Temperance Hall upon its site. Anything
rather than it should have become what it is
now. It was shut up a long time ; and I
certainly had a slight twinge of melancholy
when, passing it occasionally, I saw its doors
fast closed and bolted and barred with the
doors that had been for so many years on
the swing, and of which the paint about the
handles had been worn off by the hands of
so many good fellows who had got " comfortable "
in my house so many Monday mornings
and so many Saturday nights. At last the
Bottle of Hay was let.

The new landlord was a young beardless
man, in a coloured shirt and a wide-
awake hat. He was one of three brothers,
and they had public-houses all over London:
one at Bermondsey, one large gin-palace
somewhere over the water at a corner
where six crowded thoroughfares met; one
in a suburban neighbourhood, very new
and very improving, which was an omnibus
house; and an establishment in the City
in a dark alley down Dockway, where prime
ports and sherries were drawn from the wood,
and sold at an extraordinarily low price per
imperial quart, and white-headed old gentlemen
whose only occupation it seemed to be
to drink (I do a good deal in that way), went
to taste the prime wines and eat nuts and
cheese-crumbs. Fishtail was this new young
landlord's name, and his wide-awake hat was
a green one. No other symptom of that colour
was there in him, however, for he was as
wide awake as his hat or a detective policeman,
as cunning as a fox, as pert as a magpie,
and as avaricious as a Jew. He wasn't
above his business. He and the wide-awake
were scudding, poking, peeping, scampering
morning noon and night about the house
during its renovation (doing up, I should call
it). He began by pulling the house half
down. Then he threw the ground and first
floor into one, and filled the window with
plate glass and tremendous gilt gas burners.
Then he raised an ornamental balustrade
above the coping of the roof, and a vase above
that, and a statue of Hercules or somebody
defying something above that, and a huge
flag above all— to say nothing of a big gilt
clock surrounded with stucco cornucopias and
emblems, and which had an illuminated dial,
the letters of " B.O.T.T.L.E. O.F. H.A.Y. O."
instead of numerals, and hands like
ornamental fire shovels. Not content with this,
the second floor front middle window was
blocked up with a large gas star with V.R.
and the crown, and the rose, shamrock and
thistle, and Heaven knows what besides, all
in gas. The house was painted from top to
bottom in as gaudy colours as could be
procured, and wherever it was feasible plastered
over with compo mouldings and flourishing
ornaments. His name, Fishtail, was painted
upon almost every imaginable part of the
building, in all sorts of colours, and in letters
so big that it was almost impossible to read
them. The inside of the house was as much
transmogrified as the outside.

It was all mahogany— at least, what wasn't
mahogany, was gilt carving and ground glass,
with flourishing patterns on it. The bar was
cut up into little compartments like
pawnbroker's boxes; and there was the wholesale
entrance, and the jug and bottle department,
the retail bar, the snuggery, the private
bar, the ladies' bar, the wine and liqueur
entrance, and the lunch bar. The handles
of the taps were painted porcelain, and
green, and yellow glass. There were
mysterious glass columns, in which the bitter
ale, instead of being drawn up comfortably
from the cask in the cellar below, remained
always on view above ground to show its
clearness, and was drawn out into glasses
by a mysterious engine like an air-pump
with something wrong in its inside. There
were carved benches in the private bar,
with crimson plush cushions aerated and
elastic. There were spring duffers, working
in a tunnel in the wall, which you
were to strike with your fist to try your
muscular strength. There were machines
to test your lifting power, and a weighing
machine, and a lung- testing machine, or
"vital power determinator." There were
plates full of nasty compounds of chips,
sawdust, and grits, called Scotch bannocks, which
were to be eaten with butter, and washed
down by the Gregarach Staggering old Claymore
or Doch an' Dorroch ale; but which
never should have shown its face in my old
house, I warrant you. There were sausages,
fried in a peculiar manner, with barbecued
parsley, and a huge, brazen sausage chest,
supported on two elephants, with a furnace
beneath, from which sausages and potatoes
were served out hot and hot all day long.
There were sandwiches cut into strange
devices; and cakes and tarts that nobody ever
heard of before; and drinks and mixtures
concocted that, in my day, would have brought
the exciseman about a landlord pretty soon, I
can assure you. The soda-water bottles had
spiral necks like glass corkscrews, and zig-zag
labels. The ginger-beer was all colours—
blue, green, and violet. Every inch of the
walls that was not be-plastered with
ornaments and gilding, or bedizened with gilt
announcements of splendid ales and unrivalled
quadruple stouts I never heard of, was
covered with ridiculously gaudy-coloured
prints, puffing the "Cead Mille Failthe
Whiskey," the "Phthsis Curing Bottled Beer,"
recommended by the entire faculty; the
Imperial Kartoffelnsfell-hopfbrunnen Waters
bottled at the celebrated mineral springs of
Kartoffelnsfell, under the immediate
superintendence of the Kartoffelnsfell Government,
all of which were to be had in splendid
condition, and for which J. Fishtail was the sole
agent. This was a nice beginning. But the
worst was to come. The house was opened,
and J. Fishtail was as busy as a bee with an