'Tis a motley company, you see, which comes and goes by the half-penny
boat. Here is a Temple barrister, with his red-taped brief under his
arm, and at his heels follows a plasterer, and a tiler's labourer with
a six-foot chimney-pot upon his shoulders. There goes a
foreigner--foreigners like to have things cheap--with a bushy black
beard and a pale face, moustached and whiskered to the eyes, and
puffing a volume of smoke from his invisible mouth; and there is a
washer-woman, with a basket of clothes weighing a hundredweight.
Yonder young fellow, with the dripping sack on his back, is staggering
under a load of oysters from Billingsgate, and he has got to wash them
and sell them for three a penny, and see them swallowed one at a time,
before his work will be done for the day--and behind him is a comely
lassie, with a monster oil-glazed sarcophagus-looking milliner's
basket, carrying home a couple of bonnets to a customer. See! there is
lame Jack, who sweeps the crossing in the borough, followed by a lady
with her 'six years' darling of a pigmy size,' whom she calls 'Little
Popps,' both hurrying home to dinner after a morning's shopping. All
these, and a hundred others of equally varied description, go off on
the landing-stage, whence they will have to pay their obolus to the
Charon of the Thames ere they are swallowed up in the living tide that
rolls along the Strand from morn to night.
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