"WAITING FOR THE TIDE."
Dismissing "Old Smudge" with a fee that seemed to meet his approbation, I turned my steps in the direction of the river, not doubting for a moment but that I should find further food for reflection. I came upon the Thames suddenly as a vision, and saw it stretching out in all its dark and terrible beauty, just above Shadwell. I had taken my seat on an old dismasted hulk that lay some distance off in the river, and which I had reached with considerable difficulty by clambering from bowsprit to bowsprit among the silent shipping, on whose masts and canvas God's silent stars shone brightly down.
WAITING FOR THE TIDE.
I had not been sitting long there when a clumsy-looking and broad-bottomed boat passed me, directly below the hulk, one man pulling in the boat while another leaned over and seemed to support something, dark and bulky in shape, from the stern of the wherry.
A chill came over me, and in a faint voice I asked the man what he had in the skiff?
"Oh, yer honor, we were Waiting for the Tide below Bridge. We goes out every night, me and Tim, to look for bodies—we gets twenty shillings a-piece for them, and all we can find, and Tim's got a dead 'un now, and 'praps he's got a good haul, for there's a sparkling ring on Its finger,—mayhap yer honor would like to buy it."
Trailing slowly in the water was a lifeless corpse, and the boatman was tearing a bright object from its stiff forefinger.
Hastily I rose and turned my face away from the River which had given up its dead in this startling manner.
I went home thoroughly cured of the blues, and saw no more "sights" that night.