CHAPTER IX.

THE COSTERMONGERS AND RAG FAIR.

THERE is a wide, short street, or rather road, in the heart of London. The buildings are mean, the people who cluster against their doorways and in the alleys and courts that branch from this short, wide street, are wretched in appearance; their garments are patched and in piecemeal, and when untorn they are greasy and besmeared with filth.

In this street, crowded at night--on Saturday night it is almost impassable--children of a tender age may be seen begging for coppers and soliciting assistance from those of more mature years, but to the full as wretched as themselves. Vice is in every glance of their eyes. Crime has already made its graven lines in their young faces, and their language or dialect, (for it is not a language), is a combination of uncouth sounds, obscene imagery, and slang corruptions of the English tongue.

[Sidenote: ARCHBISHOP OF CANTERBURY'S GARDENS.]

This street, or road, is called the "New Cut," and is situated in Lambeth on the Surrey side of the Thames. It is reached from the City by Waterloo Bridge and the Waterloo road, and from the West End by Lambeth and Vauxhall bridges. Thousands are born, baptized, many beget children and die within the municipality of the Great Metropolis, and yet have never seen the New Cut--nay, have never even heard of it, or if they did, the word would have as much meaning to them as the plains of El Ghizeh, or the source of the Nile to a Bow Cockney. Yet there are thousands who are born here in this New Cut who live and die in it and make a living for themselves, after a fashion, who, if not content with, are certainly unaware of any method of changing or bettering their lot in this life.

Narrow, dark, and mean streets run contiguous to the New Cut, and branch from it in a winding, snaky way. A decently-dressed man is not safe in this street, and the only sound of civilization to cheer him, once lost in the mazes of these festering lanes and alleys, teeming with low pot-houses, tap-rooms, and wild-looking children, bold, bad-looking desperadoes of men, and reckless, obscene women, is the low, rumbling sound coming like the approaching thunder to his ears every few minutes as the loaded passenger trains dash to and fro on the Northwestern and Southeastern Railways.

The New Cut runs into the Lower Marsh and is flanked by Wootton, White Horse, Collingwood, Eaton, Marlboro streets, and the Broad Wall. To the west are Thomas, Isabella, and Granby streets, and from all this misery and destitution of a quarter where the inhabitants are packed like rabbits in a well-stocked warren, the road leads through the Upper Marsh down to the rare pleasaunce or garden of the palace of the Archbishop of Canterbury, one of the most sumptous ecclesiastical retreats in England. The Archbishop's gardens, although located in the heart of a populous city, cover as much ground, it is calculated, as gives sleeping and eating room to 11,000 human beings in the New Cut district.

It is true that the river rolls sluggishly five or six hundred yards below the New Cut, and those who are tired of dog's meat, rotten vegetables, and the offal of the street markets for their common food, and of sleeping eight in a room on straw which is not even clean, can at any time deliver their bodies from further pain and starvation, and their minds from a daily never-ending struggle as to how the dog's meat and decayed offal may be procured, by a quick plunge in the river, near by.

This quarter is the principal resort of the "costermongers" of London. The word "costermonger" has an equivalent which is better known as "peddler." All those who vend or hawk vegetables, fruit, carrion meat, game, fowl, ginger beer, nuts, or, in fact, any of the numerous articles or commodities of refuse merchandise found on the barrows and wagons of the London peddlers, are called by the London term "costermongers." The word is an old one used by Shakespeare, and therefore has, if none other, the merit of antiquity of the most genuine kind.

There are in London proper, embracing its suburbs, of both sexes--including men, women, and children--according to information which I had procured from the police and physicians, who have means of knowing, about 23,000 costermongers. These people are from daybreak until midnight in the open air, I might say, for their marketing is done as early as four or five o'clock in the morning; and then, after an hour or so spent in marketing, comes the cheap, scanty breakfast, consisting of a pound of bread, a "saveloy," which is a sort of a sausage, at a penny a piece, about four inches long and two inches in circumference, quite succulent to the costermonger's palate, or perhaps a piece of beef or bacon of the kind that is vended from barrows in the London streets at two pence a pound, the refuse of the butchers' shops and pieces unfit for a ready sale.

