Highways and Byways in London Part 17

With Carlyle too, although his chosen home was in far-away Chelsea, Bloomsbury has a.s.sociations. At No. 6 Woburn Buildings,--in a dingy little paved by-way close to New St. Pancras Church, Euston Road,--Carlyle lodged for a short time in 1831--when trying to get his _Sartor Resartus_ taken by a publisher. In these lodgings ("a very beautiful sitting-room, quiet and airy" he describes it), Edward Irving, his friend, had also stayed. And 5 Ampton Street, Mecklenburgh Square, was another London lodging of Carlyle's--frequented before the Chelsea days began in 1834. But, of the many literary men who have lived in and around Bloomsbury, none is more a.s.sociated with the locality than Charles d.i.c.kens. Tavistock House has been recently pulled down; it was an una.s.suming, ugly, semi-detached dwelling with a heavy portico, one of three houses all now destroyed, railed off from the eastern side of Tavistock Square, and entered from it through an iron gateway. This was the novelist's home for ten years, from 1850 to 1860. He, and his famous New Year's theatricals, are still a recollection of the older residents in the neighbourhood. The annual plays of Tavistock House, performed "in a theatre erected in the garden," and written and stage-managed under the collaboration of Wilkie Collins and Charles d.i.c.kens, are now matter of history. _Bleak House_ was the earliest work written here. The house after d.i.c.kens's time became a Jews' college, and the pupils "recreated" in the novelist's theatre-garden. It is now a sad scene of desolation.

Memories of Bloomsbury haunt many of d.i.c.kens's works, but none are better or more lifelike in their way than his early sketches of the immortal Mrs. Tibbs--type of her cla.s.s--and her select boarding house in Great Coram Street, in "that partially explored tract of country which lies between the British Museum and a remote village called Somers Town." Mrs. Tibbs's advertis.e.m.e.nt to the effect that "six individuals would meet with all the comforts of a cheerful musical home in a select private family, residing within ten minutes' walk of everywhere," is still not uncommonly met with.

But the literary memories of Bloomsbury are like the sands of the sea for mult.i.tude. They may be found even in the dingy streets running east of Tavistock Square, leading north towards the tram-lines and general squalor of King's Cross. At No. 26 Marchmont Street, the youthful Sh.e.l.ley and the still more youthful Mary G.o.dwin, afterwards Sh.e.l.ley's second wife, lived in 1815, before Harriet's death and their own legal marriage; and here their first baby was born and died.

"Sh.e.l.ley and Clara go out about a cradle," Mary's diary records, a few days after the infant's birth. Here Mary read _Corinne_ and _Rinaldini_, and mourned over her little dead child, "a span-long dead baby, and in the lodgings in Marchmont Street an empty cradle."

Possibly Marchmont Street then was not quite so slummy as it is now; but this young couple, treading "the bright Castalian brink and Latmos' steep," were probably just as unconscious of London mud as of any disorder, actual or moral, in their establishment.

At 54, Hunter Street, a street just east of Marchmont Street, and now exhibiting, in all its phases, the gradual decay described by d.i.c.kens, John Ruskin was born in 1819; and here, as he describes in _Praeterita_, he used, at the age of four, to enjoy from his nursery window "the view of a marvellous iron post, out of which the water-carts were filled through beautiful little trap-doors, by pipes like boa constrictors," a mystery which, he says, he was never weary of contemplating. If any such little observant boy should happen to live there now, he would have something further to contemplate, to wit, the frequent green omnibuses, for this is now the much-travelled omnibus route between the stations of King's Cross and Victoria.

Hunter Street runs into Brunswick Square, where, at No. 32, the _Punch_ artist John Leech lived for ten years, and suffered many afflictions at the hands of persistent organ-grinders, who, if they did not really shorten his life, at any rate aggravated the illness of which he died. London is conservative in its habits, and organ-grinders, trooping in from their neighbouring home of Hatton Garden--even occasionally a low type of n.i.g.g.e.r minstrels--still haunt this spot, as they do all places, for that matter, where boarding-houses congregate. The regular attendance of what is termed a "piano-organ" always denotes a boarding-house; the louder its screech the better, for the boarder seems fond of noise. His mode of life is peculiar and unique. He will sit on the balcony smoking, or eat his dinner with his friends almost in public; it is all the same to him.

