Highways and Byways in London Part 27

Yet, it must be said on behalf of human nature, that there is kindness to be met with even in the maligned 'bus. If, for instance, some "absent-minded beggar" should happen to get in without possessing the necessary pence, at least half the 'bus are immediately ready to offer the deficit; and hands are similarly always stretched out to help in the lame and the blind.

[Ill.u.s.tration: _"Benk, Benk!!"_]

Even should a fellow pa.s.senger be exceptionally conversational, it does not, I may add, usually answer to talk much to the casual neighbour on a 'bus, even if it be by way of ingratiating yourself with "the ma.s.ses." Especially does this rule hold good where young women are concerned. A seriously-minded girl--a girl, too, who was not a bit of a flirt, or indeed remarkably pretty--once confessed to me her sad experiences in that line. Being much interested in democratic politics, she had one fine day begun to talk--on the 'bus roof--to a young artisan on the "Eight Hours' Bill." She imagined herself to be getting along swimmingly, when suddenly the young man, hitherto very intelligent and respectful, began to "nudge" her (this being, I have reason to believe, the first preliminary to courts.h.i.+p in his cla.s.s).

From "nudging" he proceeded to "squeezing"; and, finally, could it be fancy, or was it an arm that began ominously to encircle her waist?

She did not stay to investigate the phenomenon, but clambered down the iron staircase with inelegant haste--a sadder and a wiser young woman!

Another time I myself was "riding," as the c.o.c.kneys term it, on the outside of a 'bus towards the sylvan park of Kennington, and, fired no doubt by the lovely summer day, began--with more enthusiasm than prudence--to discuss current topics with my neighbour on the "garden seat." He was a well-mannered youth, and for a while I was much edified by his conversation--until, that is, his sudden interjection of "There's a taisty 'at a-crawsin' of the rowd," in some inexplicable manner cooled me off.

Carlyle was a constant traveller by 'bus, which economy, it may be, agreed well with his Scotch thriftiness. Mrs. Carlyle, on one of her solitary returns to their Chelsea home, describes him as meeting her by the omnibus, scanning the pa.s.sengers (like the Peri at the gate) from under his well-known old white hat. This white hat, even in Carlyle's day, used to attract attention. "Queer 'at the old gent wears," once remarked an unconsciously irreverent pa.s.senger to the conductor of the Chelsea omnibus. "Queer 'at," retorted the conductor reprovingly; "it may be a queer 'at, but what would you give for the 'ed-piece that's inside of it?"

Cabs are vastly more luxurious than omnibuses, but are to be rigidly eschewed by the economical, except in cases where time is of as much value as money. The fact is, that it is almost necessary to overpay cabmen, and especially so if the "fare" be at all nervous. Hence it has been said with some truth, that life, to be at all worth living in London, should disregard extra sixpences. People of the Jonas Chuzzlewit type may, indeed, take cabs to their utmost s.h.i.+lling limits, but this is a proceeding hardly to be recommended to the sensitive. For the average cabman is prodigal in retort, and not generally reticent on the subject of imagined wrong. In the season overpaying is more than ever necessary, while hiring "by the hour" is, at least by the nervous, to be deprecated. The familiar device of paying one penny per minute, though fair enough in fact, has been characterised as "only possible to the hardened Londoner." Some people make a practice of only overpaying the cabman when, like John Gilpin, they are "on pleasure bent"; yet I do not know how the cabman is supposed to divine their mission.

The hansom--"the gondola of London," as Disraeli called it--is far preferable to the antiquated "four-wheeler" or "growler," a vehicle which has never been really popular since Wainwright murdered Harriet Lane, and inconsiderately carried about her mutilated body in one of these conveyances, tied up in American cloth. True, hansoms have their faults. Thus the hansom horse is sometimes afflicted with a mania for going round and round in a manner which suggests his having been brought up in a circus. Sometimes he does nothing but twist his head back to look at his fare; sometimes he persists on turning into every "mews" he pa.s.ses; sometimes he jibs in a way altogether distracting to a nervous pa.s.senger who can only, for the moment, behold the horse and the driver; but still there is a "smartness" about the well-turned-out hansom that cannot be gainsaid. The acme of smartness is, perhaps, a private hansom with a liveried driver; these, however, are exclusively seen in the haunts of fas.h.i.+on. It is, perhaps, well for the London resident to be liberally inclined, for in an incredibly short s.p.a.ce of time his or her "ways" become known to the cab-driving community, and facilities for getting cabs largely depend on their verdict. It may be added that if the hansom-driver is inclined to be pert (a natural inclination, considering the height of his elevation above the general public), more generally the "growler" is morose, and given to a huskiness that is suggestive of that abode of light and polished bra.s.s--the "poor man's club."

