one time or another. I remember one night ..." And when Johnnie remembers, that is the time to drink up and have another, for once he starts yarning he is not easily stopped. Wonderful anecdotes he has to relate, too; not perhaps brilliant stories, or even stories with a point of any kind, but stories brimful of atmosphere, stories salt of the sea or scented with exotic bloom. They begin, perhaps, "Once, off Rangoon," or "I remember, a big night in Honolulu," or Mauritius, or Malabar, or Trinidad. Before the warning voice cries, "Time, gentermen!" you have circled the globe a dozen times under the spell of Johnnie's rememberings. You may catch him any night of the week, and find him ready to yarn, save on Saturdays. Saturday night is always dedicated to the missus and to shopping in Poplar or Blackwall. Shopping on Saturday nights in these districts is no mere domestic function: it is a festival, an event. Johnnie washes and puts on his second-best suit, and then he and the missus depart from the Island, he bearing a large straw marketing bag, she carrying a string-bag and one of those natty stout-paper bags given away by greengrocers and milliners. As soon as the 'bus has tossed them into Salmon Lane, off Commercial Road, they begin to revel. Salmon Lane on a Saturday night is very much like any other shopping centre in the more humane quarters of London. Shops and stalls blaze and roar with endeavour. The shops, by reason of their more respectable standing, affect to despise stalls, but when it comes to competition it is usually stalls first and shops hanging round the gate. The place reeks of naphtha, human flesh, bad language, and good-nature. Newly-killed rabbits, with their interiors shamelessly displayed, suspend themselves around the stalls while their proprietors work joyfully with a chopper and a lean-bladed knife. Your earnest shopper is never abroad before nine o'clock in the evening, and many of them have to await the still riper hours when Bill shall have yielded up his wages. Old ladies of the locality are here in plenty, doubtfully fingering the pieces of meat which smother the slabs of the butchers' shops. Little Elsie is here, too, buying for a family of motherless brothers and sisters with the few shillings which Dad has doled out. Who knows so well as Little Elsie the exact spending value of twopence-halfpenny? Observe her as she lays in her Sunday gorge. Two penn'orth of "pieces" from the butcher's to begin with (for twopence you get a bagful of oddments of meat, trimmings from various joints, good nourishing bones, bits of suet, and, if the assistant thinks you have nice eyes, he will throw in some skirt). Then to the large greengrocer's shop for a penn'orth of "specks" (spotted or otherwise damaged fruit, and vegetables of every kind). Of this three penn'orth the most valuable item is the bones, for these, with a bit of carrot and potato and onion, will make a pot of soup sufficient in itself to feed the kiddies for two