The outstanding tavern in _Our Mutual Friend_ is that with the pleasant-sounding name of The Six Jolly Fellowship-Porters, the favoured resort of Rogue Riderhood, Gaffer Hexam, and their boon companions, which is so closely associated with the unravelling of the mystery of John Harmon. It exists to-day as the Grapes, and continues to be the favoured resort of river watermen whose business keeps or brings them to the picturesque Reach. When Dickens was engaged on his book, it is said that he wrote some chapters in a house adjoining the Grapes, overlooking the river. The Dropsical Tavern, as he calls it, was then known as the Bunch of Grapes, which, by a process of clipping, became first the Grapes Inn, and then finally the Grapes, by which it is known at the present time. Its front entrance is at 76 Narrow Street, Limehouse, and occupies little more space (as noted by the novelist) than to allow for its front door. Although the front of the building has been modernised, it still remains as narrow and tall as when Dickens likened it to "a handle of a flat iron set upright on its broadest end." The inn has been very little altered in other respects since he so minutely described it. Certainly, an ordinary public-house bar has cut off a portion of the original bar, and, if in those days "the available space in it was not much larger than a hackney-coach," its area is even smaller to-day, but yet quite comfortable enough to "soften the human breast." It is in describing this bar that Dickens gives the clue to the identification of the tavern. "No one," he says, "could have wished the bar bigger, that space was so girt in by corpulent little casks, and by cordial bottles radiant with fictitious _grapes in bunches_, and by lemons in nets, and by biscuits in baskets, and by polite beer-pulls that made low bows when customers were served with beer ... and by the landlady's own small table in a snugger corner near the fire...." Many of these alluring etceteras have given place to others, perhaps less enticing, and among those that have gone are the cordial bottles with the "grapes in bunches" on them. We have learned, however, from the present genial hostess, Mrs. Higgins, that at one time, not only did the cordial bottles bear the engraved sign of a bunch of grapes, but certain of the windows also were so embellished, and it was only a few years ago, when the front was altered, that these disappeared.