[Ill.u.s.tration: _The Hansom._]

The visitors to London vary, like the omnibus scents, with the varying year. In the spring and early summer, it is the fas.h.i.+onable world that mainly haunts its streets; in the later summer, the French, Italians, Germans--especially Germans--flock with everlasting red Baedekers (indeed, in the London streets in August, you but rarely hear your own language spoken); in autumn, it is chiefly Americans who abound, provided with all "Europe" in the compa.s.s of one guide-book; in January the country cousins, and thrifty housewives generally, come up for the day, armed with lists of alarming length, to swell the crowds at the winter sales.

One of the things that strikes the foreigner, new to England and England's ways, most in London, is the regulation of the street traffic. The innumerable vehicles that throng the highways of London, every moment threatening, or seeming to threaten, a "block"; the continuous rumble of many wheels,--omnibuses, cabs, drays, vans, bicycles, motors,--all these, an apparently limitless force, are stopped, as if by magic, by "the man in blue" simply holding up an arm. All power, for the moment, is vested in him; he is here the one authority against which there is no appeal. Under the protection of the policeman's aegis, the most timid foot-pa.s.senger may pa.s.s in perfect security; the flood will be stayed while his arm, like that of Moses of old, is raised. And there is no such thing as disobedience.

Be the bicyclist never so bold, be the hansom-driver never so smart, woe betide him if he disobey the mandate! Under the policeman's faithful pilotage, the big crossings are safe; danger only lurks in the smaller ones, where his presence is not felt. The "man in blue"

is, generally, a charming and urbane personage; if, in the exercise of his calling, he sometimes chance to develop a certain curtness, it is, perhaps, that he has in his time been overmuch badgered.... His urbanity, as a rule, is marvellous; and in great contrast to that of his continental brethren. In Germany, the officer of the law shakes his list in people's faces; in France, he gesticulates wildly; in Italy, he is timid and ineffectual; in England, he merely raises his arm, and behold! like the G.o.ds on Olympus, he is obeyed.

Londoners are a curiously callous race, and are, as has been shown, remarkably little interested in their neighbours. The fact is, their life is much too busy for such interest. In the country, your neighbours know everything you do, your business, your position, your income even. In London, all that your neighbours know of you is that you come and that you go; and, once gone, your place knows you no more. Miss Amy Levy, who, more than any other poet, has expressed the feeling of London streets, puts the idea well, in these most pathetic lines:

"They trod the streets and squares where now I tread, With weary hearts, a little while ago; When, thin and grey, the melancholy snow Clung to the leafless branches overhead; Or when the smoke-veiled sky grew stormy-red In autumn; with a re-arisen woe Wrestled, what time the pa.s.sionate spring winds blow; And paced scorched stones in summer;--they are dead.

"The sorrow of their souls to them did seem As real as mine to me, as permanent.

To-day, it is the shadow of a dream, The half-forgotten breath of breezes spent.

So shall another soothe his woe supreme-- No more he comes, who this way came and went."

(_A London Plane-Tree._)

The Londoner dies--the great bell of St. Pancras may toll out his sixty years, or the deep tones of Westminster call to his memorial service; yet none the less a dance is given at the house next door, and the immediate neighbours know not of the death until they see the hea.r.s.e and the long row of funereal trappings. Truly was it said, that in a crowd is ever the greatest solitude! The mighty pulse of London, that

"Of your coming and departure heeds, As the Seven Seas may heed a pebble cast,"

beats on just the same though you are gone. The vast machine grinds out its daily life, the propellers work, the wheels of Juggernaut hum, while, like a poor moth, you spin your little hour in the sun, and then go under. This terrible desolation of London has resulted, and still results, in many a tragedy, bitter as that of young Chatterton, the boy poet, found dead in a Brooke Street garret:

... "the marvellous boy, The sleepless soul that perished in his pride...."

