painting, and scraping the wooden hull; her bowsprit and her figurehead stick out over the street, Between the docks are small two-storied houses, half of them little shops trying to sell something; the public-house is frequent, but the ‘Humours’ of Ratcliff Highway are absent; mercantile Jack at Rotherhithe is mostly Norwegian and has morals of his own.  Such, however, as this little village of Rotherhithe is, so were ‘Wappin in the Wose,’ Shadwell, Ratcliff, and the ‘Limehouse’ a hundred years ago, with the addition of street fighting and brawling all day long; the perpetual adoration of rum, quarrels over stolen goods; quarrels over drunken drabs; quarrels over all-fours; the scraping of fiddles from every public-house, the noise of singing, feasting, and dancing, and a never-ending, still-beginning debauch, all hushed and quiet—­as birds cower in the hedge at sight of the kestrel—­when the press-gang swept down the narrow streets and carried off the lads, unwilling to leave the girls and the grog, and put them aboard His Majesty’s tender to meet what fate might bring.

The construction of the great docks has completely changed this quarter.  The Precinct of St. Katherine’s by the Tower has almost entirely disappeared, being covered by St. Katherine’s Dock; the London Dock has reduced Wapping to a strip covered with warehouses.  But the church remains, so frankly proclaiming itself of the eighteenth century, with its great churchyard.  The new Dock Basin, Limehouse Basin, and the West India Docks, have sliced huge cantles out of Shadwell, Limehouse, and Poplar; the little private docks and boat-building yards have disappeared; here and there the dock remains, with its river gates gone, an ancient barge reposing in its black mud; here and there may be found a great building which was formerly a warehouse when ship-building was still carried on.  That branch of industry was abandoned after 1868, when the shipwrights struck.  Their action transferred the ship-building of the country to the Clyde, and threw out of work thousands of men who had been earning large wages in the yards.  Before this unlucky event Riverside London had been rough and squalid, but there were in it plenty of people earning good wages—­skilled artisans, good craftsmen.  Since then it has been next door to starving.  The effect of the shipwrights’ strike may be illustrated in the history of one couple.

The man, of Irish parentage, though born in Stepney, was a painter or decorator of the saloons and cabins of the ships.  He was a highly-skilled workman of taste and dexterity; he could not only paint but he could carve; he made about three pounds a week and lived in comfort.  The wife, a decent Yorkshire woman whose manners were very much above those of the riverside folk, was a few years older than her husband.  They had no children.  During the years of fatness they saved nothing; the husband was not a drunkard, but, like most workmen, he liked to cut a figure and to make a show.  So he saved little