turned my face to that point of the metropolitan compass on leaving
Covent-garden, and had got past the India House, thinking in my
idle manner of Tippoo-Sahib and Charles Lamb, and had got past my
little wooden midshipman, after affectionately patting him on one
leg of his knee-shorts for old acquaintance' sake, and had got past
Aldgate Pump, and had got past the Saracen's Head (with an
ignominious rash of posting bills disfiguring his swarthy
countenance), and had strolled up the empty yard of his ancient
neighbour the Black or Blue Boar, or Bull, who departed this life I
don't know when, and whose coaches are all gone I don't know where;
and I had come out again into the age of railways, and I had got
past Whitechapel Church, and was--rather inappropriately for an
Uncommercial Traveller--in the Commercial Road. Pleasantly
wallowing in the abundant mud of that thoroughfare, and greatly
enjoying the huge piles of building belonging to the sugar
refiners, the little masts and vanes in small back gardens in back
streets, the neighbouring canals and docks, the India vans
lumbering along their stone tramway, and the pawnbrokers' shops
where hard-up Mates had pawned so many sextants and quadrants, that
I should have bought a few cheap if I had the least notion how to
use them, I at last began to file off to the right, towards
Wapping.

Not that I intended to take boat at Wapping Old Stairs, or that I
was going to look at the locality, because I believe (for I don't)
in the constancy of the young woman who told her sea-going lover,
to such a beautiful old tune, that she had ever continued the same,
since she gave him the 'baccer-box marked with his name; I am
afraid he usually got the worst of those transactions, and was
frightfully taken in. No, I was going to Wapping, because an