I turned down a muddy alley, where 12 or 15 placards headed “Body Found,” were pasted against the wall.  They were printed forms, filled in with a pen.  Mr. Forster tells us in his life of Dickens that it was the sight of bills of this sort which gave the first suggestion of “Our Mutual Friend.”  At the end of the alley was a neat brick police-station; stairs led to the water, and several trim boats were moored there.  Within the station I could see an officer quietly busy at his desk, as if he had been sitting there ever since Dickens described “the Night Inspector, with a pen and ink ruler, posting up his books in a whitewashed office as studiously as if he were in a monastery on the top of a mountain, and no howling fury of a drunken woman were banging herself against a cell-door in the back yard at his elbow.”  A handsome young fellow in uniform, who looked like a cross between a sailor and a constable, came out and asked very civilly if he could be of use to me.  “Do you know,” said I, “where the station was that Dickens describes in ’Our Mutual Friend’?”

“Oh, yes, sir! this is the very spot.  It was the old building that stood just here:  this is a new one, but it has been put up in the same place.”

“Mr. Dickens often went out with your men in the boat, didn’t he?”

“Yes, sir, many a night in the old times.”

“Do you know the tavern which is described in the same book by the name of The Six Jolly Fellowship Porters?”

“No, sir, I don’t know it; at least not by that name.  It may have been pulled down, for a lot of warehouses have been built along here, and the place is very much changed; or it may be one of those below.”

Of course, I chose to think that it must be “one of those below.”  I kept on a little farther, by the crooked river lanes, where public houses were as plentiful as if the entire population suffered from a raging and inextinguishable thirst for beer.  The sign-boards displayed a preference for the plural which seems not to have escaped the observation of the novelist.  If I did not see The Six Porters, I came across The Three Mariners, The Three Cups, The Three Suns, The Three Tuns, The Three Foxes, and the Two Brewers; and in the last I hope that I found the original of the tavern so often mentioned in the story.

I had first noticed it from the steamboat—­“a narrow, lop-sided wooden jumble of corpulent windows heaped one upon another as you might heap as many toppling oranges, with a crazy wooden veranda impending over the water,”—­a tavern of dropsical appearance, which had not a straight floor in its whole constitution, and hardly a straight line.  I got at the entrance on the land side after a search among puzzling alleys, and there I found still stronger reminders of “Our Mutual Friend.”  Stuck against the wall was an array of old and new hand-bills, headed, “Drowned,” and offering rewards for the recovery of bodies.  The value set upon dead persons in Limehouse Hole is not excessive:  the customary recompense for finding them seems to be ten shillings, and in only one instance did the price reach the dazzling amount of one pound.