Seven, still seven! Potboys, rubbing their eyes, take down the shutters of taverns in leading thoroughfares, and then fall to rubbing the pewter pots till they assume a transcendent sheen. Within, the young ladies who officiate in the bar, and who look very drowsy in their curl-papers and cotton-print dresses, are rubbing the pewter counters and the brass-work of the beer-engines, the funnels and the whisky noggins, washing the glasses, polishing up the mahogany, cutting up the pork pies which Mr. Watling’s man has just left, displaying the Banbury cakes and Epping sausages under crystal canopies. The early customers—matutinal _habitués_—drop in for small measures of cordials or glasses of peculiarly mild ale; and the freshest news of last night’s fire in Holborn, or last night’s division in the House, or last night’s opera at Her Majesty’s, are fished up from the columns of the “Morning Advertiser.” By intercommunication with the early customers, who all have a paternal and respectful fondness for her, the barmaid becomes _au courant_ with the news of the day. As a rule, the barmaid does not read the newspaper. On the second day of publication, she lends it to the dissenting washerwoman or the radical tailor in the court round the corner, who send small children, whose heads scarcely reach to the top of the counter, for it. When it is returned, she cuts it up for tobacco screws and for curl papers. I like the barmaid, for she is often pretty, always civil, works about fourteen hours a day for her keep and from eighteen to twenty pounds a year, is frequently a kinless orphan out of that admirable Licensed Victuallers’ School, and is, in nine cases out of ten, as chaste as Diana.