Among these refuse pieces are small portions of ham, shoulders, and pork, fragments of bacon, "snag" pieces, and mutton, and a very suspicious veal, which is often sold by these same hawkers in the suburbs to old maids for cats' meat. Sometimes the "coster" will take a pint of sloppy coffee, which he gets for three half-pence, with his brief breakfast; at other times he prefers a quartern of gin "neat," at two-pence; and again he will be satisfied with a mug of beer at two-pence. As early as 7 o'clock in the morning the hideous noises, which can only come from the throat of a costermonger, are heard in the London streets, awakening those who wish to sleep late, and, to make matters worse, no person, unless the costermonger himself, can by any application ever understand the exact words of their cries. They are only to be recognized by sound, and, therefore, it is always necessary to appear at a window or doorway in order to discover the precise article which the coster wishes you to buy.

[Sidenote: SALE OF WATER CRESSES.]

I visited the New Cut on a Saturday night, which is the great market night, when traffic is at its height in the neighborhood. The wide, short street, which runs into a half circle at its end, was filled with people. The noise was of that indefinite kind which is hardly to be described. Stands, barrows, and wagons, having ponies and asses attached, were placed along the gutters, with smoky lamps fed with a disagreeable smelling oil, from which a dusky flame was shed over the street, showing the faces of the venders as they gave tongue to many different cries.

"Whelks," a small shell-fish, like the American mussel, were heaped in thousands on the heads of barrels and tables, and ham sandwiches, at a penny apiece, and boiled potatoes, with sheeps' trotters, oysters, fried fish, oranges, apples, plums, and, in fact, every kind of fruit and vegetable were for sale. Little ragged boys and girls, their feet bare and dirty, ran hither and thither, importuning the passers-by to purchase their matches and water-cresses. Here water-cresses and radishes are sold together in bunches at a penny a handful. Some of these small children are up as early as five o'clock in the morning, to purchase the water-cresses at Farringdon market, and from that time until midnight, or until the theatres close, they are crying their water-cresses, which they carry with them through the London streets in a basket.

The whelks are sold at two a penny, and are accounted a delicacy by the poor of London, when properly seasoned with pepper, salt, and vinegar. They are very much relished in the pot-houses of the metropolis by hard drinkers when pickled in this fashion, and in any tap-room of a Saturday night it is not uncommon to find men or women peddling these shell-fish to those who have been drinking freely. The costermongers are universally great gamblers, and earning during the week from twelve to thirty shillings, as their luck may run with the purchasing community, yet it is not an uncommon occurrence for them to gamble away as much as fifty per cent. of their week's earnings in various games of chance.

These people have no religious belief whatever, and do not know anything even of the rudiments of religious instruction. To them God is some indefinite being whose attributes are unknown, and whose immutable laws are disregarded simply from utter ignorance. They never darken a church door, and tracts are received by them with the most supreme disgust.

A number of missionaries have labored among them in vain for any great result, chiefly dissenting clergymen, and, although they will listen to them patiently enough, yet they look upon them as the representatives of wealth and intelligence, and they cannot tell the difference between a Wesleyan minister who holds forth on a Sunday morning, with a big banner, calling upon them to repent, in the dark alleys of Bethnal Green and Whitechapel, and the richly beneficed divine of the Church of England who rolls by in a carriage, totally heedless of their condition, bodily or spiritual. All men who wear white neck-cloths are called parsons, and are disliked by the "costers." Besides, they have not learned to read, and tracts are useless to them, were they willing to study their contents.

The marriage relation is utterly ignored among them, and, if what the police told me be true, not ten per cent. of the costermongers who live with women and vend their goods in common are married. At fifteen years of age the young costermonger leaves father and mother to cleave to a girl of his own age, also the child of a costermonger, bred in the gutters of the metropolis, and, having purchased a barrow for ten shillings, and an ass for perhaps £2, the pair begin the world practically man and wife, but without ever dreaming of calling in the assistance of the minister to bind them together in the bonds of lawful wedlock.

[Sidenote: HEATHENISM OF THE COSTERS.]

A marriage certificate in a costermonger's den would, indeed, be a curious and unusual relic, as would also the marriage ring, which is looked upon in civilized society as the seal and confirmation of the wedding ceremony. They say that they cannot afford to pay a minister's fee, and as their code of morals is beneath mention they do not see the necessity of the expenditure. Their children grow up in the same way, bred, as their parents have been, to hawk and cry from dawn until darkness, and thus the costermongers increase, more savage in their usages than the American aborigines.

