suggestion, when his youngest hope inquired,
innocently, "I say, pup, what's Greenwich?"
Hail, required clue! Mr. C. forebore
to mention that Greenwich was the
home of whitebait; for, in the first place,
the season was over; and in the second
place, the introduction to the mysteries
is costly and not sufficiently appreciable
—at the price—by small birds under
fourteen years of age. But Mr. Chaffinch
dilated with such eloquence on the
glories of the hospital, the pensioners,
and the park, pictured so skilfully the
delights of the passage down the river,
climaxed so admirably with a hint at a
meat-tea to be procured from a hospitable
relative resident in the neighbourhood—
that the boys shouted for Greenwich with
one voice, and the parental Chaffinch saw
his way to giving them a successful treat
at a moderate expense.

Mr. Chaffinch found himself, during the
voyage down, fearfully and wonderfully
like Mr. Barlow as he pointed out (to
Sandford and Merton) the Monument, the
Custom House, the Tower, Execution Dock,
and other riverside objects of interest, and
answered, as he best might, the questions
with which S. and M. plied him.
Chaffinch and party landed at Greenwich, and
passed the Ship, where one melancholy
waiter was yawning at the upper
windows, and where a man was dining off
hot boiled beef—fancy hot boiled beef at
Greenwich!—in the coffee-room. They
noticed the lump of red granite, which,
erected as a memorial of Lieutenant Bellot,
does greater credit to British gratitude than
to British taste; they inspected the
Hospital, the Painted Hall with its pictures of
sea-fights and its wonderful portraits of
wonderful admirals; they peered in at the
glass case containing Nelson's coat and
waistcoat; and they went away happy.
Then they adjourned to the Park, and did
the pensioners: who returned the compliment
by doing them (out of a shilling) for
looking through their telescopes, and who
greatly gratified Mr. Chaffinch's youngest
hope by showing him the exact spot on
which the parental mansion, Number Four,
Adalbert Villas, Dagmar-road, Canonbury,
N., was situated. After declining to run
more than once up and down One Tree Hill,
holding a hand of each of the boys—an
athletic proceeding for which his figure is
scarcely suitable—and after failing to
catch and receiving many stinging cuts from
a ball which the boys had brought with them
—Mr. Chaffinch began to be rather bored
by the boys. You see they had been more
than three weeks at home, and the small
family circle had exhausted most of the
topics of conversation possessing common
interest, and Mr. Chaffinch was beginning
to feel that he had not done proper justice
to that priggish era, when, under similar
circumstances, he could have bade his
offspring, in sonorous sentences, to retire and
leave him to his own meditations; when the
triumvirate fortunately came across three
young gentlemen (sons of the meat-tea
relative before alluded to), in whose
company the youthful Chaffinches most
willingly remained.

The meat-tea relative though hospitable
is not amusing, and Mr. Chaffinch thought
he should be better by himself, but was very
much put to it for something to do during
two hours. The town of Greenwich one
would think the nastiest in the world unless
one had seen Deptford, its neighbour; it
occurs to its streets to be perpetually under
repair, and it has a floating population of
’longshore loafers, river scum, and navvies.
Mr. Chaffinch made his way down to the
pier, looked at the boats coming and
going, had half a mind to walk into the
Ship and see what kind of monstrous fish
they would offer him as whitebait, had an
idea of crossing by the ferry-steamer and
penetrating into the Isle of Dogs, when
suddenly, looking up stream, he caught
sight of the Dreadnought, the hospital
ship for sailors, belonging to the Seamen's
Hospital Society, which he had often heard
of but had never seen. This decided him;
he hailed a boat, and five minutes
afterwards stepped on the deck of the
Dreadnought.

A big line-of-battle ship, formerly the
Caledonia, and carrying one hundred and
twenty guns, but now named the
Dreadnought, after her immediate predecessor
(the first floating hospital-ship was called
the Grampus, was a small fifty-gun craft,
and was moored off Greenwich in 1821),
with her ports open, but filled, instead of
with grim, black gun-muzzles, with the
pale faces and light-capped heads of
convalescent patients. The upper deck, white
and bare, and with the exception of a jury-
mast quite devoid of rigging. Mr.
Chaffinch waited there looking round him while
some one fetched the resident medical
officer: a courteous gentleman, under
whose guidance he made the tour of the
ship, and from whom he received all
necessary information.

Mr. Chaffinch and his guide first
descended to the main-deck, where are, the
chapel, elaborately fitted up with carved