The Lifeboat

The Lifeboat, by R.M. Ballantyne

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Title: The Lifeboat
Author: R.M. Ballantyne
Release Date: June 7, 2007 [EBook #21744]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ASCII
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LIFEBOAT ***

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THE LIFEBOAT, BY R.M. BALLANTYNE.
CHAPTER ONE.
THE BEGINNING--IN WHICH SEVERAL IMPORTANT
PERSONAGES ARE INTRODUCED.

There existed, not many years ago, a certain street near the banks of old
Father Thames which may be described as being one of the most
modest and retiring little streets in London.
The neighbourhood around that street was emphatically dirty and noisy.
There were powerful smells of tallow and tar in the atmosphere,
suggestive of shipping and commerce. Narrow lanes opened off the
main street affording access to wharves and warehouses, and presenting
at their termini segmentary views of ships' hulls, bowsprits, and booms,
with a background of muddy water and smoke. There were courts with
unglazed windows resembling doors, and massive cranes clinging to
the walls. There were yards full of cases and barrels, and great anchors
and chains, which invaded the mud of the river as far as was consistent
with safety; and adventurous little warehouses, which stood on piles, up
to the knees, as it were, in water, totally regardless of appearances, and
utterly indifferent as to catching cold. As regards the population of this
locality, rats were, perhaps, in excess of human beings; and it might
have been observed that the former were particularly frolicsome and
fearless.
Farther back, on the landward side of our unobtrusive street,
commercial and nautical elements were more mingled with things
appertaining to domestic life. Elephantine horses, addicted to good
living, drew through the narrow streets wagons and vans so ponderous
and gigantic that they seemed to crush the very stones over which they
rolled, and ran terrible risk of sweeping little children out of the upper
windows of the houses. In unfavourable contrast with these, donkeys,
of the most meagre and starved aspect, staggered along with cartloads
of fusty vegetables and dirty-looking fish, while the vendors thereof
howled the nature and value of their wares with deliberate ferocity.
Low pawnbrokers (chiefly in the "slop" line) obtruded their seedy
wares from doors and windows halfway across the pavement, as if to
tempt the naked; and equally low pastry-cooks spread forth their stale
viands in unglazed windows, as if to seduce the hungry.
Here the population was mixed and varied. Busy men of business and
of wealth, porters and wagoners, clerks and warehousemen, rubbed

shoulders with poor squalid creatures, men and women, whose business
or calling no one knew and few cared to know except the policeman on
the beat, who, with stern suspicious glances, looked upon them as
objects of special regard, and as enemies; except, also, the
earnest-faced man in seedy black garments, with a large Bible
(evidently) in his pocket, who likewise looked on them as objects of
special regard, and as friends. The rats were much more circumspect in
this locality. They were what the Yankees would call uncommonly
"cute," and much too deeply intent on business to indulge in play.
In the lanes, courts, and alleys that ran still farther back into the great
hive, there was an amount of squalor, destitution, violence, sin, and
misery, the depth of which was known only to the people who dwelt
there, and to those earnest-faced men with Bibles who made it their
work to cultivate green spots in the midst of such unpromising wastes,
and to foster the growth of those tender and beautiful flowers which
sometimes spring and flourish where, to judge from appearances, one
might be tempted to imagine nothing good could thrive. Here also there
were rats, and cats too, besides dogs of many kinds; but they all of
them led hard lives of it, and few appeared to think much of enjoying
themselves. Existence seemed to be the height of their ambition. Even
the kittens were depressed, and sometimes stopped in the midst of a
faint attempt at play to look round with a scared aspect, as if the
memory of kicks and blows was strong upon them.
The whole neighbourhood, in fact, teemed with sad yet interesting
sights and scenes, and with strange violent contrasts. It was not a spot
which one would naturally select for a ramble on a summer evening
after dinner; nevertheless it was a locality where time might have been
profitably spent, where a good lesson or two