Explore "The Father of Yoto" by Thomas Burke on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
Sweet human hearts-a tale of carnival, moon-haunted nights: a tale of the spring-tide, of the flower and the leaf ripening to fruit: a gossamer thing of dreamy-lanterned streets, told by my friend, Tai Ling, of West India Dock Road. Its scene is not the Hoang Ho or the sun-loved islands of the East, but Limehouse. Nevertheless it is a fairy tale, because so human.
Marigold Vassiloff was a glorious girl. The epithet is not mine, but Tai Ling's. Marigold lived under the tremendous glooms of the East and West India Docks; and what she didn't know about the more universal aspects of human life, though she was yet short of twenty, was hardly to be known. You know, perhaps, the East India Dock, which lies a little north of its big brother, the West India Dock: a place of savagely masculine character, evoking the brassy mood. By day-time a cold, nauseous light hangs about it; at night a devilish darkness settles upon it.