moved, but lay on his back with his eyes wide open and shining like stars, staring at the ceiling. All of a sudden he appeared to jump clean on the top of me, and clutch me by the throat, upsetting the table and candle, and we both fell on the top of it and crushed it like a match box, and then the struggle commenced. We fought up and down, and in the struggle I stripped every rag off him, and he appeared to be trying to get me to the window to throw me out; and how our heels did rattle in that midnight struggle on the old garret floor, as we danced round in the shadow of the old Church on that Sunday morning. He was a little man, and I began to get the better of him, and got him on his back on the floor and held his arms down, when he made a plunge and snapped at my nose with his teeth. He just grazed the skin, and looked up and laughed. Of all the slippery things to handle, a naked man beats everything. The noise we made brought his wife and the two women in, and with their assistance we got him on to the bedstead, and with strips of the sheet we tore up, we tied him down to the bedstead, and he appeared to be pretty well done up. By that hour it was time to open, as there were always early customers on a Sunday morning, as it was a noted house for Dog’s Nose and other early drinks at that time. It was then about seven, and we saw old Kirk, the beadle, going past to dust and prepare the Church, and as he was a friend we called him in for advice, and he suggested a straight waistcoat. As he knew the master of the workhouse in Arthur Street, he promised to go and borrow one, which he did, and brought one of the old pauper nurses to show how to put it on. It was a large shirt made of strong bed tick sewn up at the bottoms, with two holes to put the legs through, and open behind, with strap and buckles and sleeves a yard long, with large pieces of webbing sewn at the ends. When we had got the patient comfortably settled, I had some breakfast and went home with five shillings in my pocket, but I do not think I felt like taking on another such job. Funerals on the river in those days were a frequent occurence. I recollect one in particular. A young man invalided home from the East India Company Service in an advanced stage of consumption came to stay with a sister at Chelsea. The husband worked at the malt house on the river, and there the young man died. He was a native of Mortlake and they took him there by the river in a boat to bury him. I recollect their going by our garden, we boys standing with our caps off while the procession passed. There was one boat rowed by a pair of sculls, containing the coffin and the mother and sisters as chief mourners, followed by three or four boats full of friends, most of the women in white dresses, and the men with white scarves and bows, which was the usual mourning for an unmarried person. CHAPTER 10.—A Boy’s Tramp by Road to Epsom, on Derby Day, 1837.