Page:The Mating of the Blades.djvu/51

 pounds all told but for a few odd shillings and pence in his trousers, was in his inside coat pocket in incongruous proximity to the strange old Asian blade which he had taken from the lumber room, and he smiled grimly at the thought that a pickpocket would have a surprise in store for him if his nimble fingers went groping where they were not wanted. For that morning, obeying a rather boyish impulse, he had sharpened the point of the dagger with his razor strop, and the red velvet sheath was worn thin and threadbare.

Rapidly he walked down Ratcliffe Highway, past “model tenements” that hide their feculent, maggoty souls behind white stucco fronts, past Jamrach's world-famed “Wild Beast Shop” where the spectacled proprietor boasts that, on a day's notice, he can sell you any animal from a white Siamese elephant to a blue Tibetan bear, past Donald M'Eachran's “Murray Arms” saloon bar where a nostalgic Highlander sells the London equivalent for Athol Brose, and turned into Shadwell's smelly, greasy, gin-soaked purlieus.

Here, Wapping and the East India and Commercial and Victoria Docks spilled over with taverns and sailors' boarding-houses and ship-chandlers' and second hand stores where every last mildewy curio a sailor, for reasons only known to himself, packs in his dunnage, from Korean brass to broken bits of Yunan jade, from white Gulf corals to bundles of yellow Latakia tobacco leaves, can be bought. Too, men from all the corners of the globe; men who go down to the sea in ships and come up from the sea, as often as not, in hansom cabs to spend the bitter wages of six weeks' battling with storm and rotten timbers in one night's