Such sign-manuals betray the "select boarding establishment" almost as much as does the row of five ornate cracked glazed pots, yellow and blue alternately, that adorn its lower windows; or to quote d.i.c.kens: "the meat-safe looking blinds in the parlour windows, blue and gold curtains in the drawing-room, and spring roller blinds all the way up." Adjoining Brunswick Square on the west is Great Coram Street, where (at No. 13), Thackeray lived when first married, and wrote his _Paris Sketch Book_. This district has been altered lately by tall ugly workmen's flats; but Great and Little Coram Street still perpetuate the memory of old Captain Thomas Coram, the benevolent sea captain, and originator of the well-known Foundling Hospital close by in Guilford Street. This picturesque and important inst.i.tution is a kind of show place on Sundays, to which many visitors are taken. The chapel services, with the raised tiers of boys and girls singing in trained choir on each side of the big organ presented by Handel, not only please alike the eye and ear, but have the indescribable charm of pathos. As Mrs. Meagles in d.i.c.kens's novel (_Little Dorrit_) well expresses it:

"Oh dear, dear" (she sobbed), "when I saw all those children ranged tier above tier, and appealing from the father none of them has ever known on earth, to the great Father of us all in Heaven, I thought, does any wretched mother ever come here, and look among those young faces, wondering which is the poor child she brought into this forlorn world, never through its life to know her love, her kiss, her face, her voice, even her name!"

Blake's poem pictures the scene:

"Oh, what a mult.i.tude they seemed, these flowers of London town!

Seated in companies they sit, with radiance all their own; The hum of mult.i.tudes was there, but mult.i.tudes of lambs, Hundreds of little boys and girls raising their innocent hands."

In the early days of the hospital, first established in Hatton Garden in 1740, the admission of unwanted children was more or less indiscriminate, and the mortality among them--packed for transit from the country in some cases "five infants in a basket"--enormous. Now it is only a "foundling" hospital in that it receives illegitimate children, who must not be more than a year old, and whose mothers must personally apply and state their case. The "tokens" left with the babies in the early days of the inst.i.tution as means of future identification, are preserved in the hospital. Some of them are very curious:

"Coins of an ancient date ... a playing card--the ace of hearts--with a dolorous piece of verse written upon it; a ring with two hearts in garnets, broken in half, and then tied together; three or four padlocks, intended, we suppose, as emblems of security; a nut, an ivory fish, an anchor, a gold locket, a lottery ticket. Sometimes a piece of bra.s.s, either in the shape of a heart or a crescent moon, was used as a distinguis.h.i.+ng mark, generally engraved with some little verse or legend. Thus one has these words upon it, 'In amore haec sunt vitia'; another has this bit of doggerel:--

"You have my heart; Though we must part."

By admission, after the service, to the long dining-hall, the visitors are allowed to see the children's temporal, as well as their spiritual, wants well attended to. Hogarth's _March to Finchley_, a picture which he practically presented to the hospital, hangs in its picture gallery, and testifies to the painter's interest in the inst.i.tution. The hospital's playing-grounds look into Lamb's Conduit Street, where often through the railings pa.s.sers-by stand and gaze at the children in their quaint uniform, the boys in red and brown, playing on one side of the gravelled enclosure; the girls, in brown frocks with white caps, tuckers, and ap.r.o.ns, on the other. In Mecklenburgh Square, which adjoins the hospital on the east,--the most curiously secluded square, surely, in all London,--lived George Augustus Sala, the well-known journalist, whose house was a perfect museum of curiosities and works of art. "Highly respectable but not at all fas.h.i.+onable," is the cruel sentence p.r.o.nounced both upon this square and its neighbour Brunswick Square. The broken-nosed statue of the girl with a pitcher, that stands opposite the big iron gates of the Foundling Hospital (at the opening of Lamb's Conduit Street), shows how much less reverently inclined the youth of London are to art, than the Florentine.

This, on a day of atmospheric charm, a day haloed by blue depths of mist, is, to the chastened eye of the constant Londoner, one of Bloomsbury's prettiest spots. But others there are as charming; for instance, the view from Tavistock Square, of the tower of New St.

Pancras Church, that tower imitated from the Athenian "Tower of the Winds," white against a blue sky; or, more mysterious, the great towers of St. Pancras Station, as they loom up blackly, like some mediaeval fortress, against a lurid twilight.