Mind, I am now speaking of the English costermongers, for, with the Irish costermongers, both male and female, who are still lower in the social scale as far as the goods of this world go, it is different. While the English coster cares not for the visits of the minister of the Protestant faith, the Catholic priest is ever welcome among his wretched and degraded flock in Whitechapel, in the New Cut, in St. Giles, or Lambeth, and he is beloved by them in their own rude, reckless way. The Irish costermonger believes most firmly in the sanctity of the marriage ceremony. With a few exceptions, their children, however wretched and miserable their lot may be in the future life, are born in wedlock, and the slur of illegitimacy cannot be thrown up at them. They will always have a few coppers to give their priests to help those more miserable than themselves, and, though these children but rarely receive the benefits of a common English schooling, they are more eager to learn and more ready to seek instruction than the children of their English neighbors.

I inquired of one of these costermongers, who had a fried-fish stand in the New Cut, and sold sprats all cooked and ready for eating, if he could read. He seemed rather an intelligent fellow, in his way, and had by no means the uncouth, ruffianly look that I noticed in many of the men's faces who were engaged in selling vegetables, fish, whelks, and periwinkles in the street. He had a little smoky lamp depending from a sort of gallows over his cart, and he spoke cheerfully:

"Well, I'm not much of a reader, like you gentlefolks be; but I picked up a little book schoolin' at the Ragged schools by night, when I had four puns saved, last winter. The letters wor a cruel bother to me at first, and I most guv it hup at the beginning, sort o' faint-hearted; but the teacher, as wos a Miss Spencer, she wos a good gal, and she says to me (about Christmas it wor), 'Jimmy, you'll never learn to read hif you don't persewere, and I know, Jimmy, you _can_ persewere hif you want to.' Ye see, sir, I had just gived the blessed book a kick into a corner of the room, like mad; cos vy, the blessed letters wor so cranky and they wor all so mixed hup together that I lost my 'ead as it wor, and I couldn't make nothink hout of their shapes. But that gal, Miss Spencer, she wor a topper and no mistake. She guv me a kind of a smile, and bless me hif she didn't go to the corner of the room and she takes hup the book as I had flung down, with 'er pretty little fingers, and vith that she puts hit into my 'and, hand then I 'adn't the 'art to refuse the gal; and that wos the way as I larned to read; and now I reads _Reynold's Weekly_ hevery Sunday mornin' to my maty, the boiled potato man, which is 'ere to speak for 'isself, sir."

The boiled potato man was advanced in years--a hardy, rugged-looking fellow, who seemed as if he would like to read like his "maty," but could not muster up courage to begin so late in life. I mentioned casually to him that a great Latin grammarian had, at an early stage of the world's history, made the attempt to learn Greek, being then seventy years of age. His characteristic reply made me see that my remark had struck him in the wrong place.

"Well," said he, "hif that blessed hold Latting, as ye calls 'im, had to 'awk biled pertaters from mornin' till night in the New Cut, and go 'ome to three kids vith, maybe, honly sevenpence for 'is day's vork, I'm blessed hif 'ee'd a-bother'd 'is precious hold soul a-learnin' Greek, or hany other lingo. I finds henuff to do vith the mealys, vithout a-troublin' myself habout the books as I see heverywhere I goes. N-i-c-e 'ot pertaties--hall smokin' 'ot--a-penny apiece!"

I bought a hot potato and a sprat, and left the two wondering if I had been "gaffing" or "larkin'" on 'em; and passing through the crowded street, past butchers standing at their doors in dirty aprons, sharpening their knives in a business like manner; past water-cress and match girls, who seemed to spring out of the gutters, so thick were they; past drunken, noisy women, staggering home to their miasmatic dens, with bunches of vegetables or chunks of meat in their arms, wrapped in coarse brown papers, dirty children following their footsteps, gaunt and shadowy-like; past reeking, greasy coffee-shops, the very sign-boards of which were redolent of eel pies, kidney stews, and all the abominations which are devoured in this neighborhood daily and nightly, by the poor people who are forced to eat this food, the refuse of the slaughter-houses of mighty, populous London, from that stern, blind necessity which knows no law, and I came upon a crowd of the working people--costermongers, peddlers, match-women, and young lads and girls--who find habitations in the dusky lanes and frightful courts of the neighborhood. I stood before a large, dark-looking building, which seemed like a prison, its frowning, dirty facade being no evidence that it was a place of amusement. But it was a place of amusement, or, rather, a place of torture. This was the "Royal Victoria Theatre," New Cut, Lambeth.

