CHAPTER XXIV--A VISION OF THE NIGHT.
All these were years ago little red-coloured, pulpy infants, capable of being kneaded, baked, into any social form you chose .-- CARLYLE.
Late last night I walked along Commercial Street from Spitalfields to Whitechapel, and still continuing south, down Leman Street to the docks.
And as I walked I smiled at the East End papers, which, filled with civic pride, boastfully proclaim that there is nothing the matter with the East End as a living place for men and women.
It is rather hard to tell a tithe of what I saw.

Much of it is untenable.

But in a general way I may say that I saw a nightmare, a fearful slime that quickened the pavement with life, a mess of unmentionable obscenity that put into eclipse the "nightly horror" of Piccadilly and the Strand.

It _was_ a menagerie of garmented bipeds that looked something like humans and more like beasts, and to complete the picture, brass-buttoned keepers kept order among them when they snarled too fiercely.
I was glad the keepers were there, for I did not have on my "seafaring" clothes, and I was what is called a "mark" for the creatures of prey that prowled up and down.

At times, between keepers, these males looked at me sharply, hungrily, gutter-wolves that they were, and I was afraid of their hands, of their naked hands, as one may be afraid of the paws of a gorilla.