But a clanging bell proclaims the hour of one, and the dock-labourers, from Tower Hill to the far-off Isle of Dogs, are summoned back to their toil. Goodness and their own deplenished pockets only know how they have been lunching, or on what coarse viands they have fed since noon. Many have not fed at all; for, of the motley herd of dock-labourers, hundreds, especially in the London Docks—where no recommendation save strength is needed, and they are taken on their good behaviour from day to day—are of the Irish way of thinking; and, wonderfully economical, provident, self-denying are those much maligned Hibernians when they are earning money. They are only spendthrifts and indolent when they have nothing. They will content themselves with a fragment of hard, dry bread, and the bibulous solace of the nearest pump, and go home cheerfully at dusk to the unsavoury den—be it in Whitechapel or in Bloomsbury or in far-off Kensington, for they prefer strangely to live at the farthest possible distance from their place of daily toil—where their ragged little robins of children dwell like so many little pigs under a bed. And there they will partake of a mess of potatoes, with one solitary red herring smashed up therein, to “give it a relish.” They will half starve themselves, and go as naked as the police will permit them to go; but they will be very liberal to the priest, and will scrape money together to bring their aged and infirm parents over from the “ould country.” That is folly and superstition, people will say. Of course, what people say must be right.