The “Bull,” Whitechapel, was sometimes--and with equal, if not better, exactness--known as the “Bull,” Aldgate, for it was numbered 25 in Aldgate High Street. The relentless hand of “improvement” swept it away in 1868, but until that year it presented the picture of a typical old English hostelry, and its coffee-room, resplendent with old polished mahogany fittings, its tables laid with silver, and the walls adorned with numerous specimens of those old coaching prints that are now so rare and prized so greatly by collectors, it wore no uncertain air of that solid and restful comfort the newer and hustling hotels of to-day, furnished and appointed with a distracting showiness, are incapable of giving. Everything at the “Bull” was solid and substantial, from the great heavy mahogany chairs that required the strength of a strong man to move, to the rich old English fare, and the full-bodied port its guests were sure of obtaining. A peculiar feature of this fine establishment of Mrs. Nelson’s was the room especially reserved for her coachmen and guards, where those worthies supped and dined off the best the house could provide, at something less than cost price. Mention has often been made of the exclusiveness of the commercial-rooms of old, but none of those strictly reserved haunts were so unapproachable as this coachmen’s room at the “Bull.” There they and the guards dined with as much circumstance as the coffee-room guests, drank wine with the appreciation of connoisseurs, and tipped the waiter as freely as any travellers down the road. A round dozen daily gathered round the table of this sanctum, joined sometimes by well-known amateurs of the road like Sir Henry Peyton and the Honourable Thomas Kenyon, but only as distinguished and quite exceptional guests. Once, indeed, Charles Dickens sat at this table. Perhaps he was contemplating a sequence of stories with some such title as “The Coachmen’s Room”; but if so, he never fulfilled the intention. The chairman on this occasion, after sundry flattering remarks, as a tribute to the novelist’s power of describing a coach journey, said, “Mr. Dickens, sir, we knows you knows wot’s wot, but can you, sir, ’andle a vip?” There was no mock modesty about Dickens. He acknowledged that he _could_ describe a journey down the road (doubtless, if we have a correct mental image of the man, he acknowledged that little matter with a truculent suggestion in his manner that he would like to see the man who could do it as well), but he regretted that in the management of the “vip” he was not an expert.