But the docks of London—by which, let me be perfectly understood, (I do not, by any means, intend to confine myself to the London Docks) I speak of Dock London in its entirety: of the London and St. Katherine’s, of the East and West India, and the Victoria Docks—what huge reservoirs are they of wealth, and energy, and industry! See those bonding warehouses, apoplectic with the produce of three worlds, congested with bales of tobacco and barrels of spices; with serons of cochineal, and dusky, vapid-smelling chests of opium from Turkey or India; with casks of palm-oil, and packages of vile chemicals, ill-smelling oxides and alkalis, dug from the bowels of mountains thousands of miles away, and which, ere long, will be transformed into glowing pigments and exquisite perfumes; with shapeless masses of india rubber, looking inconceivably dirty and nasty, yet from which shall come delicate little cubes with which ladies shall eraze faulty pencil marks from their landscape copies after Rout and Harding—india rubber that shall be spread over our coats and moulded into shoes, yea, and drawn out in elastic ductility, to form little filaments in pink silk ligatures—I dare not mention their English appellation, but in Italian they are called “_legaccie_”—which shall encircle the bases of the femurs of the fairest creatures in creation; with bags of rice and pepper, with ingots of chocolate and nuggets and nibs of cocoa, and sacks of roasted chicory. The great hide warehouses, where are packed the skins of South American cattle, of which the horns, being left on the hides, distil anything but pleasant odours, and which lie, prone to each other, thirsting for the tan-pit. See the sugar warehouses, dripping, perspiring, crystallising with sugar in casks, and bags, and boxes.[4] How many million cups of tea will be sweetened with these cases when the sugar is refined! how many tomesful of gossiping scandal will be talked to the relish of those saccharine dainties! what stores of barley-sugar temples and Chantilly baskets for the rich, of brandyballs and hardbake for the poor, will come from those coarse canvas bags, those stained and sticky casks! And the huge tea warehouses, where the other element of scandal, the flowery Pekoe or the family Souchong, slumbers in tinfoiled chests. And the coffee warehouses, redolent of bags of Mocha and Mountain, Texan and Barbadian berries. And the multitudinous, almost uncataloguable, mass of other produce: shellac, sulphur, gum-benzoin, ardebs of beans and pulse from Egypt, yokes of copper from Asia Minor; sponge, gum-arabic, silk and muslin from Smyrna; flour from the United States; hides, hams, hemp, rags, and especially tallow in teeming casks, from Russia and the Baltic provinces; mountains of timber from Canada and Sweden; fruit, Florence oil, tinder, raw cotton (though the vast majority of that staple goes to Liverpool), indigo, saffron, magnesia, leeches, basket-work, and wash-leather! The