The Strangers' Home by W. Clark Russell — Read

A plain red-brick building stands in the West India Dock Road, with the following lengthy name or description written along the front of it: -- "The Strangers' Home for Asiatics, Africans, and South Sea Islanders. " On the day I visited this house there were three or four people standing on the doorsteps, with faces which did more in an instant to express the character of the place than could have been effected by reams of reports of annual meetings and descriptive pamphlets. They were, it is needless to say, persons of colour, and of very decided colour too: one as black as a hat, another of a muddy yellow, a third a gloomy brown. They were dressed in European clothes: they might have belonged to nations which were in a high state of civilization when the Thames was clean water, and rolled its silver stream through a land whose scanty population hung loose and unclothed among the trees; but for all that, they had the look of wild men in breeches, and the very black person needed little more than a boomerang or a bow and arrows to give him the aspect at least of an unsafe object. I had, however, but little time to inspect these men, for a commotion in the hall of the building, coupled with an assemblage of some dozen or twenty people on the street pavement, called my attention to a spectacle of real interest. This consisted of the starting of a troupe of Javanese musicians for the place of entertainment where they were then performing.

There were a number of men and four women -- at least, I think there were four women; yet it is possible that I may have mistaken a man for one of the other sex, for some of the men and women were very much alike, especially the men. They streamed out in a great hurry, their bright black eyes sparkling in their brown faces, the men smoking short pipes of a decidedly West India Dock Road pattern, and the women bundling along in such queer raiment that it would be as hopeless to attempt to describe its colours and cut as to catalogue the stock of a rag-and-bottle merchant. A kind of large private omnibus stood at the door, into which these strange people got, some of them climbing upon the roof; and striking indeed was the appearance of the windows of the vehicle, framing, as they did, every one of them, a dark, contented face, whilst the roof of the omnibus was crowded with blacks and whites, like the keys of a pianoforte.