "No doubt ye think the owners of this gold won't have a word to say when they find the Kut Sang overdue.
"There is not a finer craft swims the ocean than the beauty that lays out yonder," said a weather-beaten old seaman to a group of sailors, watermen, and others, who were lounging about the dockhead and commenting on the merits of a first-class, clipper-built, full rigged vessel that was lying in the Cove, her sails loosed and the blue Peter or signal for sailing, flying at the fore.
In such a neighborhood, beyond Dockhead in the Borough of Southwark, stands Jacob's Island, surrounded by a muddy ditch, six or eight feet deep and fifteen or twenty wide when the tide is in, once called Mill Pond, but known in the days of this story as Folly Ditch.
And from the dockhead, in the fuddle of a rain-squall, we were waving a handkerchief, probably to the wrong man, till the vessel went out where all was one rain, river, mud, and sky, and the future. It is afterwards that so strange an ending to a brief journey from a City station is seen to have had more in it than the time-table, hurriedly scanned, gave away.
We remember, that day, a few watchers insecure on an exposed dockhead that projected into a sullen dreariness of river and mud which could have been the finish of the land. At the end of a creaking hawser was a steamer canting as she backed to head downstream now she was exposed to a great adventure the tide rapid and noisy on her plates, the reek from her funnel sinking over the water.
It is for the young to remember there is no decay, though change, sometimes called progress, resembles it, especially when your work is finished and you are only waiting and looking on. When Captain Tom is in that mood we go to smoke a pipe at a dockhead.
Investigate the lanes Hay's Lane, Mill Lane, Morgan's Lane; and the streets Bermondsey, Dockhead, Pickle Herring Street, Horsleydown, and others and there, besides the great deposit and commission warehouses which cover acres of ground, and are filled from basement to ridge-pole with the commodities and combustibles of every clime, you will find huge granaries and stores of lead, alum, drugs, tallow, chicory, flour, rice, biscuit, sulphur, and saltpetre, mingled with the warehouses of cheese-agents, ham-factors, provision merchants, tarpaulin-dealers, oil and colour merchants, etcetera.
Word Of The Day