I was now on a fair footing with them, and soon acquir’d considerable influence.  I propos’d some reasonable alterations in their chappel<4> laws, and carried them against all opposition.  From my example, a great part of them left their muddling breakfast of beer, and bread, and cheese, finding they could with me be suppli’d from a neighboring house with a large porringer of hot water-gruel, sprinkled with pepper, crumbl’d with bread, and a bit of butter in it, for the price of a pint of beer, viz., three half-pence.  This was a more comfortable as well as cheaper breakfast, and kept their heads clearer.  Those who continued sotting with beer all day, were often, by not paying, out of credit at the alehouse, and us’d to make interest with me to get beer; their light, as they phrased it, being out.  I watch’d the pay-table on Saturday night, and collected what I stood engag’d for them, having to pay sometimes near thirty shillings a week on their account.  This, and my being esteem’d a pretty good riggite, that is, a jocular verbal satirist, supported my consequence in the society.  My constant attendance (I never making a St. Monday) recommended me to the master; and my uncommon quickness at composing occasioned my being put upon all work of dispatch, which was generally better paid.  So I went on now very agreeably.

<4> “A printing-house is always called a chapel by the
workmen, the origin of which appears to have been that
printing was first carried on in England in an ancient
chapel converted into a printing-house, and the title
has been preserved by tradition.  The bien venu among
the printers answers to the terms entrance and footing
among mechanics; thus a journeyman, on entering a
printing-house, was accustomed to pay one or more gallons
of beer for the good of the chapel; this custom was
falling into disuse thirty years ago; it is very properly
rejected entirely in the United States.”—­W.  T. F.

My lodging in Little Britain being too remote, I found another in Duke-street, opposite to the Romish Chapel.  It was two pair of stairs backwards, at an Italian warehouse.  A widow lady kept the house; she had a daughter, and a maid servant, and a journeyman who attended the warehouse, but lodg’d abroad.  After sending to inquire my character at the house where I last lodg’d she agreed to take me in at the same rate, 3s. 6d. per week; cheaper, as she said, from the protection she expected in having a man lodge in the house.  She was a widow, an elderly woman; had been bred a Protestant, being a clergyman’s daughter, but was converted to the Catholic religion by her husband, whose memory she much revered; had lived much among people of distinction, and knew a thousand anecdotes of them as far back as the times of Charles the Second.  She was lame in her knees with the gout, and, therefore, seldom stirred out of her room, so sometimes wanted company; and hers was