tedness! He sets his big silver watch at
every church, and dusts his boots with an
undoubted bandanna. He has an appointment,
doubtless, at Garraway's or the Jerusalem
Coffee House, with his owner or broker.

A gush of fish, stale and fresh, stretches
across Thames Street as I near Billingsgate
market. I turn aside for a moment, and enter
the market. Business is over; and the male
and female purveyors of the treasures of the
deep solace themselves with pipes and jovial
converse.

Jack is getting more lively all through
Thames Street and Tower Street, and is
alarmingly vital when I emerge on Tower
Hill. A row of foreign mariners pass me,
seven abreast: swarthy, ear-ringed, black-
bearded varlets in red shirts, light-blue
trousers, and with sashes round their waists.
Part of the crew of a Sardinian brig,
probably. They have all their arms round each
other's necks; yet I cannot help thinking that
they look somewhat " knifey," " stilettoey." I
hope I may be mistaken, but I am afraid that
it would be odds were you to put an indefinite
quantity of rum into them, they would put a
few inches of steel into you.

But I enter the Tower postern, and am in
another London—the military metropolis—at
once. Very curious and wonderful are these
old grey towers, these crumbling walls, these
rotting portcullises, so close to the business-
like brick-and-mortar of St. Katherine's Dock
House hard by. What has the Devilin Tower,
the " Scavenger's Daughter," the " Stone
Kitchen," to do with wholesale grocers, ship-
chandlers, and outfitting warehouses ? Is
there not something jarring, discordant, in
that grim, four-turreted old fortalice, frowning
on the quiet corn and coal-carrying
vessels in the pool? What do the "thousand
years of war " so close to the " thousand
years of peace ? " Is not the whole
sombre, lowering old pile, a huge
anachronism ? Julius Cæsar, William the Third,
and the Docks! Wharves covered with
tubs of peaceful palm-oil, and dusky soldiers
sauntering on narrow platforms, from whence
the black mouths of honeycombed old
guns grin (toothless, haply) into peaceful
dwelling-houses. The dried-up moat, the old
rooms, wall-inscribed with the overflowings
of weary hearts; the weazen-faced old
warders, with their strange, gone-by costume;
the dinted armour, and rusted headman's axe;
all tell—with the vacant space on the Green,
where the four posts of the scaffold stood,
and the shabby little church, where lie
Derwentwater and Lovat, Anne Boleyn and
Northumberland, the innocent and the guilty,
the dupers and the duped—of things that
have been, thank God!

I pass a lane where the soldiers live (why
should their wives necessarily be slatterns,
their children dirty, and they themselves
alternately in a state of shirt-sleeves, beer
and tobacco, or one of pipe- clay, red blanketing,
and mechanical stolidity, I wonder?) and
ask an artilleryman on guard where a door of
egress is to be found. He " dwoan't know:"
of course not. Soldiers never do know. It
isn't in the articles of war, or the Queen's
regulations. Still, I think my friend in the
blue coat, and with the shaving-brush stuck
at the top of his shako, would be rather more
useful in guarding a fortress, if he knew the
way into and the way out of it.

Patience, " trying back," and the expenditure
of five minutes, at last bring me out by
another postern, leading on to Tower Hill the
less, East Smithfield, St. Katherine's Docks,
and the Mint; very nearly opposite is a
narrow street, where a four-oared cutter, in
the middle of the pavement, in progress of
receiving an outer coat of tar and an inner
one of green paint, suggests to me that Jack
is decidedly alive in this vicinity; while,
closely adjacent, a monster "union jack,"
sloping from the first-floor window of an
unpretending little house, announces the
whereabouts of the "Royal Naval Rendezvous."
You have perhaps heard of it more frequently
as the house of reception for the " Tower
Tender." The Rendezvous, and the Tender
too, had a jovial season of it in the war time,
when the press was hot, and civilians were
converted into " volunteers " for the naval
service, by rough compulsion. The
neighbourhood swarmed with little " publics,"
embellished with cartoons of the beatified
state of Jack, when alive in the navy. Jack
was continually drinking grog with the port
admiral, or executing hornpipes with the first
lieutenant. The only labour imposed on him
(pictorially) was the slaying half-a-dozen.
Frenchmen occasionally before breakfast; for
which a grateful country rewarded him with
hecatombs of dollars. At home, he was
represented frying gold watches, and lighting
pipes with five pound notes. Love, liquor,
and glory! King and country! Magnificent
bounty, &c., &c., &c. But the picture has
two sides; for Jack hung back sometimes,
preferring to fry watches in the merchant
service. A grateful country pressed him.
He ran away from captivity; a grateful
country flogged him. He mutinied; a grateful
country hanged him. Whether it was
the flogging, or the hanging, or the scurvy,
or the French bullets, or the prisons at
Verdun and Brest, I won't be certain; but
Jack became at last quite a scarce article.
So the Royal Naval Rendezvous, and the
Tower Tender were obliged to content
themselves with the sweepings of the prisons—
thieves, forgers, murderers, and the like.
These even grew scarce; and a grateful
country pressed everybody she could lay her
hands on. " Food for powder " was wanted
—" mortal men " good enough to " fill a pit,"
must be had. Quiet citizens, cripples, old men
were pressed. Apprentices showed their
indentures, citizens their freedom, in vain.
Britannia must have men. People would