The Hole in the Wall by Arthur Morrison

I found it quite true that one might eat the loose sugar wherever he judged it clean enough -- as most of it was. And nothing but Grandfather Nat's restraining hand postponed my first bilious attack.

Thus it was that I made acquaintance with the Highway, and with the London Docks, in their more picturesque days, and saw and delighted in a thousand things more than I can write. Port was drunk then, and hundreds of great pipes lay in rows on a wide quay where men walked with wooden clubs, whacking each pipe till the "shive" or wooden bung sprang into the air, to be caught with a dexterity that pleased me like a conjuring trick. And many a thirsty dock-labourer, watching his opportunity, would cut a strip of bread from his humble dinner as he strolled near a pipe, and, absorbed in the contemplation of the indefinite empyrean, absently dip his sippet into the shive-hole as he passed; recovering it in a state so wet and discoloured that its instant consumption was imperative.