Lamb's Conduit Street has many interesting curio-shops: Hindoo idols, yellow dragons, and the like, glare in quite human fas.h.i.+on at the pa.s.ser-by from behind the grimy shop panes; and books and curios, combined, form the main stock-in-trade of the four quaint diverging alleys of the neighbouring Red Lion Square, already mentioned. It is a great mistake, however, to imagine that because a shop is dirty and tumble-down, its wares will necessarily be cheap. Though Bloomsbury shops may be slightly cheaper than those of Soho and Wardour Street, yet here, too, the engaging and generally picturesque old dealer has, in the case of old china, a keen eye to business; and as regards old books, that apparent disinclination to sell which is so general among second-hand booksellers, as to suggest that it is not without its magnetic charm for the buyer. Some old gentlemen seem, indeed, to utilize most of the available light of a London winter's day at the outside counters of these dusty second-hand book emporiums. So long do they browse, s.h.i.+vering and blue-nosed, in ragged "comforters" and very inadequate great-coats, that one is tempted to believe the story of the old scholar who read the whole of a long-sought cla.s.sic in a winter's stolen hours at the counter. Seldom, in these days, do the "twopenny" or "fourpenny" boxes, that used to yield such prizes, now repay the book-hunter. Old school books, old guide books, and old sermons, "the snows of yester-year," now mainly fill them. And, indeed, with such a mine of fiction as Mudie's close by, where kind gentlemen recommend appropriate reading to timorous old ladies, or, better still, with such privileges as may be obtained in the neighbouring Reading Room of the British Museum, practically "for the mere asking," it is a strange taste to prefer to stand and s.h.i.+ver at a dingy book-counter. Once inside the sacred portals of the Reading Room (the stranger having satisfied the Cerberus at the wicket gate that he or she is "over twenty-one," a point on which there is not generally, as regards the Reading Room _clientele_, much doubt), a warm atmosphere, a comfortable seat, and a luxurious leather desk await the jaded wayfarer; with, further, polite attendants in the innermost circle to a.s.sist, if necessary, his researches; and, should he be hungry, a further possibility of a cheap lunch of sausage and mashed potato flanked by zoological and geological buns in the refreshment room, a locality now somewhat unkindly sandwiched between Greek heroes and Egyptian G.o.ds.

[Ill.u.s.tration: _Mudie's._]

But such mundane things as sausages are, primarily, far from the thoughts of the devotee of learning. Entering first the vast Dome of Knowledge,--where, as in St. Paul's, the blue mist and fog of London seem to hang, and where, underfoot, floor-cloth deadens all sound,--a certain solemnity impresses the visitor, a sense, almost, of being in another world. As, indeed, in some respects he is; for the denizens of the British Museum Reading Room are, mainly, a race apart and to themselves. They and their ways, "their tricks and their manners,"

form an interesting study. Day after day, each one has his--or her--special place in the long diverging galleries that, like spokes of a wheel, emerge from the central sun of wisdom and electric light under the dome. n.o.body, it is true, may reserve seats; yet often custom, seconded by public feeling (and that conservatism which is the birthright of every Londoner), reserves them none the less. The girls and women are largely of the art-serged, fuzzy-headed type, occasionally also dowdy and sallow, with that dust-ingrained complexion so peculiar to Bloomsbury; the men are generally, if young, badly tailored and long-haired, and, if old, irascible, snuffy and unwashed.

Was it perchance of any of these that Thomas Carlyle was thinking when he wrote the following characteristic diatribe?--

"There are several persons in a state of imbecility who come to read in the British Museum. I have been informed that there are several in that state who are sent there by their friends to pa.s.s away their time. I remember there was one gentleman who used to blow his nose very loudly every half-hour. I inquired who he was, and I was informed that he was a mad person sent there by his friends; he made extracts out of books, and puddled away his time there."

Woe betide the novice whose evil star leads him to one of these gentlemen's special haunts! Of course there are a few smart visitors and a modic.u.m of mere "fribblers" (some years ago, indeed, so many damsels repaired to the reading-room to skim recent novels, that a rule was pa.s.sed forbidding the issue of any recent work of fiction), but the dowdy, plodding type forms the vast majority. In many cases the toilers are simply slaves sent by some absentee literary taskmaster to ferret out knotty points, or to look up references.

