dessert from that bower wherein a pretty girl
passes her life engaged in the dispensation of
such luxuries; several are perpetually clattering
down into the kitchens, and returning
laden with different courses, all set out in
order for the particular room the waiter attached
to which is in attendance to receive
them. The same order and regularity which
pervades the rest of the establishment is brought
to play upon the waiters; to each man the plate
given out is counted and entered on a record;
each has his own particular cutlery and glass;
each is accountable for everything supplied to
him; each has, as the first instalment of his
day's labour, to cut up a huge brown loaf into
that timber-yard arrangement of delicious slices,
without which no Greenwich dinner would be
complete. Added to this, on every floor in the
secret recesses unexplored by the general public,
hangs a written code of laws and a table of fines
applicable to waiters' irregularities. At the
Greenwich houses the majority of the waiters
will be found to be foreigners, and they are
mostly sons of German innkeepers, many of
them men of worldly position, who have come
over here to acquire a knowledge of their business,
and an insight into the ways of the world.
The head waiter at such a house as the Vessel is
a superior man; at large dinners he draws a
regular sketch of the table, which is generally in
horse-shoe form, and on an average holds thirtyfive
dishes, seventeen on either side, and a huge
centre-piece before the chairman; he arranges
them artistically, and can in an instant denote the
exact place of any dish. The daily list of eatables
is prepared each morning by the superintendent
(one of the partners), and nearly every article
is purchased in Greenwich. Some of the fish is
purchased in Billingsgate, but most comes from
two local fishmongers, who each morning supply
a priced tariff of what they have to offer. The
meat and nearly all the vegetables are purchased
in the neighbourhood, and with such exactness
are the Vessel's books kept, that the precise
amount spent in lucifer matches during the
season is entered, and figures with other equally
small items in the grand total of the partnership
account. What these accounts must be, for fish
alone, may be guessed, when it is recorded here
that between the 1st of April and the 30th of
September, there is an average consumption of
thirty-five thousand flounders.

Whitebait, without which there would be no
Vessel, and in the minds of a great many people
no Greenwich—whitebait, which Theodore Hook
called "curl-papers fried in batter," which most
people sneer at as nothing, and which everybody
eats with delight— are caught where the water is
a little brackish, generally between Barking and
Greenhithe, with a net thirty feet long and
twelve feet wide. This net is cast always in
daylight, either at high or low water, and remains
two feet below the surface until nearly
the ebb or flood, as the case may be. At the
commencement of the spring whitebait first
appear, but not in large quantities, as these are
old fish who escaped the last year's netting;
about the middle of April the young fry, perfectly
transparent, arrive, and in the first week
in May come to perfection. So it continues
for a couple of months, then gradually whitebait
get larger and larger, and about the close oif
September are lost sight of altogether. There
is a speciality for dressing "bait," and the
fisherman who, assisted by his son, for upwards
of a score of years has supplied the Vessel, not
only catches the whitebait but cooks them.
On a glowing coke fire is placed a large frying-pan
full of boiling lard; the fish, first thoroughly
rolled in flour, are placed in a cloth, which is
plunged into the hissing fat. The cook, a perfect
Salamander, utterly impervious to the
frightful heat which makes strangers wink and
beat a hasty retreat, takes the handle of the
frying-pan and turns it from right to left, peering
in at the seething mass. In two minutes
the cooking is accomplished, and the fish are
emptied out of the cloth on to a dish. Ye who
would taste your bait in perfection, get permission
to eat it in the kitchen! Salmon come
from the banks of the Severn and Tweed, soles
from Texel and Torbay, whiting and mackerel
from the South Coast, smelts from the Medvvay,
turbots from Dover, eels and flounders from the
Thames, perch and crayfish from Oxford, lobsters
from the coast of Norway, trout principally from
Loch Leven, red mullet from the Channel Islands.

Let us take another example of Pleasure, and
learn something more of the Business by which
it exists. A theatre would not be a bad specimen,
or a music-hall, or a supper establishment,
with a large assemblage of customers with tastes
ranging from high patrician to low plebeian.
Here is a place combining the qualifications of
all these—CREMORNE GARDENS. So quietly,
orderly, and well is this place conducted, and
with such sensible regard to the interest of
its frequenters (who, by the way, are of all
classes, ranging from old women and children
who come for an early tea and a stroll in the
grounds, who are possessed with wild desires to
see the dogs and monkeys, and listen to the band,
down to gentlemanly gentlemen who eat suppers,
and are far too grand to express their desire to
see anything at all), that, by its non-frequenters
and by a huge class of amiable people who look
upon any amusement as emanating from Moloch
and beckoning towards the gallows, it would
never be heard of, were it not for the practical wit
of certain exquisite humorists, who annually
mark certain festive days in London's calendar
by breaking the proprietor's glasses and
the waiters' heads. This amiable class may
perchance be strong in its notions of the diffusion
of capital and the employment of labour;
it may be always publishing pamphlets in which
these subjects are paraded, in which it is clearly
proved that this wretched country is on its
way to destruction, and that the sooner every
person with natural strength or mechanical knowledge
is on his way to some hitherto unheard-of
land— there to set up that log-hut, and to ply that
axe which have stood the poetasters in such good
stead—the better for himself and for society.