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Updated: June 3, 2025
Those were happy days, those were; and we lived well, share and share alike, and when we wanted a bit of fun, we chased the fat old wharf-rats! My, how they would squeal! Then the trouble came. It was no trouble to me. I was too young to care then. But mother took it so to heart that she grew ailing, and wouldn't go abroad with me by day.
You haven't anything to fear from those wharf-rats at Plymouth; but if the Confederate authorities find out about it, and can scrape together evidence enough to satisfy them that mother is Union, they'll come down on this house like a nighthawk on a June bug. And, worse than that, Beardsley may contrive to have mother put under arrest." "No!" gasped Marcy. "What for?"
Beggars skulked back to their hiding-places like wharf-rats to the rotten piles that shelter them; the unemployed dispersed also, showing themselves once more in the files that registered when the census of the unemployed was decided upon; and then, for the most part, were lost to public sight in the mass of general, every-day, to-be-expected wretchedness which makes up London below the surface.
I can never forget my thrills the first night I took part in a concerted raid, when we assembled on board the Annie rough men, big and unafraid, and weazened wharf-rats, some of them ex-convicts, all of them enemies of the law and meriting jail, in sea-boots and sea-gear, talking in gruff low voices, and "Big" George with revolvers strapped about his waist to show that he meant business.
Gray matter and blue blood and white pigment are not dynasties of man's making. Accident of birth, and not primogeniture, makes master minds and mulattoes, seamstresses and rich men's sons. Wharf-rats are more often born than made.
"'Bout that time; just rucked up and floated with the tide." "Not much chance o' spottin' him by his looks, eh?" "Nor anything else, you bet. Reg'larly cleaned out. Look at his pockets." "Wharf-rats or shanghai men?" "Betwixt and between, I reckon. Man who found him says he's got an ugly cut just back of his head. Ye can't see it for his floating hair."
His office was constantly thronged with outcasts, who were generally relieved by small sums. In his relations with these people, his simplicity and eccentricity were noted by all who knew him. Among many stories which I know to be true, I select the following. Some six or eight years ago the winter was very cold; the river was frozen, and all the "wharf-rats" were thrown out of work.
"A terrible mistake, sir! I have been kidnapped on board this vessel! I am not a sailor, I do not know how I come to be here I have been kidnapped, sir!" "How terrible!" said Swope. "I do not doubt your word at all, my man. Anyone can see you are no sailor, but a guttersnipe. And possibly you were er 'kidnapped, as you call it, in company with the wharf-rats behind you."
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