[Sidenote: THE NEW CUT.]

The Victoria Theatre, or the "Vick," as it is called by its patrons, is one of the most democratic places of amusement, if not the most democratic in London. In another place I will attempt to describe the strange sights which I saw inside of its walls, but at present I shall confine myself to giving my readers a view of the "Old Clothes" district, which is chiefly inhabited by the lower class of the London Jew peddlers or hawkers.

Dick Ralph was a patrolman bold, who did duty in the "H," or Smithfield Division of the City of London police, and was rewarded for his vigilance and attention to duty by being promoted to the office of "special," under probation, in the old Jewry squad of detectives.

Dick had lately married and was the proprietor of a fine chubby boy of fifteen months old, who resembled his father in every respect, having the same red flush in the cheeks, the same black eyes, which sparkled like diamonds, and the same little chubby nose. The family lived back of St. Paul's towering pile, in a little lane or court which ran around the old sheds that formed a part of the Old Market or Newgate shambles, and was the principal fresh meat mart before the New Smithfield Market had been built.

Ralph had been detailed by Inspector Bailey to visit Petticoat lane, Houndsditch, Bevis Marks, and the Minories with me, and we were to go together to the Sunday market in this district, which is almost entirely inhabited by Jews, although a greater part of the out-door trade and costermongering is done by Christian Cockneys.

I found Ralph living up a two-pair back, in one of the queerest, old-fashioned wooden houses in the Newgate shambles. Directly over my head was the dome of St. Paul's, with the morning fog clearing away from its peak, and the sun was gradually appearing to gild the tall cross on the apex, and the tower of St. Faith's, under St. Paul's. The stairs were ricketty and dark, and the wainscotting quite fanciful. A woman of twenty-five or six years of age, rather tidy in appearance, I saw holding the big chubby baby, the pride of the Ralph family. The family were at breakfast, and had been busy discussing fresh plaice and soles from Billingsgate. The baby was allowed to tumble all over the floor and bite its fingers.

"How are you this morning, sir," said patrolman Ralph; "it promises to be a pertickelerly fine Sunday does this, and a nice one for stroll to see the sights."

Ralph took down his hat and overcoat from a nail, and bidding his wife good-bye affectionately, we strolled out into the streets.

We took a walk up Newgate street to Cheapside, through the Poultry, through Cornhill, passing the Bank and Mansion House on our way, and finally opposite the Aldgate Church, with its curious old Sir Christopher Wren spire, we found ourselves standing against the railing which encloses a little green square of grass belting the church.

"Now, sir," said Dick Ralph, "we are just going into one of the worst places in London. There's a regular mob here all the time, and hits just as much as a man can do to pass the peddlers without having his 'at and coat taken hoff him by the Sheenies who are selling of hall sorts of things on the Sunday market. You can buy hanything from a gimlet here in Petticoat lane to a suit of clothes in Rag Fair."

[Sidenote: PETTICOAT LANE.]

Houndsditch is a wide street which runs down from the Aldgate High street to Bishopsgate street. At the other end is the street called the Minories, going in the direction of the Tower, which frowns upon the river. Here, also, is the district called "Petticoat lane," which embraces a number of short streets, courts, lanes, and filthy alleys, with such characteristic names as "Sandy's Row," "Frying Pan alley," "Little Love court," "Catharine Wheel alley," "Hebrew Place," "Fisher's alley," "Tripe yard," "Gravel lane," "Harper's alley," "Boar's Head yard," "Stoney lane," "Swan court," and "Borer's lane."

These are only a few of the choice thoroughfares in this locality, and all of them are dirty and swarming with a class who obtain their living in the streets. There are, it is calculated, living and doing business in Petticoat lane and its lesser tributaries of streets and alleys, about six thousand men, women, and children who profess the Jewish faith, and are in humble circumstances, who have to struggle and compete with the Irish of the poorer class in the street trades, though the Jews have a monopoly of the old clothes' trade.

Houndsditch is in every way superior to the other streets which surround it. It is wider, the shops are of a better order, and it is noticeable that very few of their doors are open on a Sunday morning. As the detective and I passed through the street I noticed such names as "Abrams & Son," "L. Benjamin," "Isaacs & Co.," "Moses & Son," "Hyams & Co.," and other like names over the doors of fruit shops, jeweller shops, mercer shops, clothiers, and in one or two instances, over the doors of small publics. It is, however, not a common thing to find a Jewish name over a liquor shop door in London.