[Ill.u.s.tration: _A Doorstep Party._]

London, the "stony-hearted stepmother," as De Quincey called Oxford Street--has many a time given her children stones for bread. Many are the men and women, poets, authors, journalists, actors, who come up to the vast city, attracted by "the deceitful lights of London," to starve in Soho or Bloomsbury garrets (Bloomsbury, to which place, it is said, more MSS. are returned than to any other locality in the British Isles). Too proud to beg, too sensitive to fight, they soon become ousted in the struggle for life, and very often get pushed altogether out of the ranks; or, if they do succeed, are soured by years of trial and suffering. The biographies of successful men sometimes tell of such early struggles: but of the many who are not successful, the submerged ones, you do not hear. Some of the Bloomsbury and Bayswater boarding-houses afford sad evidence of retrenched fortunes and squalid lives. The ragged window blind, the dirty tablecloth, covered always with remains of meals; the sad, lined, discontented faces pressed close to the dingy panes, the eternal smell of onions or fried fish, the general wretchedness and frowsiness of everything--all tell tales of a sadder kind than those of d.i.c.kens's Mrs. Tibbs or Mrs. Todgers. And, descending yet lower in the social scale, individual cases become yet sadder. I once lived in a London square, next door to an empty house. For two days a battered corpse lay on the other side of the wall, in the garden, and no one knew of it. It was only the poor caretaker left in the "mansion" who, weary of existence, had herself severed the Gordian knot of life. And, in the immediate neighbourhood of another square of "desirable residences," no less than three murders was considered the usual winter average--murders, too, of the worst and most squalid type.

Such, in London, is the close juxtaposition of "velvet and rags,"

luxury and misery. London is the refuge of blighted lives, of the queer flotsam and jetsam of humanity. Where can they all come from?

and what were their beginnings? Among such waifs and strays do I recall one old man--feeble, pitiful, wizened, who carried an empty black bag, and stretched it out towards me appealingly. The contents, if any, of the black bag, I never discovered; but I often gave him a penny, simply because he was so unutterably pathetic. He is gone now, and his place knows him no more. But he always haunts my dreams. And the afflicted girl--white-faced and expressionless--who sat for many years close to the "Horse-Shoe" of Tottenham Court Road (indeed, she may sit there still), her face calm as that of a Caryatid, as though oblivious of Time and inured to suffering, through all the noise and tumult of drovers' carts and omnibuses; she has often seemed to me as a type of the eternal, dumb sorrow of humanity.

Yet this isolation of London, terrible as it is for the poor and suffering,--is,--for the well-to-do cla.s.s at least,--in some ways advantageous. For one thing, it allows more liberty of action;--for another, it prevents any undue personal pride. It is, fortunately, rare indeed for the individual to be as conceited in London as he is in the provinces. True,--London has occasional aesthetic crazes and literary fas.h.i.+ons; but, as a rule,--and with the exception of special cliques and coteries such as those of Chelsea and Hampstead,--people are not unduly puffed up in London. The city, with its vast size, acts as an automatic equaliser;--personality becomes lost,--and individuals tend to find their proper level. The Londoner is apt to realise,--that, in the words of Mr. Gilbert's song,--"he never would be missed." Nowhere is there more liberty; no one even notices you as you walk the streets. A man used, some years ago, to walk about the Bloomsbury squares with long hair in be-ribboned pigtails, and in a harlequin dress; the street-boys hardly marked him; even a Chinaman in full costume only attracts a following of a few nursery-maids and perambulators. But in London it really matters very little what you do, or how you dress. Dress here is in fact immaterial, unless you are bent on social successes. Eyes are not for ever scanning you critically, as they do in country villages. And, for ladies who work in slums and "mean streets,"--the safest plan is always to wear dark, shabby, and quiet clothes--clothes that do not "a.s.sert themselves."

Otherwise, it is likely that she may be accosted as "dear" or "Sally,"--invited to take "a drop o' tea," or otherwise chaffed by rough women standing akimbo at street doors. This practice of standing at doors and gossiping would appear, indeed, to be the main occupation of women of the lower cla.s.s; but, poor things! they enjoy it; and their life, after all, must contain but few enjoyments. It is perhaps, less certain that their babies enjoy the "cold step," on which they are unceremoniously flopped at all hours of the day. An overdose of "cold step" may, indeed, partially account for the bronchitis which riddles the ranks of the children of the poor. You may see a family of six slum children playing happily in the damp gutter one week; the week following, you may find half of them dead or dying from a visitation of this fell plague. To say that the children of London are decimated by it would be putting the case much too mildly. The mothers, however, take a different view. "She niver looked 'erself agin sence that 'ere crool vaccination,"--a mother will say placidly,--ignoring the cold step and the bronchitis that did the work. "Cold step," indeed, to their minds, acts as a refres.h.i.+ng tonic; they call it "bringin' 'im,--or 'er,--up 'ardy."

