The strictly commercial aspect of the Docks—­the London Docks above and the West India Docks below—­shades off by slight degrees into the black misery of the hole.  The warehouses are succeeded by boat-builders’ sheds; by private wharves, where ships, all hidden, as to their hulls, behind walls and close fences, thrust unexpected bowsprits over the narrow roadway; by lime-yards; by the shops of marine store-dealers and purveyors to all the wants and follies of seamen; and then by a variety of strange establishments which it would be hard to classify.

Close by a yard piled up with crates and barrels of second-hand bottles, was a large brick warehouse devoted to the purchase and sale of broken glass.  A wagon loaded with that commodity stood before the door, and men with scoop-shovels were transferring the glass into barrels.  An enclosure of one or two acres, in an out-of-the-way street, might have been the original of the dust-yard that contained Boffin’s Bower, except that Boffin’s Bower was several miles distant, on the northern outskirt of London.  A string of carts, full of miscellaneous street and house rubbish, all called here by the general name of “dust,” were waiting their turn to discharge.  There was a mountain of this refuse at the end of the yard; and a party of laborers, more or less impeded by two very active black hogs, were sifting and sorting it.  Other mounds, formed from the sittings of the first, were visible at the sides.  There were huge accumulations of broken crockery and of scraps of tin and other metal, and of bones.  There was a quantity of stable-manure and old straw, and a heap, as large as a two-story cottage, of old hoops stript from casks and packing-cases.  I never understood, until I looked into this yard, how there could have been so much value in the dust-mounds at Boffin’s Bower.

Gradually the streets became narrower, wetter, dirtier, and poorer.  Hideous little alleys led down to the water’s edge where the high tide splashed over the stone steps.  I turned into several of them, and I always found two or three muddy men lounging at the bottom; often a foul and furtive boat crept across the field of view.  The character of the shops became more and more difficult to define.  Here a window displayed a heap of sailor’s thimbles and pack-thread; there another set forth an array of trumpery glass vases or a basket of stale fruit, pretexts, perhaps, for the disguise of a “leaving shop,” or unlicensed pawnbroker’s establishment, out of which I expected to see Miss Pleasant Riderhood come forth, twisting up her back hair as she came.  At a place where the houses ceased, and an open space left free a prospect of the black and bad-smelling river, there was an old factory, disused and ruined, like the ancient mill in which Gaffer Hexam made his home, and Lizzie told the fortunes of her brother in the hollow by the fire.