Sometimes they are clergymen in search of detail for sermons; sometimes they are learned Casaubons or untiring Jellybys working on their own account.... A kind Government provides pens, ink, often tracing paper, and any amount of civility and trouble, free. It has been said unkindly by West-Enders, jealous of such liberality, that Bloomsbury alone should be taxed for the British Museum; such an injustice, however, has not, so far, been perpetrated!--

That the British Museum is gradually absorbing all the houses near it, and enlarging its boundaries into a large square, is evident. The whole eastern side of Bedford Square, and part of the western side of Russell Square, will soon be amalgamated into the vast building. The little lions, those ornaments on the old outer railings, about whose disappearance such an outcry was raised some years back, have been adapted to the internal use of the Museum, and higher, stronger, more important railings subst.i.tuted on the outside in their place. The large pediment of the portico, imitated--at how long an interval!--from the Greek model, is, like the statues in the squares, filled with nesting birds, and is generally also white with the pigeons' plumage. And, where this enormous building now stands, was originally Old Montague House, the "stately and ample ancient palace,"

adorned by Verrio and built in the "French pavilion" way, when, practically, all the rest of Bloomsbury was open country. Where the big galleries now extend were corridors adorned by fresco paintings: and where the halls now given up to statues and treasures stand, were rooms full of light, music, and dancing.

But I am wandering from the present. Yet, in the early winter twilight of the British Museum galleries, it is easy for vagrant fancies, unbidden, to arise. The vast dim galleries raise, indeed, ghosts and visions of a brilliant past, and confer almost humanity on their marble tenants, gigantic figures s.h.i.+ning through the gloom. The Greek G.o.ds of the heroic age,--the creatures "moulded in colossal calm,"--we can almost imagine the minds who inspired, the workmen who wrought, the sculptors who fas.h.i.+oned, the temples that contained them. The stream of life still flows around the feet of these immortal ones, who in their calm smiling seem to scorn the poor pa.s.sions of humanity; in their immortality, to rise above the feeble ebb and flow of human life. As Aurora they remain ever youthful, while we poor mortals, like t.i.thonus, adore their eternal youth and beauty, and ourselves grow old. Here, in the dim vestibule, is just such a Grecian Urn as that which Keats apostrophized, with its lovers whose undying youth and unsatisfied longing he envied.... "Ars longa, vita brevis," indeed! We go, but they shall endure,--to see "new men, new faces, other minds"; to have, perchance, new labels written for them by future Dryasdusts; to be invested with fresh attributes by a newer school of ambitious critics. Many of them have seen cities rise and fall; they have survived ruin, siege, burial, neglect; and now at last they have come here to the same dead level of monotony:

"Deemed they of this, those wors.h.i.+ppers, When, in some mythic chain of verse Which man shall not again rehea.r.s.e, The faces of thy ministers Yearned pale with bitter ecstasy?

"Greece, Egypt, Rome--did any G.o.d, Before whose feet men knelt unshod, Deem that in this unblest abode Another scarce more unknown G.o.d Should house with him"--

If these dead stones could feel, would they not lament their departed glory? The heroic figure of Mausolus, who, on the pinnacle of his temple, once drove his marble car, the cynosure of all eyes and the wonder of the world, outlined against the blue Aegean sky and sea, and the white-walled city; the gigantic bas-reliefs of the Parthenon, whose very existence here is the "s.h.i.+bboleth" of aesthetic criticism, that once adorned the ancient Athenian temple, brilliantly violet and golden against the faint blue line of the bay and hills of Salamis; the famous "Harpy Tomb," torn from its sunny Lycian height, and now glimmering dimly through London fog, guarded by a vigilant policeman,--what former beauties of surrounding nature do they not suggest or recall! We forget, in gazing, the nineteenth-century prose of Bloomsbury, the monotony of its gloomy streets; we forget that we ourselves are "the latest seed of time," the "last word" of the human race, dwelling, amid all the dull luxury of civilisation, in the greatest and richest city of the world. And, leaving the gallery by way of the vast and unique a.s.syrian collection of sculptures, pa.s.sing through the two colossal human-headed bulls that guard its entrance, creatures whose excavation from the buried city of Nineveh forms one of the most romantic of modern discoveries; pa.s.sing out into the misty suns.h.i.+ne and the flying doves before the pediment, we recall again Rossetti's wonderful lines, with their final suggestion of a future lost and rediscovered London--rediscovered under the dust and oblivion of future ages:

"And as I turned, my sense half shut Still saw the crowds of kerb and rut Go past as marshalled to the strut Of ranks in gypsum quaintly cut.

It seemed in one same pageantry They followed forms which had been erst; To pa.s.s, till on my sight should burst That future of the best or worst When some may question which was first, Of London or of Nineveh.

"For as that Bull-G.o.d once did stand And watched the burial clouds of sand, Till these at last without a hand Rose o'er his eyes, another land, And blinded him with destiny:-- So may he stand again; till now, In s.h.i.+ps of unknown sail and prow, Some tribe of the Australian plough Bear him afar--a relic now Of London, not of Nineveh!"