That "pity for a horse o'erdriven" that often catches you by the throat in London streets,--is yet almost cast into the shade by the far sadder lot of helpless humanity. 'Bus horses, at any rate, are well fed,--to say nothing of their being worn out, and released from their sufferings after an average period of four years; besides, you can always comfort yourself by refusing to travel by 'bus (I have a friend, indeed, who always vows that he will NOT on any consideration make one of twenty-eight people for two horses to pull);--but it is little or nothing you can do for the alleviation of the lot of the slum babies. Sad indeed is the case of some of these. For, in some dingy and romantically-named "Rose Lane,"--or "Marigold-Avenue,"--(the filthier the London lanes, the more poetic their names),--baby-farms flourish and spread. Once, I remember coming home sick at heart, from a visitation of one such slummy "lane." In a dirty "two-pair back" I found an old woman of witch-like aspect and doubtful sobriety, three mangy cats, and two miserable "farmed" babies,--one an infant, wretched, scrofulous, and covered with sores, lying on a dirty flock bed, its eyes half-closed, in the last stage of exhaustion;--the other a girl of two, wasted and cadaverous, sitting on the usual "cold step," and gazing with pathetic and suffering eyes over to the cabbage-laden and redolent gutter that, filthier far than any in Italian town or foreign Ghetto, apparently did duty, in the middle of the paved alley, as a common dustbin. (Truly, it well becomes us to decry,--in this matter of cleanliness, our neighbours of Central Europe!) I went away sadly; yet what could I have done? I could not take the poor neglected babies home; even though they probably belonged to girls who were not too regular in paying for their weekly maintenance. Nothing short of bringing in the Law would have been of any use, and I was not sure enough of my facts to do this. Yet that elder child's pathetic and mournfully patient eyes still afflict my memory.

Poor, little, neglected slum children! Miss Dorothy Tennant (Lady Stanley), has by her unique art surrounded these waifs with all that glamour of poetry and sentiment that had, by a foolish custom, been hitherto exclusively reserved for the children of the rich. Even Du Maurier always made his slum children ugly and repulsive. Nature, however, knows no such differences. And,--apart from Miss Dorothy Tennant's charming ragam.u.f.fins,--who has not stopped to admire, in some back street, the graceful dancing of some half-dozen of small ragged girls? girls in shocking shoes,--but who, nevertheless, hop so delightfully, and with such sense of time and rhythm, to the wheezy old organ, the wheeziest of its tribe, that they have inveigled into their custom. Indeed, I have sometimes doubted whether the organ-man does not himself engage the small girls to dance, as a catch-penny _ruse_. They do difficult, intricate, ever-changing steps:

"advance, evade, Unite, dispart, and dally, Re-set, coquet, and gallopade,"

as Mr. Austin Dobson hath it.

It is not, indeed, only in hospital wards that the children of the great city are pathetic. I have been moved (like Mrs. Meagles), almost to tears, at the sight of a big Ragged School of small boys marching, ten abreast, in perfect drill, in a large phalanx, numbering about five hundred. Five hundred unwanted little human souls! each child, of infant years, with no mother to love it; more dest.i.tute in a way than even the slum baby, regarded as a cipher merely; it is surely a sight pitiful enough to make the angels weep!

[Ill.u.s.tration: _Hop-scotch._]

All the street child's usual stock in-trade, in the way of toys, is chalk (for drawing those incessant white squares on the pavement), perhaps a few worn marbles, and a selection of old b.u.t.tons. The chalked squares, of course, refer to the ancient game of "hop-scotch,"

