Page:Hopkinson Smith--In Dickens's London.djvu/168

IN DICKENS'S LONDON Thank ye, sir. Come on Monday and don't forget to ask for me. Thank ye, sir, I'll smoke it to-morrow," and he was off.

Once outside, I wandered about the streets upon which the sudden chill of idleness had settled. Few people were to be seen and fewer trucks. I mounted the slope of the Bridge and leaned over the parapet, revelling for hours in the stir of the river. The sun had sunk in a dull mist and there was but little wind; the clouds of smoke rolling from the steamers kept abreast of their funnels, the black columns mounting straight up. Lights, large and small, like a swarm of fireflies, began to break out, speckling the great city. Night came on. In the gloom the outline of the larger masses on the opposite bank were merged into the slowly settling haze which fell like a drop-curtain, pricked here and there by pin-points of light. It was now Gaffer's hour—the hour when:

"A boat of dirty and disreputable appearance, with two figures in it, floated on the Thames, between Southwark Bridge which is of iron, and London Bridge which is of stone, as an autumn evening was closing in.

"The figures in this boat were those of a strong man with ragged grizzled hair and a sun-browned face, and a dark girl of nineteen or twenty, sufficiently like him to be recognisable as his daughter. The girl rowed, pulling a pair of sculls very easily; the man, with the rudder-lines slack in his hands, and his hands loose in his waist-band, kept an eager look-out. He had no net, hook, or line, and he could not be a fisherman; his boat had no cushion for a 104