No one who reads with attention the chequered career of James Burke will deny that “The Deaf’un” deserves to rank as one of the most honest, courageous, hardy, simple-minded, and eccentric fellows who ever sought praise and profit in the Prize Ring. Jem was the son of a Thames waterman who plied at the Strand Lane stairs. Left at an early age to the charge of a widowed mother, young Jem betook himself to the amphibious calling of “Jack-in-the-Water,” at the stairs where his father once plied with his “trim-built wherry.” At the time of which we write, before steam-boats, with their gangways and ugly dumb-lighters (the latter to give way yet later to a noble embankment with its broad granite-stepped landing places) had superseded the “caus’eys,” and “old stairs,” from Wapping to Westminster, the favourite and popular mode of transit of the dwellers in Cockaigne to Lambeth, to the glories of Vauxhall with its _al fresco_ concerts and 30,00 (additional) lamps; to Cumberland Gardens, with its trellised tea-boxes, and “little gold and silver fish that wagged their little tails;” to the Red House, Battersea, with its gardens and pigeon shooting; to “Chelsea Ferry,” with its elm-bordered promenade and Soldiers’ Home, and to the numerous places of riverside resort, was by “oars or sculls,” plied by the brawny arms of the “firemen-watermen,” one of the most laborious and deserving fraternities who devoted their well-earned and well-paid services to the pleasure-seeking public who patronised the broad highway of the Thames. The popularity and consequent prosperity of the stalwart “firemen-watermen” (for most of them wore the handsome coat and badge of, and were retained by, one or other of the great London Insurance Offices, and were the only organised body for the extinguishing of fires and saving of life) extended to the humble “Jack-in-the-Water,” whose duty consisted in wading bare-legged into the rippling tide, dragging the sharp nose of the wherry on to the paved causeway, or by its pile-protected side, and there steadying it, while the “jolly young waterman” politely handed his “fare” over the rocking “thwarts” of his smart, light boat to his or her cushioned seat in the “stern-sheets.” For his services in thus holding on, and thereby securing the balance of the staggering land-lubbers, for a pair of “sea-legs” were never included in the cockney’s qualifications, “poor Jack” seldom went unrewarded by one or more “coppers,” for we had not then come to the “age of bronze.” This humble and weather-beaten calling was by no means an unprofitable one to a hardy, handy, and industrious lad, such as young Jem Burke undoubtedly was. [Illustration: JAMES BURKE (“THE DEAF’UN”).]