CHAPTER XII

THEATRICAL AND FOREIGN LONDON

--"All the world's a stage, And all the men and women merely players...."--_Shakespeare._

"O gleaming lamps of London, that gem the City's crown, What fortunes lie within you, O lights of London Town!"-- _G. R. Sims, Ballads of Babylon._

As I was travelling, one day in winter, by the familiar and homely 'bus whose "hue is green and gold"; not however, the "St. John's Wood"

'bus, but that humbler and more business-like one which runs between Victoria and King's Cross, I observed, as we ascended Long Acre, a young woman get in at Bow Street, followed by a "lady friend" at Drury Lane. They were hot, untidy, and, as to their attire, muddy, be-bugled, and be-plushed; also, one of them carried a large and equally be-bugled baby. After their first salutations, they panted for a few minutes, out of breath; then:--

"I've got it, duckie," cried the Bow Street charmer, a young woman with a big black fringe, and the owner of the overdressed and pasty-faced baby.

"What have you got, dearie?" inquired her friend, who wore a dirty blouse that had once been yellow, under a heavy plush fur-trimmed cape (the month was November). The 'bus sat expectant.

"'E's made me a thief!" (The 'bus, to a man, or rather, woman, started.) "I told 'im as I'd give 'im no peace till 'e did; I was bound to go back an' back, till 'e give me somethin'. An' now, sweetie, I'm one er the forty thieves, at a quid a week, and find nothin'. Ain't _that_ somethin'?"

A light broke in upon the wondering 'bus, and all the auditors peacefully resumed their papers or their reflections. Of course, it was the Drury Lane pantomime! It was stupid of us not to have guessed it before, for the "dearie," "duckie" and "sweetie" ought to have suggested it at once! Also, the dresses of the two interlocutors, which, now that I looked at them again, seemed to have on the beholder that peculiar effect of combined smartness and disorder that, for some reason or the other, distinguishes the "pro;" the "pro,"--that is,--of the lower ranks of the theatrical profession.

_The_ profession (as it is expressively and somewhat exclusively called by its devotees) embraces, of course, as many "sorts and conditions of men" as the equally large profession of newspaper writers. While it still remains a cruel fact that any one picked up "drunk and incapable" in a London street is usually described in next day's _Police News_ as either a journalist or an actress, there can yet be no doubt that the Bohemianism of the past, so far as the higher cla.s.s of the theatrical world is concerned, is going out of fas.h.i.+on.

With few exceptions, it is only among the lower ranks of "pros," or in music-halls, that it largely exists. These exceptions are, usually, to be found among those who have suddenly risen from obscurity on the theatrical firmament, to s.h.i.+ne as bright "stars" for some brief period. Nowhere is success so sudden, so overwhelming, so blinding as it is in this vast city of London; and nowhere, alas! is that success so soon over, forgotten, eclipsed. The deity of one season is forsaken in the next; the Ruler-of-the-Universe must perforce return to his hovel, and, to say truth, he generally takes the change badly. London has a short memory. But the medal has its pleasanter reverse side.

For, _per contra_, the young woman who has for years, maybe, blushed unseen in Camberwell, wasted her sweetness on seaside "fit-ups," and lorded it in third-rate provincial companies, may, suddenly, by some unexpected turn of Fortune's wheel, find herself elevated to the highest salaries in the profession. From a penurious lodging in the slums,--a daily "third return" from Gower Street,--she may rise, almost in the twinkling of an eye, to 40 a week, a flat in Mayfair, and a daintily-clipped poodle!

It is, of course, the fame of such sudden successes that suffices to "turn the heads" of ignorant neophytes, who are but too apt to forget the common maxim, that "the many fail, the one succeeds." Thus it is that the stage has been for years flooded with girls of all cla.s.ses, all eager for distinction, and all, alas! desiring "the palm without the dust!" Rising actresses have, as a rule, but one ambition--to act in London, to charm London audiences. Better, some think, a three-line part at the Lyceum than a "juvenile lead" at Leamington; better twenty weeks of the Criterion than a cycle of the Counties; better a curtain-raiser in the Haymarket than Shakespeare's Rosalind at Darlington or Preston. Hence the cruel and heart-rending "struggle-for-life" among young actresses in this big city of London; hence the weeks of slow starvation in Bloomsbury lodgings or Soho garrets, waiting for work that never comes. It is, indeed, for them, the "dust without the palm." Disappointed hopes, shattered ambitions, tragic suicides,--what stories could some of those Bloomsbury garrets tell!