so called because the player in trying to get a stone into a square, may only "hop" over the lines which are "scotched" or "traced" on the ground. The London children often use, instead of stones, broken bits of gla.s.s or crockery they call "chaneys"; and to own a private "chaney" is considered, I believe, highly genteel. The familiar game of "Tip-cat," and the skipping rope, have rival attractions; and great enjoyment may be derived from a primitive swing--a bit of rope deftly fixed between area rails or on lamp-posts. The pavement is the London child's playground, for, though in some quarters a movement has, I believe, been started for opening some few of the select "squares" to poor children at certain days and hours, it would not appear to have done much as yet. The pavement games and the Board Schools together often produce a quite wonderful arithmetical sharpness: "The idea of Em'ly gittin' a prize," I heard a ragged girl of tender years remark contemptuously to her equally ragged companion, "_Em'ly!_ why, the girl's a perfect fool; past ten year owld, and can't move the decimal point!" Like other children, these little pariahs of the street have their "make-believe" games; for instance, I have seen them look longingly into toy-shop windows, and heard them talk to each other of every article there, as though it were their own peculiar property; I have also overheard them, sitting on a West-End doorstep, appropriate the mansion thus: "Ain't this 'ere a fine 'ouse, M'ria? didn't know as yer ma was sich a toff. When are y'going to arst me in to tea?" &c., &c. What matter if they pepper their speech continually with such c.o.c.kneyisms as "not me," "chawnce it," "you ain't no cla.s.s"; they are generally sweet English children all the same, and immeasurably superior to their surroundings. And such surroundings as they are!

"Our street" (as a little Board School boy described his home in an essay), "is a long lane betwixt two big streets.

Our street is not so clean as the big streets, coz yer mothers throws the slops and things in the gutter, and chucks bits of _Lloyds_ and cabbige leaves in the middle of the road. That's why there's allus a funny smell down our street, speshally when it's hot."

Another such essay thus describes a London "Bank Holiday":

"They call this happy day Bank Holiday, becose the banks shut up shop, so as people can't put their money in, but has to spend it. People begin talking about Bank Holiday a long time afore it comes, but they don't begin to spree about much till the night afore.... Bank Holidays are the happiest days of your life, becose you can do nearly what you like, and the perlice don't take no notice of you.... There's only one thing as spoils Bank Holiday, and that is not being fine and hot. When it's wet all the gentlemen get savige and fight one another, and pull their sweetarts and missises about. I'm very sorry for them all round, becose it is a shame for to see. But when it's fine and hot, the gentlemen all larf and are kind, and the women dance about and drink beer like the gentlemen. Everybody's right, and boys don't get skittled round."

But, of course, the Board Schools have done, and are doing, much to improve the rising generation. It is no small tribute to them that into whatever slum or rough district you elect to go, you are safe if you surround yourself with a bodyguard of street children. And for the matter of that, even that pariah of the schools, the London street arab, is with his "pluck" and general resourcefulness, distinctly attractive. Have not d.i.c.kens and other novelists adopted him as their hero? All honour to him if he outgrow his base surroundings; small wonder if he is like poor Tip, "of the prison prisonous and of the streets streety." Quickwitted, idle, and hardened to privation, he may, when he grows up, turn to honest work, or he may sink into a "loafer,"--one of those mysterious beings who arise, as out of thin air, from the empty street whenever a four wheel cab, with its burden of boxes, arrives at its destination.

[Ill.u.s.tration: _The Return, Bank Holiday._]

The conversation of the London working man hardly, perhaps, shows him at his best. The familiar but very unpleasant adjective that invariably greets your ears as you walk behind him, is in the main its distinguis.h.i.+ng element, and, notwithstanding its more or less cla.s.sical derivation (from "by'r Lady"), it is somewhat too suggestive for squeamish ears. Besides, from the frequency of its use, it would appear to mean nothing at all, but simply to be a foolish habit that cannot even plead the excuse of c.o.c.kneyism.

What, by-the-way, is the derivation of the term "c.o.c.kney"? Its beginnings, as usual in etymological questions, are abstruse; for instance, the word began by meaning a "a c.o.c.kered child"; then it was synonymous for "a milksop," "an effeminate fellow"; then, (16th cent.), "a derisive appellation for a townsman as the type of effeminacy, in contrast to the hardier inhabitants of the country."

Then it became "one born in the city of London, within sound of Bow Bells"; a Bow-Bell c.o.c.kney being always a term "more or less contemptuous or bantering, and particularly used to connote the characteristics in which the born Londoner is supposed to be inferior to other Englishmen."

According, however, to an old writer, the term "c.o.c.kney"

arose thus: "A Cittizen's sonne riding with his father into the Country, asked when he heard a horse neigh, what the horse did; his father answered, the horse doth neigh; riding further he heard a c.o.c.ke crow, and said, doth the _c.o.c.ke neigh_ too? and therefore c.o.c.kney or c.o.c.knie, by inversion thus: _inc.o.c.k_, q. _incoctus_, i., raw or unripe in Country-man's affaires."

