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Even the booksellers themselves feast one another before they buy and sell; and a trade sale, without a trade dinner to precede it, would be a very poor concern indeed. Fire companies and water companies, bubble companies and banking companies, all must be united and consolidated by a good dinner company. Your fat citizen, with a paunch that will scarce allow him to pass through the side avenue of Temple Bar, marks his feast days upon his sheet almanack, as a lawyer marks his term list with a double dash, thus =, and shakes in his easy chair like a sack of blubber as lie recapitulates the names of all the glorious good things of which he has partaken at the annual civic banquet at Fishmonger's Hall, or the Bible Association dinner at the City of London Tavern: at the mention of white bait, his lips smack together with joy, and he lisps out instinctively Blackwall: talk of a rump steak and Dolly's, his eyes grow wild with delight; and just hint at the fine green fat of a fresh killed turtle dressed at Birch's, and his whole soul's in arms for a corporation dinner. Reader, I have been led into this strain of thinking by an excursion I am about to make with Alderman Marigold and family, to enjoy the pleasures of a Sunday ordinary in the suburbs of the metropolis; an old fashioned custom that is now fast giving way to modern notions of refinement, and is therefore the more worthy of characteristic record.

Bernard Blackmantle.

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A SUNDAY RAMBLE TO HIGHGATE,

OR, THE CITS ORDINARY.

Bernard Blackmantle's first Excursion with the Marigold
Family—Lucubrations of the Alderman on the Alterations of
the Times—Sketches and Recollections on the Road—The Past
and the Present—Arrival at the Gate House, Highgate—The
Cit's Ordinary—Traits of Character—The Water Drinker, the
Vegetable Eater, and the Punster—Tom Cornish, the
Gourmand—Anecdote of old Tattersall and his Beef Eater—
Young Tat. and the Turnpike Man.