The _Negro Boy_ tavern is known by few people in its own parish, for it is a house with nothing about it to distinguish its fame to those who do not know that a man may say to his friend, when their ships go different ways out of Callao, "I may meet you at the _Negro Boy_ some day." It is in a road which returns to the same point, or near to it, after a fatiguing circuit of the Isle of Dogs. No part of the road is better than the rest. It is merely a long road. That day when I first heard of Bill Purdy I was going to the tavern hoping to meet Macandrew, Chief of the _Medea_. His ship was in again. But there was nobody about. There was nothing in sight but the walls, old, sad, and discreet, of the yards where ships are repaired. The dock warehouses opposite the tavern offered me their high backs in a severer and apparently an endless obduracy. The _Negro Boy_, as usual, was lost and forlorn, but resigned to its seclusion from the London that lives, having stood there long enough to learn that nothing can control the ways of changing custom. Its windows were modest and prim in green curtains. Its only adornment was the picture, above its principal door, of what once was a negro boy. This picture now was weathered into a faded plum-coloured suit and a pair of silver shoe-buckles--there was nothing left of the boy himself but the whites of his eyes. The tavern is placed where men moving in the new ways of a busy and adventurous world would not see it, for they would not be there. Its dog Ching was asleep on the mat of the portico to the saloon bar; a Chinese animal, in colour and mane resembling a lion whose dignity has become sullenness through diminution. He could doze there all day, and never scare away a chance customer. None would come. But men who had learned to find him there through continuing to trade to the opposite dock, would address him with some familiar and insulting words, and stride over him.