“Gentlemen, we are but a stone's throw from the _Owl and Ivy Bush_, where a society called 'The Blinkers' hold their nightly revels: it will well repay your curiosity to step in and take a peep at them. Their president has one eye permanently shut, and the other partially open; the vice has two open eyes, blinking 'like winkin' all the members are more or less somniferous; and though none of them are allowed to fall fast asleep at the club, it is contrary to etiquette to be wide awake. Their conversation is confined to monosyllables, their talk, like their tobacco, being short-cut. Their three cheers are three yawns; they sit round the table with their eyes shut, and their mouths open, the gape, or gap, being filled up with their pipes, from which rise clouds of smoke that make their red noses look like lighted lamps in a fog. To the Reverend Nehemiah Nosebags, their chaplain, I owe the honour of becoming a member; for happening to sit under his proboscis and pulpit, my jaws went through such a gaping exercise at his soporific word of command, that he proposed me as a highly promising probationer, and my election was carried amidst an unanimous chorus of yawns.” “Here” exclaimed Mr. Bosky, “is the Owl and Ivy Bush.” “No,” rejoined Mr. Merripall, “'tis the Three Jolly Trumpeters. On the opposite side of the way is the Owl and Ivy Bush.” Mr. Bosky gazed at the sign, and then, with no small degree of wonderment, at Mr. Merripall. The Lauréat of Little Britain looked signs and wonders! “I'll take my affidavit to the Owl!” raising his eye-glass to the solemn bird that winked wickedly beneath a newly-varnished cauliflower-wig of white paint; “and though the Ivy Bush looks much more like a birch broom, it looks still less like a Jolly Trumpeter.” “Egad, you're right!” said the comical coffin-maker; “though, to my vision, it seems as if both houses had changed places since I last saw them.” The contents of a brace of black bottles flowing under Mr. Merripall's satin waistcoat, and their fumes ascending to what lay within the circumference of his best beaver, might possibly account for this phenomenon. “Hollo!”' cried the comical coffin-maker, as an uproarious cheer and the knocking of knuckles upon the tables proclaimed merry doings at the Owl and Ivy Bush, “the Blinkers were not wont to be so boisterous. What a riotsome rattle!--hark!” And the following chorus resounded through the Owl and Ivy Bush:-- We're jovial, happy, and gay, boys! We rise with the moon, which is surely full soon, Sing with the owl, our tutelar fowl, Laugh and joke at your go-to-bed folk, Never think--but what we shall drink, Never care--but on what we shall fare,-- Turning the night into day, boys! “What think you of that, Mr. Merripall?” said the Lauréat of Little Britain.