What face this shipping parish shows to a stranger I do not know.  I was never a stranger to it.  I should suppose it to be a face almost vacant, perhaps a little conventionally picturesque, for it is grey and seamed.  It might be even an altogether expressionless mask, staring at nothing.  Anyhow, there must be very little to be learned from it, for those bright young cultured strangers, admirable in their eagerness for social service, who come and live with us for a time, so that they may understand the life of the poor, never seem to have made anything of us.  They say they have; they speak even with some amount of assurance, at places where the problem which is us is examined aloud by confident politicians and churchfolk.  But I think they know well enough that they always failed to get anywhere near what mind we have.  There is a reason for it, of course.  Think of honest and sociable Mary Ann, of Pottles Rents, E., having been alarmed by the behaviour of good society, as it is betrayed in the popular picture Press, making odd calls in Belgravia (the bells for visitors, too), to bring souls to God.

My parish, to strangers, must be opaque with its indifference.  It stares beyond the interested visitor, in the way the sad and disillusioned have, to things it supposes a stranger would not understand if he were told.  He has reason, therefore, to say we are dull.  And Dockland, with its life so uniform that it could be an amorphous mass overflowing a reef of brick cells, I think would be distressing to a sensitive stranger, and even a little terrifying, as all that is alive but inexplicable must be.  No more conscious purpose shows in our existence than is seen in the coral polyp.  We just go on increasing and forming more cells.  Overlooking our wilderness of tiles in the rain—­we get more than a fair share of rain, or else the sad quality of wet weather is more noticeable in such a place as ours—­it seems a dismal affair to present for the intelligent labours of mankind for generations.  Could nothing better have been done than that?  What have we been busy about?

Well, what are people busy about anywhere?  Human purpose here has been as blind and sporadic as it is at Westminster, unrelated to any fixed star, lucky to fill the need of the day, building without any distant design, flowing in bulk through the lowest channels that offered.  As elsewhere, it is obstructed by the unrecognized mistakes of its past.  Our part of London, like Kensington or Islington, is but the formless accretion of countless swarms of life which had no common endeavour; and so here we are, Time’s latest deposit, the vascular stratum of this area of the earth’s rind, a sensitive surface flourishing during its day on the piled strata of the dead.  Yet this is the reef to which I am connected by tissue and bone.  Cut the kind of life you find in Poplar and I must bleed.  I cannot detach myself, and write of it.  Like any other atom, I would show the local dirt, if examined.  My hand moves, not loyally so much as instinctively, to impulses which come from beneath and so out of a stranger’s knowledge; out of my own, too, largely.