an

But no one turned pale at the intimation of this alarming possibility. On the contrary, it seemed to give a zest to the illicit proceeding, and the secret company took long pulls at their pewter pots, and winked their satisfaction as they passed the measure to their neighbour. It was awfully good joke this, defying the police under their very noses-to engage in a deed of daring, the penalty of which, should it be discovered, would be certain fine or imprisonment. It meant much more than appeared on the surface. It meant that as men and Britons we were determined, at the risk of forfeiting our liberty, to uphold our right to drink beer on a Sunday morning, never mind what it cost us.

And, to do him justice, the landlord exerted himself heroically to enable us to exercise to the utmost the virtue of pecuniary sacrifice in the good cause. He had no common porter on tap; no fourpenny ale; no sixpenny even. It was all eightpenny, and drawn from the wood, mind you - so as to avoid the dangerous noise that raising it from the cellar by means of the beer-pulls would make. Perhaps it was this drawing it from the wood that gave the eightpenny such a foreign flavour. Not a strong flavour by any means, but the landlord made a merit of this. ""Tain't likely," said he; "that's because it's genuwine, and hain't had nothing added to it; you might drink a pailful, and not find a headache in it." Judging from its singularly mild flavour, the gin also might have been drawn from the wood, even from the rain-water butt that stood in the yard; but it was the purest " Old Tom," the landlord assured us, and on that account he charged us sevenpence a quartern for it.

During the next hour so many of Mr. Popshort's customers were curious to view his scarlet runners, that the tap-room of the "Hare and Weasel "became choke full; and the landlord, who added a delicious contraband flavour to all he brought us, by adopting a free-and-easy undress, consisting of trousers, dirty shirt, and slippers only, found enough to do in supplying our demands. Whatever he handed in at the guarded door was accompanied by a "Hush!" and a laying of his forefinger on his lips, enjoining us to secrecy and silence; so the thirty or forty of us, huddling together

in the stifling heat of that nasty-smelling little den, drank and replenished our pots and glasses with as much stealthy, malicious glee as though the cellars of the Chief Commissioner of Police himself were under the process of pillaging, and we were draining them dry.

We conversed in whispers, and the most natural thing in the world was that our favourite theme should be the new Licensing Act. Said one man--who seemed bent on practically testing the landlord's assertion, that there was not a headache in a whole pailful of the eightpenny,

"This is summat like the old times, this. Why, we ain't had such a muster here on a Sunday morning, ah, not for months."

"And we shouldn't now," remarked another, "if it wasn't for them coming down so sudden with that there Act. Well, it's only fair that everybody should have a turn. Them there publicans out in the Green Lanes, and them places just far enough into the country for a Sunday morning walk, have had a tidy spell of it with their bony-fidy travellers. They bony-fidy's 'em now when they ketches 'em, don't they?"

"So they do, but it's a pity, I think. I like to be neighbourly, of course; but I certainly used to like that stroll out atween the hedges afore dinner on a Sunday morning. It did a cove good, there's no mistake about that; but a man who's used to his half-pint at eleven can't do a baking walk in the sun and go without it."

""Tain't likely," said everybody.

"But don't you think that its just a spurt and will blow over in a month or so. They'll soon be sick of taking advantage of the precious fog that hangs about the Act, and snaring in the same net them wot says they is travellers, and them wot serves 'em because they believes that they is." "I don't believe it. It's much more likely that them that keeps public-houses a little way out in the country, where Sunday morning travellers are in the habit of calling, will get that aggravated by the police being down on 'em, that they'll cut the Sunday trade altogether, and keep their houses shut."

