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 If you think that commerce, yielding to steel and steam, has lost all romance, just give an idle day or two to London docks. The very names upon the street signs are as exotic as a breath of frankincense. Mango Wharf, Kamchatka Wharf, Havannah Street, the Borneo Stores, Greenland Dock, Sealers' Yard—on all sides are these suggestions of adventure beyond the sky-rim, of soft, tropical moons and cold, arctic stars, of strange peoples, strange tongues and strange lands. In one Limehouse barroom you will find sailors from Behring Straits and the China Sea, the Baltic and the River Plate, the Congo and Labrador, all calling London home, all paying an orang-outang's devotions to the selfsame London barmaid, all drenched and paralysed by London beer....

The kaiserstadt of the world, this grim and grey old London! And the river of rivers, this oily, sluggish, immemorial Thames! At its widest, I suppose, it might