Some c.o.c.kneyisms are frankly puzzling, some are actually startling.

Factory girls are specially prodigal of them. Now, the average factory girl is often rather a rough diamond, but there is really no harm in her when once you get used to her ways. She has, it is true, an embarra.s.sing habit of shouting into the ear of the inoffensive pa.s.ser-by; she may even (if she happen, as frequently occurs, to be walking with two others, three abreast) try to push you into the gutter; but this is simply her fresh exuberance of spirits; she means no ill by it. And her frank utterances are not always rudely meant.

For instance, the c.o.c.kney remark, "You are a fine old corf-drop, you are!" may even leave the person addressed in some bewilderment as to whether it be a compliment or an insult. It means, however, merely, that you are an "innocent," an ignoramus, a tyro in the ways of the world. "'Ere's a fine fourpenny lot!" or "Where did you get that 'at?"

seem, on the other hand, to sound a more distinctly aggressive note.

Next to factory-girls and flower-girls, costermongers talk, perhaps, the raciest "c.o.c.kney." I once knew an old flower-man with a wonderful gift of the gab, who was always persuading me to sell him my husband's old boots, or "a' old skirt for the missus" for some pot of depressed-looking fern. "Did y' ever see sich fine plants?" he will cry admiringly of his barrow-full; "all growed up in cold air, I don't tell you no story. Wy, a gent larst year as kep' a mews, 'e bought a box 'o stershuns orf o' me, an' this year 'e come back an' said as 'e didn't wawnt no more o' that sort, cos wy? they blowed too well, they did, and made 'is winders look that toffy, as 'is landlord see 'em, and 'is rent wus riz on 'im. Now, this 'ere cherry-pie, you niver see sich bewties, got real stalks an' roots, _they_ 'ave; been kep' warm under the children's bed, down our court; 102, Little Red Fox Yard; kep' in they wuz, cos of the rain; and blimy if they don't look all the better for it!"

The flower-girls have perhaps less voluble "patter," but their cry, "Fine Market Bunch!" "'Ere y'are!" is no less patiently reiterated.

The London flower-girl, good-looking as she often is, is yet, perhaps, hardly an ideal embodiment of the G.o.ddess Flora. To begin with, she is generally enveloped in a thick, rough, unromantic, fringed shawl, and wears an enormous black hat with a still more enormous feather, the latter in sad need of curling. Her abundant hair is coiled loosely on to the nape of her neck, and hangs, in a thick black fringe, over her eyes and ears; anything more totally unlike the dainty, slim, Venetian flower-girl can hardly be imagined. Some kind ladies did, indeed, get up a benevolent scheme for providing London flower-sellers with neat dresses, bonnets, and hats; two or three women, garbed in this costume, may still occasionally be seen at London's princ.i.p.al flower-mart, Oxford Circus. But Londoners are a conservative race, and it is, I imagine, doubtful if the recipients themselves much appreciate these gifts.

[Ill.u.s.tration: _Flower Girls._]

The organ-grinders who delight so many humble folk, and enrage and afflict so many of the richer cla.s.s, mostly hail from Hatton Garden and its immediate neighbourhood. The street organ,--"piano-organ" as its proud possessor generally terms it,--is usually the sole support of the family. The organ-grinders are, as a rule, Italian; and are generally to be seen in their picturesque native costume. The organ, however, requires, to catch many pennies, one, at least, of two useful adjuncts; viz., a baby in a cradle, or a dressed-up monkey. The baby sleeps peacefully through the noisiest tunes (what nerves of iron that child must possess!), the monkey dances and postures, even climbing up the area railings. Even in places where the organ-man is cursed, he often reaps a rich harvest of pennies, paid him to go away. Each organ has its special "pitches," its settled rounds. Thus, coming early from Hatton Garden, they will frequent Bloomsbury, say at 9 A.M., and work slowly towards the West End and back, to give the boarding houses in Bedford Place yet another serenade by the light of the setting sun.

When once started, the organ-man is pitiless in giving you his whole repertoire. Poor John Leech! it is said that they helped to aggravate the lingering illness of which he died. But there can be no doubt that they lighten the drab, unlovely lives of the London poor.

"Children, when they see thy supple Form approach, are out like shots; Half-a-bar sets several couple Waltzing in convenient spots.