sionally—I believe, smokes, frequently; I
am afraid, swears occasionally. Jack is a
cosmopolite—here to-day, gone to-morrow; but
Jill is peculiar to maritime London. She nails
her colours to the mast of Ratclifie. Jill has
her good points, though she does scold a little,
and fight a little, and drink a little. She is just
what Mr. Thomas Dibdin has depicted her,
and nothing more or less. She takes care of
Jack's tobacco-box; his trousers she washes,
and his grog, too, she makes; and if he enacts
occasionally the part of a maritime Giovanni,
promising to walk in the Mall with Susan of
Deptford, and likewise with Sal, she only
upbraids him with a tear. I wish the words of
all songs had as much sense and as much
truth in them as Mr. Dibdin's have.

A hackney-coach (the very last hackney-
coach, I verily believe, in London, and the
one, moreover, which my Irish maid-of-all-
work always manages to fetch me when I send
her for a cab)—a hackney-coach, I say, jolts
by, filled inside and out! Jack is going to be
married. I don't think I am mis-stating or
exaggerating the case, when I say that the
whole party—bride, bridegroom, bridesmaids,
bridesmen, coachman and all, are considerably
the worse for liquor. Is this as it should
be? Ah Poor Jack!

And I have occasion to say, "Poor Jack!"
a good many times in the course of my
perambulations. It is my personal opinion that
Jack is robbed—that lie is seduced into
extravagance, hoodwinked into spendthrift and
dissolute habits. There is no earthly reason
why Jack should not save money out of his
wages; why he should never have a watch
without frying it; nor a five-pound note without
lighting his pipe with it. It cannot be
indispensable that he should be continually
kept " alive " with gin; that he should have
no companions save profligate women, no
amusements save low dancing saloons and
roaring taverns. The sailor has a strong
religious and moral bias. He scorns and loathes
deceit, dishonesty, and injustice, innately. He
is often a profligate, and a drunkard, and a
swearer (I will not say blasphemer), because
abominable and vicious customs make him so;
because, ill cared for on board ship, he no sooner
lands than he becomes the prey of the infamous
harpies who infest maritime London. He is
robbed by outfitters (I particularise neither
Jew nor Gentile, for there are six of one and
half-a-dozen of the other); he is robbed by the
tavern-keepers, the crimps, and the boarding-
masters. He is robbed by his associates, robbed
in business, robbed in amusement. "Jack"
is fair game to everybody.

The conductors of that admirable institution,
the Sailors' Home, I understand, are
doing their best to alleviate the evils I have
lightly, but very lightly, touched upon. Jack
is alive, but not with an unwholesome
galvanic vitality, in the Home. He is well fed,
well treated, and well cared for, generally ;
moreover, he is not wronged. The tailor who
makes his clothes, and the landlord who sells
him his beer, and the association that board
him, do not conspire to rob him. The only
shoal the managers of the Sailors' Home have
to steer clear of, is the danger of inculcating
the idea among sailors, that the institution
has anything of a gratuitous or eleemosynary
element in its construction. Sailors are
high-spirited and eminently independent in
feeling.

I have got by this time to the end of the
straggling series of broad and narrow thoroughfares,
which, under the names of East Smithfield,
St. George's Street, Upper Shadwell
Street, and Cock Hill, all form part, in the
aggregate, of Ratclifie Highway. I stand on
the threshold of the mysterious region
comprising, in its limits, Shadwell, Poplar, and
Limehouse. To my left, some two miles
distant, is Stepney, to which parish all
children born at sea are, traditionally, said to
be chargeable. No longer are there continued
streets—"blocks," as the Americans call
them—of houses. There are swampy fields
and quaggy lanes, and queer little public-
houses like ship-cuddies, transplanted bodily
from East Indiamen, and which have taken
root here. The " Cat and Fiddle " is a waterman's
house—"jolly young watermen," I am
afraid—no more. At the " Bear and Harp"—
so the placard informs me—is held the
"Master Mariners' Club." Shipbuilders'
yards start suddenly upon me—ships in full
sail bear down on me through quiet lanes:
lofty masts loom spectrally among the quiet
graves in the churchyards. In the church
yonder (where the union-jack flies at the
steeple), there are slabs commemorating the
bequests of charitable master mariners dead
years ago; of an admiral's widow, who built
an organ; of the six poor women, who are to
be yearly relieved as a thankoffering for the
release of some dead and gone Levant trader
"from captyvitie among the Turkes in
Algeeres." In the graveyards, scores of
bygone sea-captains, their wives and children,
shipwrights, ropemakers, of the olden time,
dead pursers, and ship-chandlers, sleep quietly.
They have compasses and sextants, and ships
in full sail, sculptured on their moss-grown
tombs. The wind howls no more, nor the
waves roar now for them. Gone aloft, I
hope, most of them!—though Seth Slipcheese,
the great ship-contractor, who sold terribly
weevilly biscuit, and salted horse for beef,
sleeps under that substantial brick tomb
yonder: while beneath the square stone slab
with the sculptured skull and hour-glass, old
Martin Flibuster may have his resting-place.
He was called "captain," nobody knew why; he
swore terribly; he had strange foreign trinkets
and gold doubloons hanging to his watch-
chain, and told wild stories of parboiled
Indians, and Spanish Dons, with their ears
and noses slit. What matters it now, if he
did sail with Captain Kidd, and scuttle the
"Ellen and Mary," with all hands aboard?