shaved, who always look unhappy, and appear getting ready to be sick.

At one, dinner begins in the after-cabin--boiled salmon, boiled beef,
boiled mutton, boiled cabbage, boiled potatoes, and parboiled wine for
any gentlemen who like it, and two roast-ducks between seventy. After
this, knobs of cheese are handed round on a plate, and there is a talk
of a tart somewhere at some end of the table. All this I saw peeping
through a sort of meat-safe which ventilates the top of the cabin, and
very happy and hot did the people seem below.

"How the deuce CAN people dine at such an hour?" say several genteel
fellows who are watching the manoeuvres. "I can't touch a morsel before
seven."

But somehow at half-past three o'clock we had dropped a long way down
the river. The air was delightfully fresh, the sky of a faultless
cobalt, the river shining and flashing like quicksilver, and at this
period steward runs against me bearing two great smoking dishes covered
by two great glistening hemispheres of tin. "Fellow," says I, "what's
that?"

He lifted up the cover: it was ducks and green pease, by jingo!

"What! haven't they done YET, the greedy creatures?" I asked. "Have the
people been feeding for three hours?"

"Law bless you, sir, it's the second dinner. Make haste, or you won't
get a place." At which words a genteel party, with whom I had been
conversing, instantly tumbled down the hatchway, and I find myself one
of the second relay of seventy who are attacking the boiled salmon,