My instructor was the driver of a twopenny
'bus. In his love-affairs he had been cut out by
his own conductor, the bow-legged young man
who married Polly Perkins of Paddington-green.
The driver had carried on with Polly "previous."
They were in a swell family together,
he as footman and Polly as lady's-maid. One
day they accompanied their mistress in the
carriage to the London Bridge railway station,
the loving pair sitting in the rumble behind.
When the mistress got out at the station she
discharged them both with a month's wages, but
without a character. Joe and Polly, unmindful of
the laws of reflection, had been larking outside in
the rumble, and the mistress had been a witness
to all their goings on by means of the shop
windows. " It was a lesson to me, sir; and it
may be a lesson to you, as regards luggage, if
not as regards love."

The most difficult and tedious part of the
journey from Charing-cross to John o' Groats,
is the short distance—little more than three
miles—which lies between Temple-bar and the
wharf at Wapping. When I am brought to a
stand-still in Cheapside by a gaping crowd looking
up at the figures of Gog and Magog on Mr.
Bennett's clock, and nearly come to grief there,
I am reminded of a Scotchman who, on making
his first appearance in London, actually did
come to grief through being attracted by a
similar spectacle in Fleet-street more than two
hundred years ago. Here is the scene over
again. Richard Monoplies, gaping at the
images on St. Dunstan's, and Vin Jin and
Francis Tunstall (turned pickpockets in the
nineteenth century as the result of having been
idle apprentices in the seventeenth) easing him
of the very few bawbees he has brought from
Scotland with him. And, by the way, those two
nickums (capital Scotch word for saucy young
scamps), Vin and Frank, had the first scattering
in the eyes of Scotchmen of that pungent
chaff to which. I have alluded at the opening of
this paper. It was a sore subject with them.
They were reckless young dogs, who, at the cry
of " Apprentices," would leap over the counter
and fly to join their companions in any devilment
that might be going on, leaving the shop
to take care of itself; whereas the staid Scotch
loons who came south, with Jingling Geordie and
David Ramsay, stopped their ears to the cry,
and went steadily on with their work. The idle
apprentice always makes sport of the industrious
one; and so we have the saucy cockney
saluting the raw Scot with "Buy a watch, most
noble northern Thane; buy a watch, to count
the hours of plenty since the blessed moment
you left Berwick behind you; buy barnacles, to
see the English gold lies ready for your gripe;
buy what you will, and have credit for three
days, for were your pockets as bare as Father
Fergus's, you're a Scot in London, and you
will be stocked in that time." Thus the chaff
began, to be revived and renewed when Lord
Bute further aggravated the southron by
bespeaking favour at court for Sir Pertinax
Macsycophant and the new race of Scots who had
learned to "boo." If you regard this as a
digression, a halt on my journey back, I must
plead Mr. Bennett's images, which, for the last
twenty minutes, have stopped the way.

I would as soon steer a steam-boat through
the Hebrides as drive a cab through the
labyrinth of narrow streets that lies between the
Minories and the Aberdeen Steam Company's
wharf at Wapping. If you ever elect to travel
northward by this route, be in time. If the
steamer be advertised to leave her moorings at
three P.M., start in your cab, say from Charing-cross,
two hours earlier. There are several
dock-bridges to cross, and it may happen that
you will find these bridges swung back to give
egress to vessels proceeding to sea. [This
Johnsonian style that I am falling into is the
result of a peep at the Tour to the Hebrides:
good English, no doubt, but bad feeling; ill-
conditioned book; shall seize an opportunity
to take Johnson down a peg.] An Indiaman at
every bridge will detain you perhaps an hour,
and the block of vans and carts in the road will
divert your course and send you round through
a series of narrow and dirty streets, where the
misery and squalor of the inhabitants will act
like a reproach to your joyful spirit, and make
you irritable and unhappy. So, if you are eager
and anxious to catch the Aberdeen boat, be in
time!

Let me mention an odd feeling that came
over me while I was being jerked along at a
snail's pace across these bridges and through
these alleys. I remembered them all well, but
I had not seen them for nigh twenty years. I
had not seen them since the night that I first
arrived in London. I saw no alteration in any of
their dingy features, and this unchanged aspect of
the place annihilated all the years I had lived in
the south, and I was a beardless Scotch laddie
again, stepping for the first time on English
soil, with a breast full of hope and a pocket full
of emptiness. At the gates of the wharf a dirty
little public-house presented itself as an old
acquaintance; on my arrival I had gone in there
to taste real London porter. I thought it nectar
then, fit for the gods. I went in now to see
if I had preserved that impression. Alas, I
hadn't; I thought it wash, not fit for the pigs.
Was it Barclay and Perkins who had degenerated,
or I?

There was a pleasant surprise for me when I
got upon the wharf. The vessel advertised to
sail that day for Aberdeen, was the Gambia, a
terrible screw; but, lo and behold, the vessel
which lay alongside was the magnificent paddle-
steamer the City of London! Was I in a dream,
or was some enchanter practising upon me?
Why, this City of London was the very vessel
I came up in, nigh upon twenty years ago.
Could it be the same; could a ship knock
about the seas for twenty years and still
appear so young and so fresh? Time had set his
mark upon me—had scored my brow a little
with that indelible hard pencil of his; had
satisfied my youthful ambition by growing me
a beard, and now was mocking me by blanching