Facts are more wonderful than fiction, the truth is stranger than any written tale could ever hope to be. I do not propose to dwell on horrors, or to tell again the story of startling crimes. London, the modern Babylon, the Mother of Mysteries, lies before us. It is from her own lips that we will hear the story of much that is strange and mysterious in her life. CHAPTER II--BY THE WATERSIDE _The River of Death--How the hooligan works--The story of a man who escaped--"Found drowned"--The tragedy of vengeance--The mystery of John Wilson--The woman in the case_ |A THIN mist wraps London in a shroud of grey this dismal winter afternoon as we pick our path carefully along the miry roads and sodden footways that lead us to the gloomy little building where the mysteries of the quiet water come to the light of day again. We have come by a region of desolation, across waste land and black patches of marshy earth where men sow seed and dig and wait patiently for a few stunted vegetables to reward their toil. Here and there under the black archways, above which the trains of a great railway thunder and shriek, we have seen a group of pale-faced, scantily-clad urchins kicking a black and battered football about among broken glass and rubbish heaps, and perhaps finding as much joy in the game as the famous performers who make a goal amid the cheers of tens of thousands of spectators. And so, gradually--always in the mist, always in the mud--we have come to a low-lying, far-stretching expanse of dingy houses and black palings and damp, oozy walls--a bit of Holland, as it were, in which the land and the water meet upon a dead level, and the only reliefs for the wearied eye are the glimmering lights of the barges and the timber ships lying far down the quiet canal. If we turned off the muddy road and passed inside the black palings we should be by the waterside, and on the broad towing-path that, dotted here and there with lonely little houses and black, mysterious-looking sheds and outbuildings, in the gathering night suggests that river of the nether regions over which the souls of the departed pass. And to call this silent water-way, glistening darkly where here and there a ray of lamp-light falls upon it, the Styx, would be no wild flight of fancy, for surely to those who know its record this is a River of Death. The humid, mud-trampled pathways that run on either side are the highways of tragedy--the beaten track of the last footsteps. Here by the water-way that brings the golden freight from the great river to the heart of the busy town is the parting of the ways of Time and Eternity for many a one who lays down the burthen of life. Not a pleasant place this, on a night of gloom, to linger and look and think. One raises one's eyes from the black water and sees far off the lights of the vehicles that cross the bridges in a steady stream, and the movement of busy life is a relief at once.