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A’ GREENWICH pensioner! Did any of my readersever ponder on that 
strangé composition’ of battered humanity and blue serge?» Did they 
never feel’ something approaching very near gratitude on’ passing, 
in the metropolis, a Greenwich pensioner, who with his honest, darret. 
out, unabashed front, looks as bluntly and as wonderingly at the’ bustle 
and splendour around him, as does an unsophisticated wether suddenly 
removed from South Downs to Cheapside, whilst shaking his woollen 
coat beneath the whip of the coachman to the Lord Mayor. What a mix- 
ture of gravity and wonderment is in the poor brute’s countenance! 
how with its meek, uplifted head, it stares at the effulgent vehicle;— 
runs leaping at the coach-wheels, mistaking them for hurdles—falls, 
awe-struck, back, at the gilt and beavered greatness of the footman’s 
cocked-hat—then, suddenly awakened from its amazement by the lurcher’s 
teeth or the driver’s stick, makes an unlucky spring of some three feet 
into the air, catches a glance of its figure in the mirrored walls of a 
silk-mercer’s, and, startled at the sight, dashes through the first court,— 
carrying perhaps a few yards upon its back, some red-faced, nankeen- 
gaitered little stock-broker, whose spattered small-clothes are for a 
time unregarded, in the mighty rush of drovers, butchers, dogs, and 
idlers. 
Now such is the real Greenwich pensioner. When I say real, I mean, 
one who abhors London worse than he does a Frenchman; who thinks 
there is nothing to be seen in it, unless, indeed; it be Nelson’s tomb, 
in St. 'Paul’s, or the Ship, public-house, in Tooley-street. _ London is to 
him ‘a never-failing source of merriment; that is; whilst he'is out of it. 
He sits at Greenwich, and ‘looking as sagely asa starling'ere he’ snaps 
at a fly, at the piled-up clouds of smoke hanging over the metropolis, or 
indeed ‘almost propped upon its chimney-pots, and, stretching forth’ his 
stick; significantly points them out to his former shipmates, asking them 
if they do not think “ there is something dark over there—-something of 
‘an’ “ox-eye’ to the west?” He, indeed, never ventures to London, 
amless*it be for afresh supply of tobacco, or to pay a quarterly visit to 
his grand-daughter, the upper housemaid in a gentleman’s family—and 
who,’ ‘indeed, thinks with horror upon his call, because the neighbours 
Jauigh at the ¢ocked-hat and the shoe-buckles of her relative; but prin- 
cipally beeause Richard, the baker’s young man, declares he hates all - 
sailors. ‘The visit is never avery lengthened one, especially if the girl lives 
far tothe west: for her grandfather has to call upon Will Somebody, 
who’ set up, with his prize-money, a public-house in Wapping: ‘so\ off he 
starts; hurries up the Strand, touches his hat from a point of’ principle 
as’ he nears Somerset House; puts out more canvas, and away for 
Temple Bar. The pensioner has not yet, however, sat for his picture.” 
We have all read of crabs being despoiled of their claws, locusts ‘of 
their entrails, and turtles of their brains, receiving in lieu thereof a 
pellet of cotton, and yet retaining life, and appearing, in the words of 
the experimentalizing and soft-hearted naturalist “ very lively and 
comfortable.”* Now, the real Greenwich pensioner’ distances all these ; 
he is, indeed, an enigma: nature knows not what to make of him. ‘He 
hath been suspended, like a schoolboy’s bob-cherry, a hundred times 
THE GREENWICH PENSIONER. 
* See Vaillant and Redi. 
