alist's doors, gratefully inhaling scents
as of veal-stuffing yet uncooked, dreamily mixed up with capsicums,
brown-paper, seeds, even with hints of lusty snails and fine young curly
leeches. Many and many a pleasant stroll they had among the poultry
markets, where ducks and fowls, with necks unnaturally long, lay
stretched out in pairs, ready for cooking; where there were speckled
eggs in mossy baskets, white country sausages beyond impeachment by
surviving cat or dog, or horse or donkey; new cheeses to any wild
extent, live birds in coops and cages, looking much too big to be
natural, in consequence of those receptacles being much too little;
rabbits, alive and dead, innumerable. Many a pleasant stroll they
had among the cool, refreshing, silvery fish-stalls, with a kind of
moonlight effect about their stock-in-trade, excepting always for
the ruddy lobsters. Many a pleasant stroll among the waggon-loads of
fragrant hay, beneath which dogs and tired waggoners lay fast asleep,
oblivious of the pieman and the public-house. But never half so good a
stroll as down among the steamboats on a bright morning.

There they lay, alongside of each other; hard and fast for ever, to all
appearance, but designing to get out somehow, and quite confident of
doing it; and in that faith shoals of passengers, and heaps of luggage,
were proceeding hurriedly on board. Little steam-boats dashed up and
down the stream incessantly. Tiers upon tiers of vessels, scores
of masts, labyrinths of tackle, idle sails, splashing oars, gliding
row-boats, lumbering barges, sunken piles, with ugly lodgings for
the water-rat within their mud-discoloured nooks; church steeples,
warehouses, house-roofs, arches, bridges, men and women, children,
casks, cranes, boxes horses, coaches, idlers, and hard-labourers; there
they were, all jumbled up together, any summer morning, far beyond Tom's
power of separation.

In the midst of all this turmoil there was an incessant roar from every
packet's funnel, which quite expressed and carried out the uppermost
emotion of the scene. They all appeared to be perspiring and bothering
themselves, exactly as their passengers did; they never left off
fretting and chafing, in their own hoarse manner, once; but were always
panting out, without any stops, 'Come along do make haste I'm very
nervous come along oh good gracious we shall never get there how late
you are do make haste I'm off directly come along!'

Even when they had