It is not only in name that this great thoroughfare has the sound of the sea, the suggestion of a tarry atmosphere, and that mystery which hangs about the lives of simple sailor men. To thousands and thousands of foreigners the word London means the West India Dock Road, and nothing more. There are sailors sailing on every sea who cherish the delusion that they have seen life and London when they have passed the portals of one of the large public-houses of the West India Dock Road. There are others who are not sailors, speaking one of the half-dozen tongues of eastern Europe, of which the average educated Briton does not even know the name, whose lives are bounded on the west by Aldgate Pump, on the east by the Dock Gates, on the north by Houndsditch, and on the south by St. Katherine's Dock and Tower Hill. A man who would wish to knock at any door in this district, and speak to him who opened it in his native tongue, would have to pass five years of his life between the Baltic and the Black Sea, the Carpathians and the Caucasus. Galician, Ruthenian, Polish, Magyar would be required as a linguistic basis, while variations of the same added to Russian and German for those who have served in one army or another, would probably be useful. There are many odd trades in the West India Dock Road, and none of them, it would seem, so profitable as the fleecing of sailors. But by a queer coincidence the callings mostly savor of the same painful process. They run to leather for the most part, and the manufacture of those _articles de luxe_ which are chiefly composed of colored morocco and gum. There is also a trade in furs. Half-way down the West India Dock Road, where the shops are most sordid, and the bird-fanciers congregate, there is quite a large fur store, of which the window, clad in faded red, is adorned by a white rabbit-skin, laid flat upon a fly-blown newspaper, and a stuffed sea-gull with a singularly knowing squint. There was once a name above the shop, but the owner of it, for reasons of his own, or so soon, perhaps, as he realized that he was in a country where no one wants to know your name, or cares about your business, had carelessly painted it out with a pot of black paint and a defective brush, which had last been used for red.