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Pleasantly wallowing in the abundant mud of that thoroughfare, and greatly enjoying the huge piles of building belonging to the sugar refiners, the little masts and vanes in small back gardens in back streets, the neighbouring canals and docks, the India vans lumbering along their stone tramway, and the pawnbrokers' shops where hard-up Mates had pawned so many sextants and quadrants, that I should have bought a few cheap if I had the least notion how to use them, I at last began to file off to the right, towards Wapping.
After showing me the exteriors of all the things of mark about the town, and the interiors of a few that I was disposed to pay for, he descended in his tastes, and carried me through Wapping, its purlieus and its scenes of atrocities.
Among the rest of our Men that did use to Dance thus before the General, there was one John Thacker, who was a Seaman bred, and could neither Write nor Read; but had formerly learnt to Dance in the Musick-Houses about Wapping: This Man came into the South Seas with Captain Harris, and getting with him a good quantity of Gold, and being a pretty good Husband of his Share, had still had some left, besides what he laid out in a very good Suit of Cloaths.
But then a difficulty came in their way, that, as they set out from the hither end of Wapping, near the Hermitage, and that the plague was now very violent, especially on the north side of the city, as in Shoreditch and Cripplegate parish, they did not think it safe for them to go near those parts; so they went away east through Ratcliff Highway as far as Ratcliff Cross, and leaving Stepney Church still on their left hand, being afraid to come up from Ratcliff Cross to Mile End, because they must come just by the churchyard, and because the wind, that seemed to blow more from the west, blew directly from the side of the city where the plague was hottest.
"Sir; he and some of the others caught me but yesterday. They had heard some tale of my having been to Mr. Secretary, and " "And you swore you had not, I suppose," snarled the other. "Sir; what could I do? Rumbald was all for despatching me then and there. They caught me at Wapping. I prayed them for God's love not to believe such things: I entreated: I wept " "I'll be bound you did," said Mr.
Kirkwood, needlessly attaching himself to the reins near the animal's head, pried his sense of observation open and became alive to the fact that he stood in a quarter of London as strange to him as had been Bermondsey Wall. To this day he can not put a name to it; he surmises that it was Wapping. Ramshackle tenements with sharp gable roofs lined either side of the way.
Well, Tom, consider of it a little. This was about the beginning of July; and though the plague was come forward in the west and north parts of the town, yet all Wapping, as I have observed before, and Redriff, and Ratdiff, and Limehouse, and Poplar, in short, Deptford and Greenwich, all both sides of the river from the Hermitage, and from over against it, quite down to Blackwall, was entirely free; there had not one person died of the plague in all Stepney parish, and not one on the south side of Whitechappel Road, no, not in any parish; and yet the weekly bill was that very week risen up to 1006.
In this way, then, at about the hour of ten on a stuffy autumn night, in the crowded bar of that Wapping public-house, these two made a compact; and of its outcome and of the next appearance of Cohen, the Jewish-American cracksman, within the ken of man, I shall now proceed to tell. "I've been expecting this," said Chief Inspector Kerry.
"Prithee, Wildrake, sit down," said Everard; "thou art drunk disturb us not." "Drunk? I drunk?" cried Wildrake, "I have been splicing the mainbrace, as Jack says at Wapping have been tasting Noll's brandy in a bumper to the King's health, and another to his Excellency's confusion, and another to the d n of Parliament and it may be one or two more, but all to devilish good toasts.
But New Bedford beats all Water Street and Wapping. In these last-mentioned haunts you see only sailors; but in New Bedford, actual cannibals stand chatting at street corners; savages outright; many of whom yet carry on their bones unholy flesh. It makes a stranger stare.
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