It was secluded from the main stream, and its children were a lively yet merely revolving eddy.  They could not get out.  When I first visited Mr. Pascoe, as there was no window ornament to distinguish his place from the others, and his number was missing, I made a mistake, and went next door.  Through a hole drilled in that wrong door a length of cord was pendant, with a greasy knot at its end.  Underneath the knot was chalked “Pull.”  I pulled.  The door opened on a mass of enclosed night.  From the street it was hard to see what was there, so I went inside.  What was there might have been a cavern—­narrow, obscure, and dangerous with dim obstructions.  Some of the shadows were darker than others, because the cave ended, far-off, on a port-light, a small square of day framed in black.  Empty space was luminous beyond that cave.  Becoming used to the gloom I saw chains and cordage hanging from the unseen roof.  What was faintly like the prow of a boat shaped near.  Then out from the lumber and suggestions of things a gnome approached me.  “Y’ want ole Pascoe?  Nex’ dore, guv’nor!” At that moment, in the square of bright day at the end of the darkness, the apparition of a ship silently appeared, and was gone again before my surprise.  That open space beyond was London River.

Next door, in a small room to which day and night were the same, Mr. Pascoe was always to be found bending over his hobbing foot, under a tiny yellow fan of gaslight which could be heard making a tenuous shrilling whenever the bootmaker looked up, and ceased riveting.  When his head was bent over his task only the crown of a red and matured cricketing cap, which nodded in time to his hammer, was presented to you.  When he paused to speak, and glanced up, he showed a face that the gas jet, with the aid of many secluded years, had tinctured with its own artificial hue, a face puckered through a long frowning intent on old boots.  He wore an apron that had ragged gaps in it.  He was a frail and dingy little man, and might never have had a mother, but could have been born of that dusty workroom, to which he had been a faithful son all his life.  It was a murky interior shut in from the day, a litter of petty tools and nameless rubbish on a ruinous bench, a disorder of dilapidated boots, that mean gas jet, a smell of leather; and there old Pascoe’s hammer defiantly and rapidly attacked its circumstances, driving home at times, and all unseen, more than those rivets.  If he rose to rake over his bench for material or a tool, he went spryly, aided by a stick, but at every step his body heeled over because one leg was shorter than the other.  Having found what he wanted he would wheel round, with a strange agility that was apparently a consequence of his deformity, continuing his discourse, and driving his points into the air with his hammer, and so hobble back, still talking; still talking through his funny cap, as his neighbours used to say of him.  At times he convoluted aerial designs and free ideas with his hammer, spending it aloft on matters superior to boots.  The boots were never noticed.  Pascoe could revivify his dust.  The glitter of his spectacles when he looked up might have been the sparkling of an ardent vitality suppressed in his little body.