The date of Jem’s birth was Dec. 8th, 1809, in the closing years of the “war of giants,” and in his earlier days London was alive with war excitement; with processions on the Thames of the gilded and bannered barges of the Corporation and the public companies, with gaily painted pinnaces, shallops, and house-boats, aquatic fireworks and illuminations, and galas in honour of our victories in Portugal and Spain; to say nothing of frequent grand doings along the then bright river on all sorts of City “gaudy” days. It was moreover the line of procession on the 9th of November and other times when my Lord Mayor went in state to Westminster; and of continually recurring wager matches of skill and strength for prizes given by citizens, public bodies, and aquatic clubs, for the encouragement of the Thames watermen “between the bridges.” All these have vanished with the crowds who enjoyed them. The “fireman-waterman” is as extinct as the dodo. The half-penny or penny steam-boat of an utilitarian age has “improved him off the face of the earth,” and the picturesque silver Thames runs a paddle-churned _cloaca maxima_ of the great towns in its upper course, by the stately buildings of our Palaces of Parliament and Palatial Hospital, sweeping by where once Strand Lane stairs offered itself as a convenient outlet for “taking the water,” along a spacious embankment, with its leafy avenues, bordered by lofty stone-built public edifices. Far different the Thames by which the young Deaf’un earned his “crust,” and added to the poor comforts of a widowed mother. Then the merry-makings we have above alluded to made the miscalled silent highway a lively and populous show-scene, to the profit of such snappers-up of unconsidered trifles as our “poor Jack,” whose Christian name was Jem. As to the “schooling” of our hero――for a hero he unquestionably was――it amounted to that sort of general knowledge which could be picked up in that “university” which Mr. Samuel Weller declares to be the best for sharpening a boy’s wits――the streets. The Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge as yet was not; the “schoolmaster” was altogether “abroad,” in the wrong sense; and the Briarean School-board had not yet “comprehended all vagrom” boys and girls, and taught them the “three R’s” in spite of their teeth. “Reading, ’riting, and ’rithmetic” not being in the curriculum of young Jem’s “’varsity,” he was perfectly innocent of those accomplishments, despite Dogberry’s assertion that to “read and write comes by nature,” though at figures, we can certify from our own personal converse, the Deaf’un had, on special occasions, an almost intuitive aptitude. His knowledge too, upon out-of-the-way subjects, was occasionally surprising; he had much “mother-wit,” a quaint felicity of expression, a sly touch of humour, and a quiet stolidity of look and manner, the outcome of his infirmity of deafness, which amused the hearer, from the apparently unconscious humour with which