famous sculler, from Execution Dock, for a
matter of two hundred pounds. On the
evening of the payment of the last deposit
(made good at Thwaits's, the trim-built
wherry, Fishgaff stairs) it so fell out that Jibb
and Rollocks, quarrelling as to who fouled
whom in some previous match, Jibb broke
both Rollocks's shins with an oar; which,
coupled with his getting exceedingly inebriated
that night and sleeping in a six-oared
cutter half full of water, brought on lameness
and rheumatism, broke off the match (Jibb
paid forfeit), and moved Hollocks to retire
into the public line. He is a damp mildewed
man, now, with bow legs and very long arms;
to exhibit the symmetry and muscle of which
he is, seemingly, much addicted—if one may
judge from his shirt-sleeves being always
rolled up to his armpit.

Rollocks has, behind his bar, the silver
cups he has won during his aquatic career;
his Doggett's Coat and Badge, with his
portrait wearing ditto; the silver oar presented to
him by the Barge Club (Viscount Billingsgate,
chairman), the mahogany model of his wager
boat, and a neat collection of oars and sculls
of various shapes and dimensions. Likewise
the identical cushion on which Her Mellifluous
Highness the Grand Duchess Dowager of
Kartoffelshausen-Stoubenfeldt sat when he,
Rollocks, had the honour to row her from
Vauxhall to Whitehall stairs, during the visit
of the Allied Sovereigns to England in 1815.
Rollocks's parlour is decorated with various
coloured engravings of crack scullers in crack
wager boats, all bearing (the boats I mean) in
their sharp-nosedness, slim-shapedness, and
eager straining attitudes, a certain curious,
inanimate, yet striking resemblance to so
many race-horses, winning memorable Derbys.
There is a screen before the fire, on which are
pasted sundry pictorial illustrations of the
songs of Mr. Thomas Dibdin; notably Jolly
Dick the lamplighter, in a full curled wig,
lighting a large lamp with an enormous flambeau,
in so jaunty a manner, that his tumbling
off his ladder seems an event anything but
problematical of occurrence.

When a rowing match is on the tapis—or,
more appropriately, on the water—the parlour
of the Tom Tug's Head is scarcely large
enough to contain the eager crowd of
freshwater sportsmen, watermen, bargees, backers,
and amateurs in aquatics. On these
occasions it is by no means unfrequent to see
the happy class of society, known among the
commonalty as "swells," muster strongly
within Rolloeks's damp walls. The alumni
of the two great seats of Academic education
are here in great numbers, their costumes
presenting a sumptuary medley, in which the
fashions of the wild beast menagerie mingle
with those of the stable. At present, they
come to Rollocks's (which is close to Hook's,
the great boat builder); they drink out of his
pots and clap him on tlie back, and are
hail-fellows well met with the decayed
tapsters and discarded serving-men; the river
weeds, and slime, and scum. They meet here,
not because they like it, but because some of
their associates who have been two terms
longer than they have at "Keys," or
"Maudlin," say that it is very "jolly" to go
to old Rollocks's "crib," that it is  life, my
boy," that it is "the thing," and so on.

Apart from the parlour of the Tom Tug's
Head connected with aquatics as a sport, I
must enumerate a miscellaneous population
who are of the water and watery, though
they run no races and win no cups. Here by
night smoke their pipes and drink their grog
captains of river steamboats: silent, reserved
men, mostly, lost in fogs of fluvial metaphysics,
perhaps; or forming mental charts of
shoals in the river yet undiscovered. These
aquatic omnibus-drivers, if I may call them
so, puzzle and disconcert me mightily. 'They
are inscrutably mysterious. Where do they
live? What were they before the steamboats
were started? Do their wives (if they have
wives) call themselves Mrs. Captain So and
So? Are the call-boys their sons? Have
they studied steam? Could they stoke?
Would they be sea-sick if they were to go to
sea? They are nautical men, yet why do
they always wear frock coats, round hats and
half-boots? When shall we see a Citizen
captain in a cocked hat?

Not so much parlour customers, but chiefly
frequenters of the bar, or hangers about the
door and muddy bridge, are knots of damp,
silent, deep-drinking men, surrounding whom
there is a halo of deep and fearful interest.
I know what they wear those huge leathern
aprons and thigh boots for. I know why
they carry at times that weird apparatus of
hooks and cordage. I know what lies
sometimes in the long, low, slimy shed at the
bottom of the garden, with a padlock on the
door, blue, swollen, stiff, stark, dead! These
be the searchers of the river, the finders of
horrors, the coroner's purveyors, the beadle's
informants, the marine store-keeper's
customers. When a man is no longer a man,
but a body, and drowned, these seek and find
him. The neighbouring brokers' stalls and
rag-shops have dead men's boots and dead
men's coats exposed for sale. These men are
quiet, civil, sober men enough, and passing
honest oiity there never was a drowned man
found with any money in his pockets.

Homogeneous to the bar and purlieus of
the Tom Tug's Head are casual
half-pint-of-porter customers, mudlarks, sewer gropers,
ratcatchers, finders, river thieves, steamboat
touters, waterside beggars, waterside thieves,
I am afraid, sometimes. They pick up a
living, nobody knows how, out of the mud and
soppy timbers, as men will pick lip livings
from every refuse; as a teeming population
and an advanced civilization only can have
such livings to be picked up.

I don't know whether I am justified—
before coming to Powder Dick—in describing