The Six Jolly Fellowship Porters, already mentioned as a tavern¹ of a dropsical appearance, had long settled down into a state of hale infirmity. In its whole constitution it had not a straight floor, and hardly a straight line; but it had outlasted³, and clearly would yet outlast², many a better-trimmed building, many a sprucer publichouse. Externally, it was a narrow lopsided wooden jumble⁴ of corpulent windows heaped one upon another as you might heap as many toppling oranges, with a crazy wooden verandah impending⁵ over the water; indeed the whole house, inclusive of the complaining flag-staff on the roof, impended⁶ over the water, but seemed to have got into the condition of a faint-hearted diver who has paused so long on the brink⁷ that he will never go in at all.

This description applies to the river-frontage of the Six Jolly Fellowship Porters. The back of the establishment, though the chief entrance was there, so contracted that it merely represented in its connexion with the front, the handle of a flat iron set upright on its broadest end. This handle stood at the bottom of a wilderness⁹ of court and alley¹⁰: which wilderness pressed so hard and close upon the Six Jolly Fellowship Porters as to leave the hostelry not an inch of ground beyond its door. For this reason, in combination with the fact that the house was all but afloat at high water, when the Porters had a family wash the linen¹¹ subjected to that operation might usually be seen drying on lines stretched across the reception-rooms and bed-chambers.

The wood forming the chimney-pieces, beams, partitions, floors and doors, of the Six Jolly Fellowship Porters, seemed in its old age

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