"We are in the very nick of time to see the show," said Ralph to me--it was nearly nine o'clock of the Sunday morning, and we had gone down Houndsditch about three of our New York blocks.

"The market is from eight o'clock Sunday morning until about two in the hafternoon, and the business is as brisk as can be all that time," said Ralph.

The houses were all old, and all of them had a slouching, mean look, with funny gables, grimy windows in the upper stories, and queerly peaked and stunted roofs, overhung by tubular red chimneys, which stood up like rows of corn in a field when seen from a distance.

The people whom we met in the streets had an Eastern look, with peculiarly brilliant, almond-shaped eyes, and prominent noses. Some others had the Celtic features and spoke to each other with the unmistakable brogue. The policemen that we met, too, seemed to partake of the characteristics of the place, and I fancied that I could trace a resemblance in their faces to those by whom they were surrounded.

Crossing the street, we went through a court about a hundred feet wide, that seemed to lead into a covered shed, from which came a din and clamor of voices that was almost deafening.

There was a wooden building like a market covered over, to to which we ascended by a flight of three steps.

"This is the Rag Fair, sir; I suppose you heard on't before. It's a werry strange place, Rag Fair. But don't stop to look at anythink, or them as keeps the stands will tear you to pieces to make you buy."

[Sidenote: A CONGRESS OF RAGS.]

Although I took as much heed as possible of the injunction, it was impossible not to look. It was a very queer place in more senses than one. To get an idea of it take a section of Washington Market, New York, with its stalls and blocks, and buyers and sellers; and on the walls where the pork, mutton, and beef are hung to be inspected and sold, and, instead of the flesh of the cow, pig, and peaceful sheep, hang hundreds upon hundreds of pairs of trousers--trousers that have been worn by young men of fashion, trousers without a wrinkle or just newly scoured, trousers taken from the reeking hot limbs of navies and pot boys, trousers from lumbering men-of-war's men, from spruce young shop boys, trousers that have been worn by criminals executed at Newgate, by patients in fever hospitals; waistcoats that were the pride of fast young brokers in the city, waistcoats flashy enough to have been worn by the Marquis of Hastings at a race-course, or the Count D'Orsay at a literary assemblage; take thousands of spencers, highlows, fustian jackets, some greasy, some unsoiled, shooting-coats, short-coats, and cutaways; coats for the jockey and the dog-fighter, for the peer and the pugilist, pilot-jackets and sou-westers, drawers and stockings, the latter washed and hung up in all their appealing innocence, there being thousands of these garments that I have enumerated, and thousands of others that none but a master cutter could think of without a softening of the brain, take two hundred men, women, and children, mostly of the Jewish race, with here and there a burly Irishman sitting placidly smoking a pipe amid the infernal din; and shake all these ingredients up well, and you have a faint idea of what I saw in Rag Fair.

Take five thousand pair of shoes, boots, gaiters, bootees, brogans, watermen's boots, shoes of criminals, and suspicious-looking boots, taken from the feet of thieves, flashy-looking women's gaiters and cordovans purchased from prostitutes and wretched women in garrets, who had sold them to buy food or a drink of gin.

Take all these articles, scatter them around, hang them on nails and hooks depending from greasy stalls ascending to the old tumble down roof, and then the reader will have a dose offered to him such as I got when I fell on Rag Fair, Petticoat lane.

It was by far the strangest scene I had ever looked upon. London has nothing like it elsewhere, and New York, which is really destitute of any specially salient characteristic, could not in fifty years' time organize and bring together such a mass of old clothes, grease, patches, tatters, and remnants of decayed prosperity and splendor. In every old tattered trousers there was an unwritten epic; in every gaudily fashioned waistcoat there was a tale perhaps of sorrow and sadness and want, if any one could but point it out.

The patches and rents that were botched up and mended, showed the hasty repairs in the old coats that hung in platoons and files from the niches; the jagged sewing and frayed edges in each of these old garments, could they speak, would tell an astonishing tale, or furnish the groundwork of a plot for a popular drama.

