Explore "The Paw" by Thomas Burke on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
It was the maidenly month of April, though it was not to be known in / Pennyfields except by the calendar: a season of song and quickening / blood. Beyond London, amid the spray of meadow and orchard, bird and / bee were making carnival, but here one still gambled and waited to find / a boat. Limehouse has no seasons. It has not even the divisions of day / and night. Boats must sail at all hours at the will of the tide, and / their swarthy crews are ever about. It has no means of marking the pomp / of the year's procession. Lusty spring may rustle in the hedgerows; / golden-tasselled summer may move on the meadows. In Limehouse there are / only more seamen or less seamen. Summer is a spell of stickiness, and / winter a time of fog. There may perhaps be those who long to escape from / it when the calendar calls spring, to kiss their faces to the grass, to / lose their tired souls in tangles of green shade; but they are hardly to / be met with. For the most, Limehouse is sufficient. These rather futile / green fields and songs of birds and bud-spangled trees are all very well, / if you have the limited mind, but how much sweeter are the things of the / hands, the darling friendliness of the streets!
It was this season of flower and awakening that was the setting for the / most shuddering tale that the Chinese quarter can tell.