he called his "port-money." He'd better
have looked to his port wine. He shut his
house up all day Sunday, and actually tried
to put his pot-boy into a white neckcloth;
but he being a pot-boy that knew his
business, and wasn't above it, told him plainly
that he wasn't used to it, and that he had
better look out for another young man.

His bar, instead of being covered with
the decent piles of halfpence and trays
full of silver, that a right-minded publican
loves to accumulate towards Saturday, was
tricked out with all sorts of bulbs and
roots, and trumpery— nasturtiums,
heliotropes, ranunculuses, and the like; and there
wasn't an Italian image-man out of Leather
Lane that came in to take a drop but he'd
buy a Venus, or a Jenny Lind, or a Holy
Family of; and these he'd stick up on
gimcrack brackets under his tubs, and ask me
with a simpering grin if I didn't think it
classical? Classical! What business has a
licensed victualler with the classics? I could
not stand this; I turned to Pruffwell (this
was the classical gentleman's name), and said
I to him— " Mr. Pruffwell, it's my belief that
you're not acting becoming. If you're a
landlord, say so; if you're not, the sooner
you say so, or go out of the business, the
better;" and thereupon I paid for what I
had had and walked out. He said I was an
old fool; but Mr. Batts, of Liquorpond Street,
and Mr. Crapper, of Gray's Inn Lane, and
little Shoulderblade, the sheriff's officer— all
respectable warm men, who used the house—
went out with me, and all said I had done
the thing that was right. I never set my foot
in Pruffwell's house again till he left it; but
I heard that he went on from bad to worse
afterwards: that he took a wife who was all
curls and conceit, and was nervous and
musical, bless us; and that the choruses at
the Wednesday Evening Free and Easy in the
tap-room used to be drowned by Madam's
piano-forte up-stairs jangling such variations
upon Auld Robin Gray that his mother
would'nt have known him. At last he got a
fellow with long hair and spectacles, and a
turn-down collar, and a tuft, to lecture upon
the " Od force," and " Things not Seen," or
things never heard of in his coffee-room; and
another (in a cloak and more spectacles, green
this time) to demonstrate the " theory of the
earth's movement," with a piece of string, a
copper disc, like the bottom of a stew-pan
knocked out, and an old clock dial-plate. He
couldn't demonstrate it, it seemed, without
a great deal of gin and water first, and turning
off the gas afterwards; and there were
two great coats and seven spoons missing the
next morning. When I heard Pruffwell was
countenancing such proceedings as these, I
thought he was coming to a bad end; and,
sure enough, to a very bad one he came
shortly afterwards. He got into some scrape
about defrauding the gas company out of
their dues, falsifying the meter and tapping
the main himself ; but somehow he was too
clever, and the gas got into the gin, and the
water into that, and the sewer into that ; and
the gas company came in and tore up the
flooring, and spoilt the beer-engines, and sued
him dreadfully. He ran away very quickly
did Mr. Pruffwell after this, Albert chain, port-
money, and all. I did hear that he went to
America, where he turned schoolmaster,
lecturer, and got into some trouble about the
notes of a bank that had stopped payment ;
and, besides that, Mrs. Pruffwell was not
Mrs. Pruffwell after all, and after P.'s
disappearance had taken to drinking shockingly.

All this while the Bottle of Hay was
becoming dingier and dingier, and more
dilapidated in appearance every day. The
pots had lost their brightness, and the pewter-
covered bar counter, which should have been
clean and glistening, became stained and
discoloured with sticky rings of treacly porter.
When the handles of the taps got loose and
unscrewed they were never replaced; the
glasses lost half their feet, and the pewter
measures half their capacity of containing by
dinting and battering. The letters and
numbers wore off the gin tubs; the till contained
nothing but broken tobacco pipes, and pock-
marked, defaced, advertisement-branded and
perforated halfpence, which even the neediest
of the customers had indignantly refused;
and little Ruggs, the tipstaff of the Sheriff's
Court, now pretty nearly the only regular
customer that remained, declared that really
he must use some other house, for that on
three separate days the Bottle of Hay had
been out of gin and bitters. The harp, piano,
and violin that used to come regularly every
Saturday night and give a musical performance
in front of the door, removed to the
Coach and Horses up the lane; and really if
it had not been for the sign, and the old
portrait of myself in the coffee-room (kitcat,
half length, three-quarter face, representing
me with my hand in my waistcoat, backed by
a crimson velvet curtain and a Grecian column,
and flanked by an inkstand, a hat and gloves,
four books and an orange cut in halves) I
really should not have recognised my old
house, where I had worked hard for so many
years, and realised such a neat little bit of
property. Then the sheriff came in with his
levy and his men in possession; and for a
week or so what little beer was required was
drawn by hooked-nosed men of the Israelitish
persuasion. Then they hung the carpets out
of the window, and had a sale; and three
weeks afterwards I recognised my old
armchair, bar-flap and beer-engine at a secondhand
shop in Brokers' Row, Long Acre,
higgledy-piggledy with tin tea canisters, sham
bookshelves, dummy chemists' drawers,
bandy-legged counting-house desks and empty
jars, labelled ''tamarinds" and "leeches."

I wish they had pulled down my old house
after this. I wish they had built a Methodist
Chapel, or Baths and Washhouses, or a