Some of them, I believe, are absolutely homeless and friendless, and hang about street corners, getting perhaps a bit of tobacco from one or another more fortunate in this world's goods than themselves, and with it stave off the gnawing pangs of hunger. They hang about up side streets and round corners till night comes, then fling themselves down and sleep where they can, and go back once more at dawn to the gates of their paradise, to wait and hope, and be disappointed perhaps again. This is the dark side of the Dock-labourer's story. It has a brighter and better one inside, where on miles and miles of wharf hundreds of men, package- and bale-laden, are hurrying to and fro, stowing the produce of the world in shed after shed. Thousands of barrels of sugar are lying in one, and the air is perfectly sweet with it. The ground is treacly with it, and one's boots are saturated with it as one walks through a thick slime of what looks like toffee gone wrong in a sweetstuff window on a hot summer day. Thousands of boxes of tea, just in from China, are in another shed, and their next-door neighbours are myriads of bags of wheat. The steam cranes are going as far as the eye can see, whirling and dragging, and swinging huge bale after bale greedily from the good ships' holds; lighters laden to the top are being piled higher still; whole regiments of men bent with precious burthens are filing from wharf to warehouse; the iron wheels of the trolley, as it is pushed rapidly over the asphalted floor, make a music of their own; and the whole scene is shut in with a background of shipping--argosies freighted with the wealth of the Indies, the produce of many a land beyond the seas; all this goes to make up a picture of industry and enterprise and wealth, which gives just a little pardonable pride to the Englishman who contemplates it for the first time. The system in the Docks is admirable. The strange men who are taken on are not taken entirely on trust. There is a uniform scale of pay for old hands and new, but there is an overlooker to see that all work well. If a man shirks or makes himself in any way objectionable, the process is short and summary: 'Go to the office and take your money.' The man is discharged--he is paid for the time he has worked, but no more; and he can leave the Docks out of the question as a field for his talents, if he has shown himself a duffer. A mark is put against his name in the ganger's book. At the door every man who leaves the Docks is searched. This is more of a preventive measure than anything else. The men handle many packages of valuable commodities which have been broken in transit, and could easily extract some for their private use.