"Why, it stands to sense that they will," spoke the

landlord of the "Hare and Weazel”—at that moment handing in and taking the money for half-a-pint of gin and two pots of eight penny-" and a good thing too. It'll put a stopper on them that's so jolly fond of walking off to take their Sunday morning's pint in the fields and medders, and never caring a button how their neighbours are to live. All right. I've got my eye on 'em. It'll rather astonish 'em when they come here a Sunday morning for me to oblige 'em, and I tell em to go and have a look at the green leaves instead. Them and their 'umbuggin' green leaves. Give me a good summer cabbidge-them's green leaves enough for me, and if they ain't, and my appetite wants another tickler in the afternoon, I can always fall back on water-creases."

This noble sentiment elicted loud whispers of applause; and the man who had expressed his liking for a walk between the country hedges, feeling that he, perhaps, was the individual the landlord had his retributive eye on, ordered a conciliatory quartern of rum, and when the landlord had fetched it, and had condescendingly drunk a glass of it, he further enlightened us as to what were his opinions on the clause of the new Act that dealt with Sunday trading during prohibited hours.

"Live and let live, that's my motto," said the landlord. "All except teetotallers," remarked a sneak, who a little before had "stuck up a pint " till next day.

"Teetotallers included," replied the landlord of the "Hare and Weazel," magnanimously; "they've done me many a good turn, and never a better than when they passed the Act that stopped the Sunday morning out in the country. I approve of their principles," continued the landlord, bestowing a grin and a wink on the company generally. "It is a scandalous thing to see the doors-the front doors, mind you! -of a public-house open on Sunday morning on any pretence whatever. If fellows will indulge in the vicious habit of insisting on their pint on a Sunday morning as well as on any other, they should keep it dark, and not make their wulgarity as public as people coming out of church make their hymn-books and that. If they must drink-and, mind you, they will do that, open or sly, if they take it into their heads to do it—why, let them keep the secret to them

selves, and call at Popshort's and get a comfortable shave, and

What else did not transpire, for at this moment an authoritative rapping was heard at the front door, and at the same moment the potboy made his appearance with a pail. Without apology, he seized every measure on the tables and emptied it into that receptacle; and in a twinkling he gathered up every pot and measure and vanished with them to regions below. "Out you go. Sharp's the word. Hook it over the wall. Good luck t'ye!"

And so, ignominiously dismissed, we tumbled over the wall into the wood-chopping shed, and thence made our way to where the scarlet runners grew, and so, one at a time, through the barber's shop, and out into Little Swallow Street.

SUNDAY IN THE "DITCH."

JUST as your old and respected friend named Thomas gets called "Tom," or your dear old and familiar crony Elizabeth becomes "Lizzy" or even "Liz," so do the inhabitants and frequenters of certain parts of Shoreditch speak of it as the Ditch. The Ditch extends even to Bethnal Green. There are various approaches to it. You may take the turning by the Shoreditch Railway Station, which is Sclater Street; or a more direct route is to take Church Street for it, and keep along until you arrive at Club Row, going thence to Hare Street and Brick Lane, and then you are in the Ditch up to your very ears. It is nothing of a Ditch on week days— comparatively speaking, that is. From Monday to Saturday it is as sluggish a place as can well be imagined. A dreary, stagnant pool, swarming with fish, but all so lean, and so bent on hunting up and down for the wherewithal to keep body and soul together, that so much hilarity and cheerfnlness of disposition as may be evinced even by the wagging of a tail, is on a week day seldom or never seen there. A murderous locality for trades that employ women and children, a den of the dirtiest and worst paid drudgery for male labourers. But it is not all work. Every Sunday throughout the live-long year there is held in the Ditch a sort of market fai, which is attended by hundreds and thousands.

Winged creatures are the staple of the said market. It is not too much to say that, excepting the dodo and the golden eagle, the bustard, and a few others of the rarer sort, there is not a bird which may not be bought in the Ditch on a Sunday morning. Long before the church bells begin to ring out, from every direction the market-folks begin to arrive; and by the time the bells have ceased their pious invitation, Hare Street and all the adjacent streets are crammed full. It is a marvellous spectacle. Fowls of the