concomitants of light and glitter and gilding,
stand forth in hideous and undisguised relief.
They mean drink and drunkenness without
excuse or extenuation; the cup that inebriates
and does not cheer; the bowl that is
wreathed with no flowers of soul, but with
the crass dockweeds of intemperance. Bacchus
is dismounted here, and lies wallowing in the
thwarts of a bumboat. Sir John Barleycorn
staggers about disknighted, with his spurs
hacked off his heels. It is convivial life, but
life seen in a Claude Lorraine glass, and that
glass a pothouse rummer blackened with the
smoke of a pipe of mundungus.

"Love levels ranks," Lord Grizzle says,
but intemperance has pre-eminently the
power of levelling and confounding ranks and
ages and sexes, and species even. And thus
it happens that from so levelling a system,
there will result a terrible sameness of feature
and expression, of habit, manner and custom;
even as drill makes ploughboys, mechanics,
and vagabonds all machines, as similar to
each other as the sequent spikes in an area
railway; even as slavery makes all negroes
alike as one parched pea to another; even
as judicious flogging will train a pack of
hounds to run and cry and stop as one dog.
Tyranny is most potent for exacting and
maintaining conformity; and there is no
tyranny so strong as that of the King of
drink, no conformity so abject and so universal
as that of drunkards. "Which must be
my excuse, gentles, if I find no very novel
characters among the bibbers at the Barge
and Buttons.

Stay! one, a man; nay, half a man;
nay, a quarter man; nay, less than that, a
trunk a drunken trunk. As I live, a miserable
little atomy, more deformed, more diminutive,
more mutilated than any beggar in a
bowl, any cul-de-jatte, than that famed
Centaur-beggar who, as Charles Lamb phrased it,
appeared to have had his equestrian half hewn
off in some dire Lapithsean conflict. This
wondrous abortion's name, if he have a name, is
doubtful. Men call him "Powder Dick,"
whether in remembrance of some terrible
Dartford or Hounslow explosion, by which
his limbs were (supposititiously) blown off, or
because his chest and face are ceaselessly
covered with the black powdery refuse of
coal barges, or because he was so actually
baptised, who can say? Powder Dick he has
been for years: blasted, blown up, crushed,
torn up, or amputated he must have been at
one time or another; but he cares not to say,
and no man cares to ask him; for, though an
atomy, he blasphemes like an imp of Acheron,
and though he cannot fight he can bite and
spit, and with one maimed arm his accidents
have left him, hurl pewter pots, and broken
glasses, and hot tobacco ash, with unerring
aim. His occupation is that of a ferryman;
and he ferries tares 'cross river from six in
the morning till nine in Iho evening all the
year round.

Not, of course, that he rows himself. He
sits at the stern of the boat like a hideous
pagod, and steers, swearing meanwhile, and
craunchiug a, monstrous plug of tobacco, in
the manner of a wild beast over a shin-bone
of beef. His wife plies the oars— a tall, bony,
ay, and a strong-boned woman—quick of
action, quicker of imprecation and vituperation,
who on a disputed copper would not
scruple to paint your eyes as black as Erebus
with the tire out. She is called Mrs. Dick,
but whether that be her right name, or she
have her "marriage lines" to prove her legitimate
connection with Mr. Dick, I should
advise you not to be too curious in inquiring.
She is communicative, however, when
unruffled. "My fust," she vouchsafed to tell
your correspondent, "was a life-guardsman,
and I kep him, for he carried on dreadful, and
his pay wouldn't a kep him in blacking. My
second was a navvy, and I kep him. So then
I took up along with Powder Dick, here, and,
rabbit him, I amost keeps him; for though
the boat is his hown, and the hoars hare his
hown, my harms is my hown, and they keeps
us all afloat. A penny, please, sir."

Every evening at nine Mrs. Dick marches
into the bar of the Barge and Buttons with
Powder Dick, pickaback; which mode of
conveyance she adopts and he acquiesces in
with the utmost coolness and complacency.
Powder Dick is then set up on end in a corner
of the bar, propped up by emptied measures;
and there he remains, on end, guzzling fiery
compounds, and roaring forth wicked songs,
till his wicked old trunk is suffused with
drink to the very stumps, and he tumbles or
rolls on to the floor, at which period of time
his wife, who has been drinking rum and
porter mixed all the evening, with an
inflexible countenance raises him, replaces him
in the pickaback posture, and so exit with
him towards that unknown slum of the
purlieus of Lambeth, which may contain his
home—if he have a home—or den.

Powder Dick has engrossed so much of
my space, has caused me to digress in what is
itself but a long digression, because I consider
him to be in some measure not only an original
but a meritorious deformity—most cul-de-jattes
contenting themselves with existing
upon charity—wheeling themselves about on
small trucks like cockhorses; sitting on
kerbstones with rude oil paintings spread
before them, pictorially explaining how they
came by their mutilation; being conveyed
about as riders to perambulating organs; or
simply crouching on the cellar flaps of public-houses,
holding hats in their mouths much in
the fashion of poodle dogs, with an associate
(unmutilated) posted close handy to give
timely intimation of the approach of the
police. But Powder Dick, inasmuch as
he is the owner and exploiter of a flourishing
ferry-boat (albeit the feme coverte, his wife,
rows it), inasmuch as lie makes an honest
living and gets drunk on his proper earnings,