Again, as is well known, hundreds of men seek work at the docks. It might be supposed by their innocent lordships that nothing could be easier than for a man to prove his employment at such gigantic and sternly-regulated establishments as the London or St. Katherine Docks, with their staff of liveried officials and responsible gate-keepers. The dock-labourer, on his admittance, is furnished with a ticket, and when he leaves he is searched so as to make sure that he has stolen none of the valuable goods scattered in every direction. But it is a fact that no system can be looser or more shambling or shabbier than that which rules in the drudgery departments of these great emporiums for ship-loading and warehousing. Every morning the dock-gates are besieged by a mob clamorous as that which in the old time swarmed about the door of the casual-ward; and if rags and patches and hunger-pinched visages go for anything, the quality of both mobs is much of a sort. It is only men who can find nothing else to do who apply at the docks for work, for the pay is but threepence an hour, and the labour, hoisting-out and landing goods from the holds of ships, is cruelly hard; and it is not uncommon to employ a man for an hour and a half or two hours, and then discharge him. But it is better than nothing, and it is the “ready penny”—emphatically the penny—that the miserable, shamefaced, twice-convicted man, with some remnant of conscience and good intent remaining in him, would seek as the last resource of desperate honesty, all other sources failing him. But it would be next to impossible for him to prove that he had been working at the docks; no one knows him there. He might be there employed twenty times, and each time in a different gang, and under a different ganger. His workmates for the time are strangers, bearing not names, but numbers. Were it to save his life, he would find it hard to prove that he occasionally found a “job” at the docks, and, despite all his honest exertions, he would he liable to have his ticket revoked, and be sent back to finish to its full length his original sentence.