k, there: overloaded already!' roars
the captain. 'Let go; turn ahead; go on!'--and fiz! away we go,
leaving full half of the intending voyagers to wait for the next boat,
which, however, will not be long in coming.

'Bless me, how we roll about from side to side!' says an anxious old
lady. 'Is anything the matter with the boat, that it wabbles so?'

'Only a little krank, marm; it's all right,' says the person
addressed.

'It's all right, of course,' says another, glancing at the nervous
lady, 'whether we goes up or whether we goes down, so long as we gets
along. The _Cricket_ blowed herself up, and the _Ant_ got tired on it,
and laid down to rest herself at the bottom t'other day. Howasever, a
steamer never blows up nor goes to the bottom but once, and, please
God, 't aint goin' to be this time.'

While the old lady, unsatisfied with this genuine specimen of Cockney
philosophy, is vowing that if she once gets safe on shore, she will
never again set foot in a half-penny boat, we are already at Waterloo
Bridge. Duck goes the funnel, and we dart under the noble arch, and
catch a passing view of Somerset House. The handsome structure runs
away in our rear; the Chinese Junk, with its tawdry flags, scuttles
after it; we catch a momentary glimpse of Temple Gardens, lying in the
sunlight, where half-a-dozen children are playing on the grass; then
comes Whitefriars, the old Alsatia, the sanctuary of blackguard
ruffianism in bygone times; then there is a smell of gas, and a vision
of enormous gasometers; and then down goes the funnel again, and
Blackfriars Bridge jumps over us. On we go, now at the top of our
speed, past the dingy brick warehouses that lie under the shadow of St
Paul's, whose black dome looks down upon us as we scud along. Then
Southwark Bridge, with its Cyclopean masses of gloomy metal, disdains
to return the slightest response to the fussy splashing we make, as we
shoot impudently through. Then come more wharfs and warehouses, as we
glide past, while our pace slackens, and we stop gently within a
stone's-throw of London Bridge, at Dyers' Hall, where we are bundled
out of the boat with as little ceremony as we were bundled in, and
with as little, indeed, as it has ever been the custom to use since
ceremony was invented--which, in matters of business, is a very
useless thing.

And now, my friend, you have accomplished a half-penny voyage; and
without being a conjuror, you can see how it is that this cheap