Nay, in the boat at the minute of which I have been speaking, silent and neglected, sat a fellow-passenger, who was a greater adept at removing nuisances than the whole Board of Health put together; and who had done his work, too, with a cheapness unparalleled; for all his good deeds had not as yet cost the State one penny. True, he lived by his business; so do other inspectors of nuisances: but Nature, instead of paying Maia Squinado, Esquire, some five hundred pounds sterling per annum for his labour, had contrived, with a sublime simplicity of economy which Mr. Hume might have envied and admired afar off, to make him do his work gratis, by giving him the nuisances as his perquisites, and teaching him how to eat them. Certainly (without going the length of the Caribs, who upheld cannibalism because, they said, it made war cheap, and precluded entirely the need of a commissariat), this cardinal virtue of cheapness ought to make Squinado an interesting object in the eyes of the present generation; especially as he was at that moment a true sanitary martyr, having, like many of his human fellow-workers, got into a fearful scrape by meddling with those existing interests, and “vested rights which are but vested wrongs,” which have proved fatal already to more than one Board of Health. For last night, as he was sitting quietly under a stone in four fathoms water, he became aware (whether by sight, smell, or that mysterious sixth sense, to us unknown, which seems to reside in his delicate feelers) of a palpable nuisance somewhere in the neighbourhood; and, like a trusty servant of the public, turned out of his bed instantly and went in search; till he discovered, hanging among what he judged to be the stems of ore-weed (Laminaria), three or four large pieces of stale thornback, of most evil savour, and highly prejudicial to the purity of the sea, and the health of the neighbouring herrings. Happy Squinado! He needed not to discover the limits of his authority, to consult any lengthy Nuisances’ Removal Act, with its clauses, and counter-clauses, and explanations of interpretations, and interpretations of explanations. Nature, who can afford to be arbitrary, because she is perfect, and to give her servants irresponsible powers, because she has trained them to their work, had bestowed on him and on his forefathers, as general health inspectors, those very summary powers of entrance and removal in the watery realms for which common sense, public opinion, and private philanthropy are still entreating vainly in the terrestrial realms; so finding a hole, in he went, and began to remove the nuisance, without “waiting twenty-four hours,” “laying an information,” “serving a notice,” or any other vain delay. The evil was there,—and there it should not stay; so having neither cart nor barrow, he just began putting it into his stomach, and in the meanwhile set his assistants to work likewise.