massive fragment of the Castle Wall. It was high time
to make the Wassail now; therefore I had up the materials (which,
together with their proportions and combinations, I must decline to
impart, as the only secret of my own I was ever known to keep), and made
a glorious jorum. Not in a bowl; for a bowl anywhere but on a shelf is a
low superstition, fraught with cooling and slopping; but in a brown
earthenware pitcher, tenderly suffocated, when full, with a coarse cloth.
It being now upon the stroke of nine, I set out for Watts's Charity,
carrying my brown beauty in my arms. I would trust Ben, the waiter, with
untold gold; but there are strings in the human heart which must never be
sounded by another, and drinks that I make myself are those strings in
mine.

The Travellers were all assembled, the cloth was laid, and Ben had
brought a great billet of wood, and had laid it artfully on the top of
the fire, so that a touch or two of the poker after supper should make a
roaring blaze. Having deposited my brown beauty in a red nook of the
hearth, inside the fender, where she soon began to sing like an ethereal
cricket, diffusing at the same time odours as of ripe vineyards, spice
forests, and orange groves,--I say, having stationed my beauty in a place
of security and improvement, I introduced myself to my guests by shaking
hands all round, and giving them a hearty welcome.

I found the party to be thus composed. Firstly, myself. Secondly, a
very decent man indeed, with his right arm in a sling, who had a certain
clean agreeable smell of wood about him, from which I judged him to have
something to do with shipbuilding. Thirdly, a little sailor-boy, a mere
child, with a profusion of rich dark brown hair, and deep womanly-looking
eyes. Fourthly, a shabby-genteel personage in a threadbare black suit,
and apparently in very bad circumstances, with a dry suspicious look; the
absent buttons on his waistcoat eked out with red tape; and a bundle of
extraordinarily tattered papers sticking out of an inner breast-pocket.
Fifthly, a foreigner by birth, but an Englishman in speech, who carried
his pipe in the band of his hat, and lost no time in telling me, in an
easy, simple, engaging way, that he was a watchmaker from Geneva, and
travelled all about the Continent, mostly on foot, working as a
journeyman, and seeing new countries,--possibly (I thought) also
smuggling a watch or so, now and then. Sixthly, a little widow, who ha