“Talk of brimming measure,” cried the Lauréat exultingly, “I go to a better market. The overflowings of an honest heart for _my_ money!” In former days undertakers would hire sundry pairs of skulls, and row to Death's Door * for a day's pleasure. * “The Search after Claret, or a Visitation of the Vintners” 4to. 1691, names the principal London Taverns and their Signs, as they then existed. But the most curious account is contained in an old ballad called “London's Ordinary: or every Man in his Humour” printed before 1600. There is not only a humorous list of the taverns but of the persons who frequented them. In those days the gentry patronised the King's Head (in July 1664, Pepys dined at the “Ordinary” there, when he went to Hyde Park to see the cavaliers of Charles II. in grand review); the nobles, the Crown: the knights, the Golden Fleece; the clergy, the Mitre; the vintners, the Three Tuns; the usurers, the Devil; the friars, the Nuns; the ladies, the Feathers; the huntsmen, the Greyhound; the citizens, the Horn; the cooks, the Holy Lamb; the drunkards, the Man in the Moon; the cuckolds, the Ram; the watermen, the Old Swan; the mariners, the Ship; the beggars, the Egg- Shell and Whip; the butchers, the Bull; the fishmongers, the Dolphin; the bakers, the Cheat Loaf; the tailors, the Shears; the shoemakers, the Boot; the hosiers, the Leg; the fletchers, the Robin Hood; the spendthrift, the Beggar's Bush; the Goldsmiths, the Three Cups; the papists, the Cross; the porters, the Labour in vain; the horse-coursers, the White Nag. He that had no money might dine at the sign of the Mouth; while “The cheater will dine at the Checquer; The pickpocket at the Blind Alehouse; 'Till taken and try'd, up Holborn they ride, And make their end at the gallows.” Then it was not thought infra dig. (in for a dig?) to invite the grave-digger: the mutes were the noisiest of the party; nothing palled on the senses; and to rehearse the good things that were said and sung would add some pungent pages to the variorum editions of Joe Miller. But undertakers are grown gentlemanlike and unjolly, and Death's Door exhibits but a skeleton of what it was in the merry old times.