Sheer above the walls of East India Dock rose the deck of the _Cawdor Castle_, as splendidly correct as a cathedral. The leaping lines of her seemed lost in the high skies, and she stood out sharply, almost ecstatically. Against such superb forces of man, the forces of Nature seemed dwarfed. It was a lyric in steel and iron. Men hurried from the landing-stage, up the plank, vanishing into the sly glooms of the huge port-holes. Chains rang and rattled. Lascars of every kind flashed here and there: Arabs, Chinkies, Japs, Malays, East Indians. Talk in every lingo was on the air. Some hurried from the dock, making for a lodging-house or for The Asiatics' Home. Some hurried into the dock, with that impassive swiftness which gives no impression of haste, but rather carries a touch of extreme languor. An old cargo tramp lay in a far berth, and one caught the sound of rushing blocks, and a monotonous voice wailing the Malayan chanty: "Love is kind to the least of men, EEEE-_ah_, EEEE-_ah_!" Boats were loading up. Others were unloading. Over all was the glare of arclights, and the flutter of honeyed tongues. A few tugs were moored at the landing-stages. One or two men hung about them, smoking, spitting. The anger of the Blackwall streets came to them in throbbing blasts, for it was Saturday night, and closing time. Over the great plain of London went up a great cry. Outside the doors of every hostelry, in Piccadilly and Bermondsey, in Blackwall and Oxford Street, were gathered bundles of hilarity, lingering near the scenes of their recent splendours. A thousand sounds, now of revelry, now of complaint, disturbed the brooding calm of the sky. A thousand impromptu concerts were given, and a thousand insults grew precociously to blows. A thousand old friendships were shattered, and a thousand new vows of eternal comradeship and blood-brotherhood were registered. A thousand wives were waiting, sullen and heavy-eyed, for a thousand jovial or brutal mates; and a thousand beds received their occupants in full harness, booted and hatted, as though the enemy were at the gates. Everywhere strains of liquor-music surged up for the next thirty minutes, finally to die away piecemeal as different roads received different revellers.