CHAPTER VII.
THE OYSTER AT ITS JOURNEY'S END.
Oyster Stalls; How to Open the Oyster; an Oyster Supper; Beer, Wines, and Spirits; Roasted, Fried, Stewed, and Scolloped Oysters; Oyster Soup, and Oyster Sauce; Broiled Oysters; Oyster Pie; Oyster Toast; Oyster Patties; Oyster Powder; Pickled Oysters; Oyster Loaves; Oyster Omelet; Cabbage, Larks, and Oysters; and Frogs and Oysters.
"If where Fleet Ditch with muddy current flows
You chance to roam, where oyster-tubs in rows
Are ranged beside the posts, there stay thy haste,
And with the savoury fish indulge thy taste."—Gay.
I am writing for the Million, and the least the Million can do in return is every one to buy a copy of my book, and bid everybody to recommend everybody to do the same. The Fleet Ditch, which was once in the centre of the old Fleet Market, has disappeared since Gay wrote the lines I have just quoted, and now forms the great sewer of Farringdon Street; but with the Ditch have not disappeared the oyster-stalls; they have only changed their locality, and, like the Wandering Jew, have turned up in the most out-of-the-way places, where nobody would expect to find them. I know what stall-oysters are; for when I was a school-boy many and oft is the time I spent my pennies, on the sly, at a stall behind the old cathedral that just abutted the ancient Market Cross. The maiden that opened them had clean white hands—for, boy as I was, I could not have endured a baronet's hand to open oysters for me; for—
"The damsel's knife the gaping shell commands,
While the salt liquor streams between her hands."
Never have I eaten finer oysters than those, fresh almost within a few hours from the placid Solent, upon which now the palace of Osborne looks down, and calls forth the heartfelt prayer of "God bless the Queen," as we pass beneath the grass-covered slopes, reminding every Wykehamist of the founder's motto, "Manners maketh Men;" for Her Majesty is the tenant of Wykeham's College, and his arms and motto are carved upon the gates of the Queen's royal residence of Osborne.