The question struck us all at once. It was a grand discovery; it was a flash of light; it was the birth of a new idea; it was an influx of brilliant inquiry. It was ascertained, that though we had all steamed up and down the Thames times without number, not one of us had seen the river. Some had always steamed it in their sleep; some had plunged at once into the cabin, to avoid the passengers on deck; some had escaped the vision by the clouds of a cigar; some by a French novel and an English dinner. But not one could recollect any thing more of it than it flowed through banks more or less miry; that it was, to the best of their recollection, something larger than the Regent's Canal; and some thought that they had seen occasional masts and smoke flying by them. My mind was made up on the spot. Novelty is my original passion--the spring of all my virtues and vices--the stimulant of all my desires, disasters, and distinctions. In short, I determined to see the Thames. * * * * * Rose at daybreak--the sky blue, the wind fragrant, Putney throwing up its first faint smokes; the villa all asleep. Leaving a billet for Sir Charles, I ordered my cab, and set off for the Thames. "How little," says Jonathan Swift, "does one-half of the world know what the other is doing." I had left Putney the abode of silence, a solitary policeman standing here and there, like the stork which our modern painters regularly put into the corner of their landscapes to express the sublime of solitude--no slipshod housemaid peeping from her window; no sight or sound of life to be seen through the rows of the flower-pots, or the lattices of the suburb gardens. But, once in London, what a contrast. From the foot of London bridge what a rush of life; what an incursion of cabs; what a rattle of waggons; what a surge of population; what a chaos of clamour; what volcanic volumes of everlasting smoke rolling up against the unhappy face of the Adelaide hotel; what rushing of porters, and trundling of trunks; what cries of every species, utterable by that extraordinary machine the throat of man; what solicitations to trust myself, for instant conveyance to the remotest shore of the terraqueous globe!--"For Calais, sir? Boat off in half-an-hour."--"For Constantinople? in a quarter."--"For Alexandria? in five minutes."--"For the Cape? bell just going to ring." In this confusion of tongues it was a thousand to one that I had not jumped into the boat for the Niger, and before I recovered my senses, been far on my way to Timbuctoo. In a feeling little short of desperation, or of that perplexity in which one labours to decypher the possible purport of a maiden speech, I flung myself into the first steamer which I could reach, and, to my genuine self-congratulation, found that I was under no compulsion to be carried beyond the mouth of the Thames.