"O cruel lamps of London, if tears your light could drown, Your victims' eyes would weep them, O lights of London Town."

Theatrical managers are callous; they can, indeed, hardly be otherwise, for the stage, like journalism, is scarcely "a charitable inst.i.tution"; and the supply of stage applicants is far greater than the demand. When a new play is to be produced at a theatre, see how its waiting-rooms and grimy staircases are daily crowded with young men and women, all eager, all well-dressed, and all anxiously trying to conceal their often desperate need of money. For they must always be well-dressed; no self-respecting manager will ever think twice of a shabby or dowdy young woman; and dress is difficult to procure on a starvation diet.

In certain quarters of the Strand and of Soho, "ladies" are to be found who act as superior "old clothes" dealers, buying, at cheap rates, the fine dresses of society b.u.t.terflies from the maids of these latter, and retailing them again at enhanced prices to the poor neophytes in the theatrical profession. The custom, no doubt, is advantageous to all parties concerned; to the fine lady, who must not be seen more than three or four times in the same gown; to the maid, to whom the said gowns are "perquisites"; and, lastly, to the poor girl who must, _coute que coute_, procure her brocades, her gold lace and tinsel for her provincial tours. (London managers usually provide the ladies' dresses themselves; the men of the company, on the other hand, must provide their own.)

Though actors and actresses live, nowadays, in all parts of London, yet, perhaps, they most incline to Bloomsbury and Soho, which cla.s.sic region they have, indeed, haunted for centuries. In old Tudor and Shakespearean times Sh.o.r.editch and Bankside were the favoured spots, just as, later on, Covent Garden with its "Piazza," its Opera-houses, and its general air of Bohemianism, became the chosen locality. The histrionic art is no longer solely a.s.sociated with Covent Garden and Bohemianism; indeed, the stars of the profession now belong, rather, to the smartest "set" in society; they often inhabit Mayfair,--and all doors, even those of royalty,--are open to them. But, just as the "rank and file" of the profession still haunt the cla.s.sic neighbourhood of the "Garden," so the large bulk of actors and actresses are still to be found in the adjacent and convenient districts of Soho and Bloomsbury. In Bloomsbury, especially, are yearly rising innumerable red-brick flats, abodes largely tenanted by the theatrical profession. Their surroundings tell of them; "by their fruits ye shall know them." Hair-dressing shops, florists' shops, cheap jewellery shops, all these betray the tastes of the profession, and all these abound in the neighbourhood.

The pantomimes, owing to the enormous number of people they employ, as well as to the great fillip they give to certain trades and occupations, play no inconsiderable part in the vast web of London life. That the Pantomime, as a yearly pageant, has so much increased in glory of recent times, is due mainly to the efforts of the late Sir Augustus Harris, who may, indeed, be said to have reached the high-water-mark of splendour in the Christmas show. Many hundreds of girls and women, often married and supporting families, are employed in the vast choruses of the Drury-Lane Theatre,--"the Lane" as it is called in local parlance; many hundreds of men, scene-s.h.i.+fters, carpenters, mechanics, and the like, are required for the production of its stupendous effects. Pantomime-land is, indeed, to those who know it, a country and a life in itself. From autumn to spring its rigors last; from October to March its workers labour. A few weeks before Christmas, the annual fever is at its height. Not only grown people, but children too, are pressed into the service; hence, no doubt, the pretty "steps" daily practised, throughout the year, by c.o.c.kney girl children before street-organs. Yet, the cla.s.s whence these children are drawn is generally a more or less superior one; superior, at any rate, to that which one would naturally imagine.

Once, in walking down Museum Street, I chanced to get just behind three nice little girls and their mother. It was a foggy, murky evening, and they were evidently taking the direct route for Drury Lane. They were pretty children, red-cloaked, rosy-cheeked, and neatly shod, and they tripped along demurely, holding each other's hands; their mother, neat also, if a little threadbare, walking behind them, keeping a careful and approving eye on her little flock.

"Yes, they're all engaged for the winter at the 'Lane,'" she told me, in response to my sympathetic inquiry. "And it's a great help to me, it is, indeed; for my husband's ill, and he doesn't ever expect to get much better.... They're in the 'Flower Ballet'; the eldest, Lina, she's a Pansy; and the two younger ones, they're both Daisies....