FRIARY COURT. 99 



According to the very excellent custom of the 

 Officers of the Royal Marines, &c. &:c., the travel- 

 lers mess together, at rather a lat6 hour, this meal 

 is generally called supper ; the mess-room may 

 hold four dozen when stowed as closely as the feed- 

 ers are at an election dinner. There is no table suffici- 

 ently ample to accommodate this number, but, by a 

 judicious juxta-position of three or four, varying 

 materially in height, a very picturesque board is 

 contrived ; the banquet room is not graced by chairs, 

 wooden benches being found to answer the purpose 

 quite as well ; and when a more numerous company 

 than usual is assembled, sundry extra seats are put 

 into request ; such as fish-maunds, tin saucepans, 

 and buckets, turned upside down, and adjusted 

 to the needful height by two or more courses of 

 bricks. 



Tom Hynes was president at the feast to which 

 we invited ourselves, the Lord of the Isles officiated 

 as Vice, on Tom's left we noticed Billy Brown ; 

 Charley Warn occupied a place on liis right, and 

 next to him sat Nickky OTlinn, and Jack O'Dia- 

 monds. The supper was too abundant for us to 

 attempt a detail of all the viands ; near the president 

 we noticed a dozen of boiled hakes ; the Baron did 

 his best at carving a stewed bullock's head ; one 

 guest very modestly appropriated two roast fowls to 

 himself, on the score of his ho^v'mg found them some- 

 where on the preceding night ; a huge dish smoked 

 most savourily of a species of compound ragout, 

 made of pieces of ham, beef, bread, cheese, potatoes, 

 turnips, onions, cold fish, and sundry other fragments 

 which formed the joint stock of such wallets as had 

 been doing peregrination amongst the charitable in 

 the course of the day. An ample tin cauldron held 

 about a wheel-barrrow-full of potatoes, brown and 

 beautiful from a neighbouring oven, near Tom Hynes 

 were three bottles of Holman's newly invented sauce, 

 which it appears had been borrowed by some one of 

 the party, (without the inventor's kno^^rledge) from 



