There were states of the tide when, having been down the river, I could not get back through the eddy-chafed arches and starlings of old London Bridge; then, I left my boat at a wharf near the Custom House, to be brought up afterwards to the Temple stairs.  I was not averse to doing this, as it served to make me and my boat a commoner incident among the water-side people there.  From this slight occasion, sprang two meetings that I have now to tell of.

One afternoon, late in the month of February, I came ashore at the wharf at dusk.  I had pulled down as far as Greenwich with the ebb tide, and had turned with the tide.  It had been a fine bright day, but had become foggy as the sun dropped, and I had had to feel my way back among the shipping, pretty carefully.  Both in going and returning, I had seen the signal in his window, All well.

As it was a raw evening and I was cold, I thought I would comfort myself with dinner at once; and as I had hours of dejection and solitude before me if I went home to the Temple, I thought I would afterwards go to the play.  The theatre where Mr. Wopsle had achieved his questionable triumph, was in that waterside neighbourhood (it is nowhere now), and to that theatre I resolved to go.  I was aware that Mr. Wopsle had not succeeded in reviving the Drama, but, on the contrary, had rather partaken of its decline.  He had been ominously heard of, through the playbills, as a faithful Black, in connexion with a little girl of noble birth, and a monkey.  And Herbert had seen him as a predatory Tartar of comic propensities, with a face like a red brick, and an outrageous hat all over bells.

I dined at what Herbert and I used to call a Geographical chop-house — where there were maps of the world in porter-pot rims on every half-yard of the table-cloths, and charts of gravy on every one of the knives — to this day there is scarcely a single chop-house within the Lord Mayor’s dominions which is not Geographical — and wore out the time in dozing over crumbs, staring at gas, and baking in a hot blast of dinners.  By-and-by, I roused myself and went to the play.

There, I found a virtuous boatswain in his Majesty’s service — a most excellent man, though I could have wished his trousers not quite so tight in some places and not quite so loose in others — who knocked all the little men’s hats over their eyes, though he was very generous and brave, and who wouldn’t hear of anybody’s paying taxes, though he was very patriotic.  He had a bag of money in his pocket, like a pudding in the cloth, and on that property married a young person in bed-furniture, with great rejoicings; the whole population of Portsmouth (nine in number at the last Census) turning out on the beach, to rub their own hands and shake everybody else’s, and sing “Fill, fill!” A certain dark-complexioned Swab, however, who wouldn’t fill, or do anything else that was proposed to him, and whose heart was openly stated (by the boatswain)