and but a few hours of that, to clean off the
accumulating rust which the social wheels
will gather from se'nnight to se'nnight. I
cursorily traced, lately, some of the street
features of a Sunday out. Let me devote
these present lines to Sunday on the river
and in the tea-gardens.

Waterman Number One Hundred, in which
I start from Hungerford Pier, is very full. So
crowded is it when we start, that I should be
inclined to give a flat contradiction to anybody
who told me it could possibly hold any
more; yet we seem to take in and find room
for a few dozen more at every pier. We are
(and I am delighted to see it) a mixed
assembly: swells of the most solemn description
quite barricaded from the vulgar view by
all-round collars, and elevated above meaner
mortals towards their native ether by the
highest of heeled boots, being in close proximity
to horny-handed mechanics and their
families. Soldiers, working young fellows
and their sweethearts, and boys, who have
been clubbing among themselves for cheroots
and half-pint bottles of stout, together with
that intoxicating viand, the Abernethy
biscuit, and who are bent on seeing life. I
am pleased to observe, too, that a very
large proportion of the passengers have
provided themselves with copies of the
cheap periodicals sold on the steamboat
piers. I am not disposed, seeing them read,
to be quite so critical as to the character of
the literature they are reading, as a
newspaper commissioner, or Cardinal Wiseman
I am afraid there is but little about St.
Alphonso Liguori, or Doctor Lardner on the
Steam-Engine, or Anonymous on the Measurement
of the Parabola, in these publications.
I see a good many humorous woodcuts, and
Observe sundry grins of the broadest description
pervading the countenances of the
purchasers as they read. This is bad. It is
better though, or so it appears to me, that they
should be studying a. nonsensical broadsheet
of fun, with one hundred comic cuts for one
penny, or even that they should be absorbed
by the last police-case, or elopement in high
life, than they should be beguiling their
passage down the river by shouting scurrilities
to the passengers by other boats. The Sunday
travellers had no better amusement than
that in the polished days of Mr. Ned Ward.
People were given to it even in the
soberer days when it pleased Doctor Johnson
to take a pair of scullfe at the Temple Stairs
with Mr. Boswell.

We paddle down the river in the golden
evening. The very smoke of London turns
crimson in honour of the Sunday sun, and
wraps round the blue dome of the master-
church like a king's mantle. The white
shirt-sleeves of the rowers that shoot past us;
the thousand find one masts in the pool,
dressed out with Sunday flags; the thronged
Gravesend boats, full of light bonnets and
summer muslins; the tuneful bands,the
dancing, rippling, sparkling water, looking as
though it would never have the heart to
drown a man —all these make my soul merry
within me, and give great glory to Grease,
More than this, I. have picked up a genial
companion on board. "Comes jucundus in
viâ pro vehiculo est." A merry travelling
companion is as good as a coach, says old
Tully, and my travelling friend is indeed the
representative of a coach — I have seen him
upon a coach often, I fancy ; a long coach,
painted black, with much velvet and fringe
upon it, drawn by long-tailed, long-maned
horses, also black ; and on the roof of which
my friend with some half-dozen others sit
with their legs swinging, and holding on by
the ornamented pegs, to which the black
ostrich plumes are affixed. He has those
plumes in a bag beside him now, on board
Waterman One Hundred ; and, having a red
nose, a rusty black suit, a frayed white
neckcloth, and a most humourous countenance,
is — of course —an undertaker's man. I
like him much, though that never-failing
odour of mingled mouldiness and recently
consumed spirits which distinguishes his
profession, pervades him. He is full of humour,
shrewd observation, caustic comment, and
good-humoured satire. He takes the cheeriest
view of things mundane. I should like him
steamboat to bury me. — Bump!

This last ejaculation, I humbly beg to
observe, does not in the least relate to the
mirthful philosophy of the man who does
black work. It is Waterman Number One
Hundred that bumps, not the undertaker.
I had observed for a considerable time that
our gallant craft was moving through the
water rather slowly, and made very little
way, and that we were on this side of the
Tunnel Pier, when we ought to have been at
Blackwall. I had half, in my carelessness, and
desire to impute the best motives to everybody,
assumed that the Waterman's captain
desired to give us the best possible view of
the river prospect, and therefore steamed
along gently; but the bump scatters that
theory to the winds. Have we run aground?
Have we sprung a leak? Are we to go down
as when Kempenfeldt's sword was in the
sheath, when his fingers held the pen, the
Royal George went down with twice four
hundred men? An immediate rush is made
forward, and a counter-rush aft. The engine
begins to give forth strange noises, and to
emit steam from strange places. The ladies
begin to scream and threaten fainting;
and a considerable section vehemently express
their wish and determination to "get out,"
which, there being no boat near, is
ridiculous. There is "something the matter"
with the engines. I think there is something
the matter with the engineer, whose
greasy trunk, accumbent between the deck
and the engine-room skylight, is now
visible, and who looks wrathfully, and, I am
afraid a little rumfully, at the captain. The