Those who have once reached the Monument, may "smell" their way to Billingsgate; for there is an old monastic odour about the shops, recalling Lent and stock-fish, and telling you that you are hemmed in with smoked haddock and salted herrings--which, when nothing else could be had, it must have been a heavy penance to have lived upon, and caused the poor sinner to have made many a wry face while devouring such dry and thirsty food. Once in Lower Thames-street, and you are in a land of danger. You come in contact with big men bending beneath bulky boxes; huge hogsheads swing high above you, and make you tremble as you look up, while treading the slippery pavement; and you know that if the crane-chain were to slip, or the hooks to which the ponderous packages are affixed to give way, you must be crushed like an egg which an elephant tramples upon; for danger ever dangles in the air about Billingsgate. The pavement is often blocked up by barrels of oranges and herrings, and hampers of dried sprats, the latter crammed together as close as white-bait in the stomach of an alderman when he has just dined at Lovegrove's. Sometimes the atmosphere is so impregnated with the smell of shrimps, that you almost fancy it has been raining shrimp sauce. You are now, as it were, in the very manufactory, where fish are brought and emptied out to be sold; where there is no attempt at show; but, rough and shining as when they flapped about on the ocean sand, or were thrown from the first hand ashore, so do you see them here in the early morning, rough and fresh as potatoes just dug out of the mould. There is none of that clean blue twilight look which gleams and plays about the shops of the West-End fishmongers, and is sometimes enlivened by the sunny flash of the gold-fishes that float about the silver-looking globes, which give such a picturesque appearance to the shops in that more refined neighbourhood. Here all is of "the fish, fishy." To this "rough and ready" market, those who wish to see how matters are managed must come early; for a minute or two before five o'clock the wholesale dealers are seated in their stalls, or recesses; while at the end of the market, nearest the river, the porters are drawn up in a row, each ready with his first load of fish, each standing within the allotted line, like hounds eager to spring from the leash. The clock strikes, and off they rush, helter skelter, every man Jack putting his best leg foremost, each eager to be the first to reach the stall of his employer. Slap goes the skate out of the baskets--they shoot out cod like coke, pitching the plaice wherever they can find room; and off they run for another load at the same rapid pace, nor cease until the salesman has received the whole of his stock.