As they glided slowly on, keeping under the shore and sneaking in and out among the shipping by back-alleys of water, in a pilfering way that seemed to be their boatman’s normal manner of progression, all the objects among which they crept were so huge in contrast with their wretched boat, as to threaten to crush it. Not a ship’s hull, with its rusty iron links of cable run out of hawseholes long discoloured with the iron’s rusty tears, but seemed to be there with a fell intention. Not a figurehead but had the menacing look of bursting forward to run them down. Not a sluice gate, or a painted scale upon a post or wall, showing the depth of water, but seemed to hint, like the dreadfully facetious wolf in bed in Grandmamma’s cottage, “That’s to drown you in, my dears!” Not a lumbering black barge, with its cracked and blistered side impending over them, but seemed to suck at the river with a thirst for sucking them under. And everything so vaunted the spoiling influences of water⁠—discoloured copper, rotten wood, honeycombed stone, green dank deposit⁠—that the after-consequences of being crushed, sucked under, and drawn down, looked as ugly to the imagination as the main event.