e_ upon the table tea and coffee, and bread and butter, and salmon,
and shad, and liver, and steak, and potatoes, and pickles, and ham, and
pudding, and sausages; and three-and-thirty people sitting round it,
eating and drinking; and savory bottles of gin, and whiskey, and brandy,
and rum, in the bar hard by; and seven-and-twenty out of the
eight-and-twenty men, in foul linen, with yellow streams from
half-chewed tobacco trickling down their chins. Perhaps the best time
for you to take a peep would be the present: eleven o'clock in the
forenoon: when the barber is at his shaving, and the gentlemen are
lounging about the stove waiting for their turns, and not more than
seventeen are spitting in concert, and two or three are walking overhead
(lying down on the luggage every time the man at the helm calls
'Bridge!'), and I am writing this in the ladies' cabin, which is a part
of the gentlemen's, and only screened off by a red curtain. Indeed, it
exactly resembles the dwarf's private apartment in a caravan at a fair;
and the gentlemen, generally, represent the spectators at a penny a
head. The place is just as clean and just as large as that caravan you
and I were in at Greenwich Fair last past. Outside, it is exactly like
any canal-boat you have seen near the Regent's Park, or elsewhere.

"You never can conceive what the hawking and spitting is, the whole
night through. Last night was the worst. _Upon my honor and word_ I was
obliged, this morning, to lay my fur coat on the deck, and wipe the
half-dried flakes of spittle from it with my handkerchief; and the only
surprise seemed to be that I should consider it necessary to do so. When
I turned in last night, I put it on a stool beside me, and there it lay,
under a cross-fire from five men,--three opposite, one above, and one
below. I make no complaints, and show no disgust. I am looked upon as
highly facetious at night, for I crack jokes with everybody near me
until we fall asleep. I am considered very hardy in the morning, for I
run up, bare-necked, and plunge my head into the half-frozen water, by
half-past five o'clock. I am respected for my activity, inasmuch as I
jump from the boat to the towing-path, and walk five or six miles before
breakfast; keeping up with the horses all the time. In a word, they are
quite astonished to find a sedentary Englishman roughing it so well, and
taking so much exercise; and question me very much on that head. The
greater part of the men