scarcely got his last leg into the boat,
when the whole ricketty rabbit-hutch went down, and only as many bubbles
as you could fill a soup-plate with stayed a-top to mark the
whereabouts. But the owners wanted to press the charge, and for a while
I wanted to lie close, and that's why I came to London, which is a big
bag, as it were, where one pea's like another when they're well shaken
up in it.

You'll say it was rather like those birds who, when they hear the
sportsman coming, dive their heads into the sand, and leave the other
three-quarters of them in full view to be shot at, thinking no one else
can see it, because they don't happen to be able to see it themselves.
You'll say it was like one of them, for me, a sailor, wanting to keep
dark from the police, to go skulking about in waterside taverns and
coffee-houses Wapping and Rotherhithe way; well, perhaps it was.

It was at a coffee-house in Wapping I met Atlantic Jones, and he scared
me a bit the first time I met him. It wasn't a pretty kind of
coffee-house, not one of those you read about in that rare old book, the
_Spectator_, where the fops, and dandies, and bloods, "most did
congregate," where they "quaffed" and "toasted" in the good old style,
which, by the way, must have been somewhat of an expensive old style,
and, thank goodness, even some of us third or fourth-raters, nowadays,
can spend an odd half-hour or so from time to time very much as the
biggest nobs would spend it, though we have but a few silver pieces in
our pocket.

To the good old style of coffee-house my fine gentleman, with the
brocaded coat-tails, dainty lace ruffles, and big, powdered periwig,
would be borne, smoothly (with an occasional jolt or two that went for
nothing) in a sedan chair; and on his arrival there, if it were
night-time, would call for his wine, his long pipe, his newspaper, and
his wax-candles, and sit solemnly enjoying himself, while humbler folks
blinked in the dim obscurity surrounding him, for most likely it was not
everybody frequenting the place who could afford to be thus illuminated.

No; this was one of the most ordinary, common, and objectionable kind of
coffee-shops, where the most frequent order was for "half a pint and
slices;" where the half-pint was something thick and slab, which
analytical research might have proved to be artfully compounded of
parched peas and chicory, with a slight flavouring of burnt treacle;
while the slices were good old, sole