There are others who are not sailors, speaking one of the half-dozen tongues of eastern Europe, of which the average educated Briton does not even know the name, whose lives are bounded on the west by Aldgate Pump, on the east by the Dock Gates, on the north by Houndsditch, and on the south by St. Katherine’s Dock and Tower Hill.  A man who would wish to knock at any door in this district, and speak to him who opened it in his native tongue, would have to pass five years of his life between the Baltic and the Black Sea, the Carpathians and the Caucasus.  Galician, Ruthenian, Polish, Magyar would be required as a linguistic basis, while variations of the same added to Russian and German for those who have served in one army or another, would probably be useful.

There are many odd trades in the West India Dock Road, and none of them, it would seem, so profitable as the fleecing of sailors.  But by a queer coincidence the callings mostly savor of the same painful process.  They run to leather for the most part, and the manufacture of those articles de luxe which are chiefly composed of colored morocco and gum.  There is also a trade in furs.  Half-way down the West India Dock Road, where the shops are most sordid, and the bird-fanciers congregate, there is quite a large fur store, of which the window, clad in faded red, is adorned by a white rabbit-skin, laid flat upon a fly-blown newspaper, and a stuffed sea-gull with a singularly knowing squint.

There was once a name above the shop, but the owner of it, for reasons of his own, or so soon, perhaps, as he realized that he was in a country where no one wants to know your name, or cares about your business, had carelessly painted it out with a pot of black paint and a defective brush, which had last been used for red.

On each side of the shop-window is a door, one leading to the warehouse and workshop at the back.  Through this door there passes quite a respectable commerce.  The skin of the domestic cat, drawn hither on coster carts from the remoter suburbs, passes in to this door to emerge from it later in neat wooden cases addressed to enterprising merchants in Trondhjem, Bergen, Berlin, and other northern cities from which tourists are in the habit of carrying home mementoes in the shape of the fur and feather of the country.  There is also a small importation of American fur to be dressed and treated and re-despatched to the Siberian fur dealers from whom the American globe-trotter prefers to buy.  A number of unhealthy work-people—­men, women, and ancient children—­also use this door, entering by it in the morning, and only coming into the air again after dark.  They have yellow faces and dusty clothes.  A long companionship with fur has made them hirsute; for the men are unshaven, and the women’s heads are burdened with heavy coils of black hair.