“Say, then, you wanted a light—mind, you know, those was the days when the sojers used to carry the musket they called Brown Bess, as went off with a flint and steel, long before the percushin cap times—well, say you wanted a light, you laid your match ready, took your tinder-box off the chimneypiece, opened it, took the bit o’ flint in one hand and the steel or iron in the other, and at it you went—nick, nick, nick, nick, nick, with the sparks flying like fun, till one of ’em dropped on your black tinder, and seemed to lie there like a tiny star. You were in luck’s way if you did that at the end of five minutes; and then you made yourself into a pair o’ human bellows, and blew away at that spark, till it began to glow and get bigger, when you held to it one of the brimstone matches, and that began to melt and burn blue, and flamed up; when the chances was as the stifling stuff got up your nose, and down your throat, and you choked, and sneezed, and puffed the match out, and had to begin all over again.
“Well, that’s a long rigmarole about old ways of getting a light; but I mention it because we’d got one o’ them set-outs on board, and that’s the way we used to work. You know, after that came little bottles in which you dipped a match, and lit it that way—in fosseros, I think you call it. Next came what was a reg’lar wonder to people then—lucifers, which in them days was flat-headed matches, which you put between a piece of doubled-up stuff, like a little book cover, and pulled ’em out smart. Soon after, some one brought out them as you rubbed on the bottoms of the box on sand-paper, and they called them congreves; but by degrees that name dropped out, and we got back to lucifers for name, and now folks never says nothing but matches.
“In the days I’m telling you about, I was capen of a lighter—a big, broad, flat barge, working on the Thames; not one of your narrow monkey boats as run on the canals, though it was the blowing up of the Tilbury the other day as put me in mind of what I’m going to tell you in my long-winded, roundabout fashion. But I s’pose you ain’t in no hurry, so let me go on in my own way.
“You see, your genuine lighterman ain’t a lively sort of a chap, the natur’ of his profession won’t lot him be; for he’s always doing things in a quiet, slow, easy-going fashion. Say he’s in the river: well, he tides up and he tides down, going as slow as you like, and only giving a sweep now and then with a long oar, to keep the barge’s head right, and stay her from coming broadside on to the piers o’ the bridges.
“Well, that’s slow work, says you; and so it is. And it ain’t no better when your bargeman gets into a canal, for then he’s only towed by a horse as ain’t picked out acause he’s a lovely Arab as gallops fifty mile an hour—one and a half or two’s about his cut, and that ain’t lively. As for your new-fangled doing with your steam tugs, a-puffing, and a-blowing, and as smoking, like foul chimneys on a foggy day, what I got to say about them is as it’s disgustin’, and didn’t ought to be allowed. Just look at ’em on the river now, a-drawing half-a-dozen barges full o’ coal at once, and stirring up the river right to the bottom! Ah! there warn’t not no such doings when I was young, and a good job too.
“Well, as I was going to tell you, I was capen of the Betsy—as fine a lighter as you’d ha’ found on the river in them days, and I’d got two hands aboard with me. There was Billy Jinks—Gimlet we used to call him, because he squinted so. I never did see a fellow as could squint like Billy could. He’d got a werry good pair o’ eyes, on’y they was odd uns and didn’t fit. They didn’t belong to him, you know, and was evidently put in his head in a hurry when he were made, and he couldn’t do nothing with ’em. Them eyes of his used to do just whatever they liked, and rolled and twissened about in a way as you never did see; and I’ve often thought since as it was them eyes o’ Billy’s as made him take to drink—and drink he could, like a fish.
“T’other chap was Bob Solly—Toeboy they used to call him on the river, acause of his lame foot and the thick sole he used to wear to make one leg same length as t’other; and perhaps, after all, it was Bob’s toe as made him such a drinking chap, and not the example as Gimlet set him. Anyhow, that there don’t matter; only when I’m a-telling a thing I likes to be exact, as one used to be with the inwoices o’ the goods one had to deliver up or down the river.
“Well, I was going up and down the river with all sorts o’ goods, from ships, and wharves, and places—sundry things, you know, for I never had no dealings with coals—and one day, down the river, we loaded up with barrels off a wharf down by Tilbury—not the Tilbury as was blowed up the other day, ’cause that was only a monkey boat, but Tilbury down the river, you know; where there’s the fort, and soldiers, and magazines, and all them sort o’ things.
“Loaded up we were, and the little barrels all lying snug, and covered up with tarpaulins, and us a-waiting for the tide to come—for we was going up to Dumphie’s Wharf, up there at Isleworth—when Bob Solly comes up to me, and he says, says he—
“‘Guv’nor,’ he says, ‘we ain’t got no taties.’