the house I am about, now, lightly to touch
upon as a waterside "public," inasmuch as
it is less by the waterside than on the water
itself—an hostelry permanently floating on
the muddy bosom of the Thamesian stream.
In good sooth this "public" hath its habitat
on a barge: its basement and cellar are keel
and ribs. During the week it is moored by
the muddy shore; but on Sundays it casts
anchor a good score of yards therefrom; and
the proprietor may, if he list, join in the
exulting chorus of the piratical navigator whose
bark was his bride, who was afloat, afloat!
and, being a rover, free. I will call the proprietor
Mr. Rover; for his hair is red, and he
has a jovial roving delivery and a roving eye
(one), and, according to the centilingued
Rumour, has roved a great deal in his time—
to the Antipodes once on compulsion. Mr.
Rover's bride, the Barge and Buttons, has
attained a green old age—to judge by the
rankly aqueous vegetation clinging to her
mildewed sides. For aught I or Mr. Rover
know she may have been once, as a single
barge or lady, first cousin to, if not herself the
very identical "Folly on the Thames," at
which our great-grandfathers and grandmothers
halted sometimes in their wherries on
their way to a Vauxhall masquerade. The
Barge and Buttons may have beheld the
"nice conduct of a clouded cane," the
surrounding waters may have rippled reflectively
with the dazzling brightness of Belinda's
diamonds, of the still more dazzling brightness
of Belinda's eyes. The Barge's rotten timbers
may have been mute witnesses of the humours
of Lieutenant Lismahago, of the fopperies of
Beau Tibbs, of the assurance of Ferdinand
Count Fathom, of the fashionable airs of Miss
Caroline Arabella Wilhelmina Skeggs; for
the "Folly on the Thames" was the resort of
highly fashionable company, and if bears were
danced there they were never danced but to
the very genteelest of tunes. I only hazard
this, nothing more. I am not certain.

Rover is a cunning man. Sunday, the dies
non (comparatively speaking) of the publican of
the financier (though beer can be sold in church
hours and bargains made at church doors), is
a harvest day for him. On week-days, as I
have said, his boat is on the shore; but,
hebdomadally his bark is on the sea, or rather on
the river; and, being there, Rover is
extraparochial and can sell all sorts of exciseable
commodities. So can, and do, as all men
know, the river steamboats. All sorts of
benches of magistrates, parochial and
municipal authorities, have tried to do all sorts of
things with the astute landlord; but in vain.
The Rover is free and licensed. You have,
to be sure, to pay a small augmentation of
price on the liquors you consume, owing to
the necessity of taking a wherry or a ferry
boat to put you on board the Barge and
Buttons, but what is a penny to a man who
must and will have his drink, week-day or
Sunday, fair weather or foul?

Touching Sunday I am moved to advert
here, cursorily, to a class of bibulous
philosophers who unite the wisdom of the serpent
to the subtilty of the fox, and who, drunken
dogs, as they mostly are, have been wary and
expert enough to baffle persons and powers of
no meaner note than the Houses of Lords and
Commons. These are the Sunday "dram-waiters."
The legislature has said to the
dram-waiter, "John Smith, during such and
such hours, when divine service is performed,
you shall not buy beer of Thomas Swypes."
To the publican it has said, " Swypes, you
shall not during the aforesaid hours sell any
beer to John Smith; and if you do, I, the
Law, will send my lictors or 'bobbies' after
you, and I will mulct you of golden pounds
and take away your license, and bring you
very low, and, in fact, play the devil with you."
But the "dram-waiter," wiser, subtler, and
warier than even the collective wisdom of the
nation, forthwith sets to study parochial law,
and parochial regulations. He finds, that in
one parish afternoon service begins at one
hour and in another at another, that in the
one street in the county of Middlesex, called
the Strand, there are houses that close from
two till four, from three till five, from three
till eight, from six to seven, p. m. respectively:
that some publics are extra parochial. The
"dram-waiter" will do without his Sunday
morning drink by taking as much home
over night as he wants, or he will introduce
himself surreptitiously into a "public"
with the connivance of a lawless licensed
victualler; but he is not to be balked
of his post-prandial potations. He knovs to
a moment when the Bag o'Nails opens, and
when the Elephant and Shoestrings closes.
He can roam from bar to bar, suck sweets
from every noggin, and keep himself all the
time within the strict limits of legality. He is
never hard up for a drink. He may get as
drunk as an African king between litany and
sermon, and endanger no man's license. So
much will perverted human ingenuity do.
The glutton studies Latin to be able to read
the beastly messes of Apicius in the original.
We learn to paint in order to blacken, to
write in order to libel. Heaven gives us the
talents, and somebody else their application.

But, revenons à nos Buttons. This bargetap
offers, both on week-days and Sundays,
many features of social peculiarity worthy of
entrance into the common-place book of the
philosophic observer. Analogically thinking,
I perpend that this beery vessel has many
points in common with the dark, stifling
mouldy cheese, and rancid rat, and raw
rumsmelling store-room of an emigrant ship, or
to the worst class of bar in the worst class
American steamer. This reeking smell of
bad spirits, this lowering roof, these sticky
stains of beer, this malty mildew, these
haggard or crimsoned customers—these, the
accessories more or less of almost every
public-house, but here denuded of the adventitious