The stalls were in rows, and the men and women and boys who did business there kept running about all the time I remained in the fair, shouting and screaming like possessed beings. Their great aim and object was to catch some unfortunate visitor by the lappel of his coat or snatch his elbow, his coat-tail, or any other available part of his clothing, hold on to him, shake an old waistcoat in his face, and if he didn't want a waistcoat, shake a dirty old pair of trousers in his face, talking all the time in an imploring, or may be a trembling tone, until the man would be compelled to break away by sheer force or call the police, who seemed to have enough to do in this place.

I stopped for a moment to look at a stall where about a hundred pairs of boots and shoes were displayed in rows, the thick-soled heavy-looking brogans of the laborer ranged next to the nicely-fashioned gaiter of the elegant, with their well-turned toes and arching insteps, and the man, a sharp-featured Hebrew, who was proprietor, seized me and thrust a second-hand pair of boots in my face, saying at the same time:

[Sidenote: MODUS OPERANDI OF SELLING.]

"You wan'sh a nish pair o' bootsh? S'help, I shells you thish pair for two shillings, and they wash never made lesh than a guinea and a half! Don't you want to buy these sphlendid bootsh; s'help me, I only makes'h two pensh?"

I tried to get away, but he held to my arm and kept shaking the boots, while his sharp, black eyes glittered like sword points at the prospect of losing a sale. At last the detective, losing patience, jerked him away, and we passed on to the next slop stand.

This was kept by an old Irish woman. The Jew was all mercantile acerbity and sharpness. This old humbug of a female Celt was all treacle and honey.

"Ah, then, it's the foine gentleman that ye are. It's easy to see the good dhrop is in ye. May be it's a likin' ye'd be taking to this sphlindid waistcoat; that's all the fashion now, and it's well it 'id look on yer fine figger. And don't ye want nothing at all to wear? And shure ye wouldn't be afther goin' naked like an omaudhaun in the streets and havin' the people shoutin' after ye?"

"How much rent d'ye pay for this stall," said I to her, to get her off a topic by which she made her living.

"Is't the durty rint ye mane? Well, it's enouff for the ould hole. I pay sixpence a day in advance, and the devil resave the penny I've turned yet, this blessed mornin."

"Have you any one to support beside yourself?"

"Well, indade, I have two childher, and its small comfort they are to me. One of thim, the eldest, is down wud scarlet favir, and the docthor says it tin to one if she'll ever recover."

"You see sir," said the detective, "the people who rent stands from the men as own this place, they have to pay sixpence a day to 'old the stand. But those fellows as you see running around like lunatics, and a borin of every one, they pays two pence a day rents--cos why they 'ave no stands and honly walk habout with the clothes hon their harms."

"Yis, and I wish you'd sind them to the divil, the haythens--they niver give an honest woman a chance to make a penny be hook or be crook, wud thim runnin all over the fair."

"Halso, we never allows the 'awker as has no stands to stay in one place," said Dick Ralph, "cos hif we did, that would ruin the business of the people as pays rent for the stands. So we keeps them a movin' hon, and they doesn't like it, but we have got to do it, or else they would have rows hall the Sunday through with the nobs as keeps the stands. You see, the wery minute one of the 'awkers gets hopposite a stand, he collects a crowd and--now, there goes one now;" and he pointed to a fellow with a pair of trousers, who was bawling his goods out while a policeman had him by the neck shoving him along by main force.

"Oh, some of these lads are precious 'ard coves, I tell you, to manage. Some of them will fight and curse at you like as hif they wor made of brass. But we never talks long to them, 'cos hif we did Rag Fair would be too much for the force."

"How much a day do the hawkers make on an average?" I asked Ralph.

"Well, I can't tell, because they are sich werry 'ardened liars. I axed one the werry last Sunday as I wos 'ere. Says I, 'old Benjamin, how much do you take in on a day's work on a haverage?'"

"Oh! blesh your 'art," sez he, "some days I hash two pounds profit, and some days I makes a shillin' by 'ard vork."

"Now ye see," said Ralph, "I knew he was of gaffin me, for he was not worth two pounds, body and soul, and I don't suppose he never made more than half a crown in a day and do his best. Then Old Benjamin spends it hall in fish. The Jew peddlers here are wery fond of fish on Saturdays. They would go without a meal in three days to have a fresh mackerel on Sunday. And they are werry pertikler as to who kills the meat before they buys it."

Determining to make another attempt to see Petticoat Lane on a week day, I bade the polite policeman and the highly odorous quarter of the Old Clothes sellers, a very good day.