lled fourteen salmon, the smallest twenty-nine pounds
weight, the largest somewhere about five stone ten), my young friend
Blake Bodkin Lynch Browne (a fine lad who has made his continental tour)
and I adjourned, after dinner, to the young gentleman's private room,
for the purpose of smoking a certain cigar; which is never more pleasant
than after a hard day's sport, or a day spent in-doors, or after a good
dinner, or a bad one, or at night when you are tired, or in the morning
when you are fresh, or of a cold winter's day, or of a scorching
summer's afternoon, or at any other moment you choose to fix upon.

What should I see in Blake's room but a rack of pipes, such as are to
be found in almost all the bachelors' rooms in Germany, and amongst them
was a porcelain pipe-head bearing the image of the Kalbsbraten pump!
There it was: the old spout, the old familiar allegory of Mars, Bacchus,
Apollo virorum, and the rest, that I had so often looked at from
Hofarchitect Speck's window, as I sat there, by the side of Dorothea.
The old gentleman had given me one of these very pipes; for he had
hundreds of them painted, wherewith he used to gratify almost every
stranger who came into his native town.

Any old place with which I have once been familiar (as, perhaps, I have
before stated in these "Confessions"--but never mind that) is in some
sort dear to me: and were I Lord Shootingcastle or Colonel Popland,
I think after a residence of six months there I should love the Fleet
Prison. As I saw the old familiar pipe, I took it down, and crammed it
with Cavendish tobacco, and lay down on a sofa, and puffed away for an
hour wellnigh, thinking of old, old times.

"You're very entertaining to-night, Fitz," says young Blake, who had
made several tumblers of punch for me, which I had gulped down without
saying a word. "Don't ye think ye'd be more easy in bed than snorting
and sighing there on my sofa, and groaning fit to make me go hang
myself?"

"I am thinking, Blake," says I, "about Pumpernickel, where old Speck
gave you this pipe."

"'Deed he did," replies the young man; "and did ye know the old Bar'n?"

"I did," said I. "My friend, I have been by the banks of the Bendemeer.
Tell me, are the nightingales still singing there, and do the roses
still bloom?"

"The HWHAT?" cries Blake. "What the divvle, Fitz, are you growling
about? Bendemeer Lake's in Westmoreland, as I preshume; and as for roses
and nightingales, I give ye my w