may almost be considered in the light of a
Mister Biffin, working as he does, though
so horribly foreshortened.

I knew another meritorious deformity once
(he is dead now), who positively became
independent through his deformed industry,
coupled with ingenuity. This worthy, being
born endowed with qualities combining
ignorance the most crass and most persistent,
with idleness the most steadfast and
persevering, is reported (I speak from report,
for I knew him not in his perfect manhood)
to have wilfully cast himself three separate
times beneath the wheels of three separate
carriages belonging to the nobility and
gentry. Three mutilations of the most
appalling nature, obtained from the charitable
and wealthy occupants of the carriages three
separate though trifling annuities, amounting
in the aggregate to twenty-eight pounds a
year. I believe he enacted the part of a
votary of Juggernaut a fourth time; but
the vehicle turning out to be a yellow
hackney coach with a prodigious coat of arms on
each panel, he gained little this time, save a
five pound note from the coach proprietor and
two months' eleemosynary treatment in Saint
Bartholomew's hospital. He then retired
upon his annuities, and, feeling naturally
lonely and in want of comfort, fixed his eyes and
affections on a young and ugly vendor of fruit
in the public thoroughfares, to whom he was
shortly after united, but who does not appear
to have had that regard and consideration for
the trunk of her husband, to which his
talents and well-earned competence would
have seemed to entitle him. At the
comencement of my acquaintanceship with him
(he had then been married two years) it was
patent and notorious that his unfeeling partner
was in the frequent habit of leaving him for
days together without sustenance, on-end in
his chair, from which, owing to his infirmity,
he was, it is needless to say, unable to move.
Nay, as a refinement of brutality, she has
been known to place at the foot of the chair
a large footbath of mustard and water, thus
insultingly and derisively taunting him with
his inability to avail himself of that useful
adjunct to the toilet. But his sufferings were
speedily terminated. My unfortunate friend
was one morning found dead, drowned, his
stumps uppermost, and his head in the
footbath. It was conjectured that, after a too
copious dose of snuff (to which he was much
addicted, and to which he was wont to help
himself by a dexterous extension and
elongation of his upper lip, between a bag of
snuff suspended round his neck and his nose
—thus quite rivalling the elephant and his
trunk)—he had fallen into a violent fit
of sneezing; and, in the midst of his convulsive
movements, had been precipitated
from his chair into the bath, and so
asphyxiated. His annuities died with him, and
hope his unworthy widow went to the
workhouse.

One more variety of the waterside public,
and I will go inland. Farther, much farther
down river must you sail with me (our dray
hath masts and sails now) before you come to
the Trinchinopoly Crab. Far down below
Woolwich, with its huge Dockyard and Field
of the Balls of Death, or Arsenal, and hideous
convict-hulks— spruce men-of-war once, but
now no more like men-of-war than I to Hecuba;
—far down below Dumbledowndeary,
the already-sung (which charming waterport
hath lately been endowed with a garrison of
fourteen real coast-guardsmen—called by the
natives "perwenters,"—armed with real muskets
and cutlasses: and who shall say the
coast's in danger now?);—far, even below
Bluehithe, where the gentleman hung his
harriers, and Gray's, and Purfleet, and Rainham, w
here the gentlemen fight for money—
in a reach, a lonely reach, a swampy-shored
reach—the grim sedgy banks of Essex staring
from over the way, the salt marshes of
Kent behind and on each side—here is the
Trinchinopoly Crab, a lone white house,
approached from the shore by a bridge over a
slough of worse than Despond; approachable
from the western side of Kent by ferry only,
other communication being cut off by a sludgy
miry little estuary—Dead Man's Creek.

The Trinchinopoly Crab is dismally white.
Its frame might be taken for the bones of a
house, bleached by the wind. The rickety
bridge is painted white, so is the door of
entry, with ghastly, skeleton-like chequers on
either jamb, that remind you of the pips on
the Dice of Death. The outward aspect of
the Trinchinopoly Crab is, decidedly, not
canny; yet within it is a very haven of
maritime joviality and jollity. From the ships
in the river come skippers, pilots, mates,
supercargoes; from the adjacent villages oorne
river- pilots, ship- chandlers, slop- dealers.
From, no man knows whither—going, no man
knows where—come strange mysterious men,
who seem to know everything and everybody,
who smoke cigars of inconceivable fragrance,
moucher themselves with rainbbw-hued
bandannas, and must be either smugglers (none
of your London street "duffers," but real
smugglers—fellows who could run a cargo of
Hollands in the teeth of all my lords
mustered in the Long Boom at the Custom House),
or else aquatic detective policemen.

If you put your head, and subsequently
your corporeality, into the long low coffee or
tap room (for it serves for both) of the Crab,
you will first of all be sensible that the
tobacco smoked by the majority of the
company is of a far better and more fragrant
quality than that vended by your lordship's
tobacconist. Your olfactory nerves will be
gratefully titillated by the pungent fumes of
the genuine molasses-mixed Cavendish; by
the incense-like suavity of the pure Oronooko;
by the manly, vigorous smoke of unadulterated
Virginia, and the dream-like languor
of Varinhas and Latakia. Next you shall