The present Custom House, built in 1825, contains one of the longest and the most dingy-looking rooms in England. Here may be encountered strings of British merchants and rough ship-captains waiting to transact business relating to their cargoes. At one counter is kept a record of vessels and their owners, at another the clearance of ships outward is the subject of concern; at a third the skipper must hand in a list of every article on board his vessel, and thence proceed from counter to counter until he has satisfied all the requirements of the law. In one corner of the building there is a Custom House Museum, containing many quaint official documents, detailing how John Doe, being a Papist, did not receive his quarter's salary, and how some other servant of the Customs has been docked of his wages because of the indiscretion of somebody else's wife; containing, also, curious articles which have been employed in small acts of smuggling--a stewardess's crinoline that has been puffed out with a bottle of right good Hollands, a book which has been made to do duty as a brandy-flask, quantities of snuff that have been shipped as oilcake, and many other curious examples of unexpected failure to evade the law. Those whose business it is to detect cheats of this description love to retain some memorial of their prowess, and in this manner it happens that the Custom House Museum is valuable chiefly to those who care to study human ingenuity in connection with dishonest purposes. There is in existence a curious record concerning the Custom House and Queen Bess. "About this time (1590)," writes the quaint author of "The Historie of the Life and Reigne of that famous Princesse Elizabeth," "the commodity of the Custom House amounted to an unexpected value; for the Queen, being made acquainted by the means of a subtle fellow, named Caermardine, with the mystery of their gaines, so enhanced the rate that Sir Thomas Smith, master of the Custom House, who heretofore farmed it of the Queen for £14,000 yearly, was now mounted to £42,000, and afterwards to £50,000, which, notwithstanding, was valued but as an ordinary sum for such oppressing gaine. The Lord Treasurer, the Earls of Leicester and Walsingham, much opposed themselves against this Caermardine ... but the Queen answered them that all princes ought to be, if not as favourable, yet as just, to the lowest as to the highest, desiring that they who falsely accused her Privy Council of sloth or indiscretion should be severely punished; but they who justly accused them should be heard. That she was Queen as well to the poorest as to the proudest, and that therefore she would never be deaf to their just complaints. Likewise that she would not suffer that these toll-takers, like horse-leeches, should glut themselves with the riches of the realm, and starve her Exchequer; which, as she will not bear it to be docked, so hateth she to enrich it with the poverty of her people."