London Bridge, would save many minutes if he
went by water instead of driving, and there
seems to be a link wanting between the express
steamers and the carriage-driving and cab-riding
public. The literature and the refreshment
sold on board confirm my views. The
illustrated and facetious broad-sheet belongs to
a bygone time, and speaks to even a lower
order of intelligence than our penny comic
periodicals appeal to now. The pictorial Police
News, with fancy woodcuts of the latest
murderer disembowelling his victim, and of the
latest murderer but one swinging on the gallows
(the evil man's moustache and features being
quite visible through the white cap), is not an
intellectual form of literary solace; and though
the boy shouts astutely "with portraits of the
gallows for the last time, through 'angings
goin' to be done in private," he meets with
as little encouragement as the vendor of oranges
and almond paste. The young men and boys
on board, who remind one somehow of a
third-rate theatre, have an air of truant playing,
and such of them as have parcels put
them under the seats to place hands in pockets
and patrol the deck unconcernedly. Looking
about among the passengers, we also
notice clerks, old and young, aged nondescripts,
whose garments bear the traces of many years'
conflict with a greasy and cloth-staining world,
and a few idlers who gaze critically on the
Thames Embankment, and call it "a tidy bit of
work," as if it were a composition in Berlin
wool, and remind each other how long they
"said it would be about, when it was fust
begun." But no one on board seems of sufficient
importance to himself and to the world
to make his time valuable, and we land at All
Hallows' pier, with a troubled conviction that
we have not made out why the classes who are
at once busy and prosperous do not avail
themselves of the steamers of the Thames.

Through cavernous passages which, though
open at the top, are dungeon-like in their blank
high walls; past the quaint old tavern, where
"warm" sea-faring men and hard traders take
their half-pints of heady port from the wood,
with "morsels"—say a six-inch cube—of cheese
at eleven in the day; past, too, its antithesis, the
large-windowed café of the Italian confectioner
who sells hot maccaroni, sweetmeats, cheap wine,
and light dishes of eggs, and grease, and salad,
and who seems to have transported his
establishment bodily from one of the quays of Genoa
or Leghorn to Thames-street, E.C.; we arrive
at our destination and find the Tower straight
ahead of us, but hidden by bulging
warehouses, and bales, and cranes. The shops
around have the distinctive marks of the
district, and the trade taste and decoration
savour strongly of realism. Thus, every
fish-dealer seems to sell cod-liver oil, and
rows upon rows of bottles of bright golden
liquid fringe and border the bodies of the huge
cod themselves. Unpleasant looking toads,
lizards, and puny crocodiles swing in boltles
from one warehouse door; and a poetical
publican, who declines to rival his dry-goods neighbour
by selling tea, winds up a distich to that
effect, with—

      Nor deal in goods sold by my grocer-brother,
      But live in harmony with one another.

Going round by Tower Dock, the dryness of
which is relieved by a couple of taverns in near
contiguity, we see precisely the same string
of listless ragged figures we left here yesterday.
Forlorn, weary, wretched, they seem to have
neither washed nor slept nor moved since that
time. "Labourers-on-the-look-out-for-a-job,
would-you-give-a-poor-man-out-o'-work-the-
price-of-a-crust-of-bread-master?" (all in one
word) is the answer of the nearest of them to our
question as to why they are there and for what
they are waiting. We incautiously give the
poor man out of luck the price of a crust of
bread, and at once find ourselves a centre of
attraction to an unsavoury crowd. Faces so
seamy, unkempt, unshorn, and fierce, that it is
difficult to think of them as ever having been
babies, or ought else unrepulsive and human,
cluster round and plead roughly for help.
"There has been no work to get latterly, times
are so bad and hard, and won't we give 'em what
we've given the other man, who hasn't a family,
so help them, he hasn't, and had a job, too,
the day before yesterday." Not a pleasant
introduction to sight-seeing, this hoard of hungry
desperate men; and distributing some small
money, we pass through a sentry-guarded gate
to the right, and stand face to face with a little
knot of town beef-eaters with a considerable
sense of relief.

" 'Beefeaters,' if you like to call us so, of
course," said the fine old veteran we struck up
a friendship with upon the instant; "and
beefeaters I believe we're mostly known as among
the commoner sort o' people. But 'Warders of
the Tower,' " drawing himself up an inch or
two, "is our proper title, and our uniform is
the same as the Yeomen of the Guard at St.
James's, who walk next before the Queen when
she opens parliament in state and has her eight
cream-coloured horses out. Not this thing;
this is only our working everyday dress, but a
coat of all scarlet covered with gold, very
handsome and expensive. We're all old soldiers
who've never bin tried by court-martial. I was
sergeant in the 9th Lancers myself, and well
remember Sir Hope Grant joining us in Glasgow,
when he was a mere boy, in 1826. Got on
wonderfully since then, hasn't he, sir? So
young, you see, to be in his position; but he
were always a kind, good man to the soldiers,
and every one of 'em was glad when he was
promoted up and up as he has been. The
great Duke of Wellington appointed me here
four-and-twenty years ago, when he was
Constable of the Tower, and it is a comfortable
little thing enough, added to one's pension,
though it wouldn't do without that. No, sir,
we don't all have apartments found us. There's
a certain amount of accommodation for the
warders, and as one set of rooms gets vacant