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LONDON LABOUR
AND THE LONDON POOR

A Cyclopædia of the Condition and Earnings
OF
THOSE THAT WILL WORK
THOSE THAT CANNOT WORK, AND
THOSE THAT WILL NOT WORK

BY
HENRY MAYHEW

THE LONDON STREET-FOLK
COMPRISING
STREET SELLERS · STREET BUYERS · STREET FINDERS
STREET PERFORMERS · STREET ARTIZANS · STREET LABOURERS

WITH NUMEROUS ILLUSTRATIONS FROM PHOTOGRAPHS

VOLUME THREE

CONTENTS
OF
VOLUME III.

THE STREET-FOLK.

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS.

LONDON LABOUR
AND
THE LONDON POOR.

THE DESTROYERS OF VERMIN.

The Rat-Killer.

In “the Brill,” or rather in Brill-place, Somers’-town, there is a variety of courts branching out into Chapel-street, and in one of the most angular and obscure of these is to be found a perfect nest of rat-catchers—not altogether professional rat-catchers, but for the most part sporting mechanics and costermongers. The court is not easily to be found, being inhabited by men not so well known in the immediate neighbourhood as perhaps a mile or two away, and only to be discovered by the aid and direction of the little girl at the neighbouring cat’s-meat shop.

My first experience of this court was the usual disturbance at the entrance. I found one end or branch of it filled with a mob of eager listeners, principally women, all attracted to a particular house by the sounds of quarrelling. One man gave it as his opinion that the disturbers must have earned too much money yesterday; and a woman, speaking to another who had just come out, lifting up both her hands and laughing, said, “Here they are—at it again!”

The rat-killer whom we were in search of was out at his stall in Chapel-street when we called, but his wife soon fetched him. He was a strong, sturdy-looking man, rather above the middle height, with light hair, ending in sandy whiskers, reaching under his chin, sharp deep-set eyes, a tight-skinned nose that looked as if the cuticle had been stretched to its utmost on its bridge. He was dressed in the ordinary corduroy costermonger habit, having, in addition, a dark blue Guernsey drawn over his waistcoat.

The man’s first anxiety was to show us that rats were not his only diversion; and in consequence he took us into the yard of the house, where in a shed lay a bull-dog, a bull-bitch, and a litter of pups just a week old. They did not belong to him, but he said he did a good deal in the way of curing dogs when he could get ’em.

On a shelf in this shed were two large dishes, the one containing mussels without the shells, and the other eels; these are the commodities in which he deals at present, so that he is properly what one would call a “pickled-eel seller.”

We found his room on the first-floor clean and tidy, of a good size, containing two bedsteads and a large sea-chest, besides an old-fashioned, rickety, mahogany table, while in a far corner of the room, perhaps waiting for the cold weather and the winter’s fire, was an arm-chair. Behind the door hung a couple of dog-leads, made of strong leather, and ornamented with brass. Against one side of the wall were two framed engravings of animals, and a sort of chart of animated nature, while over the mantel-shelf was a variety of most characteristic articles. Among these appeared a model of a bull-dog’s head, cut out of sandstone, and painted in imitation of nature—a most marvellous piece of ugliness. “He was the best dog I ever see,” said the host, “and when I parted with him for a ten-pound note, a man as worked in the New Road took and made this model—he was a real beauty, was that dog. The man as carved that there, didn’t have no difficulty in holdin’ him still, becos he was very good at that sort o’ thing; and when he’d looked at anything he couldn’t be off doin’ it.”

There were also a great many common prints about the walls, “a penny each, frame and all,” amongst which were four dogs—all ratting—a game cock, two Robinson Crusoes, and three scripture subjects.

There was, besides, a photograph of another favourite dog which he’d “had give him.”

The man apologised for the bareness of the room, but said, “You see, master, my brother went over to ’Merica contracting for a railway under Peto’s, and they sends to me about a year ago, telling me to get together as many likely fellows as I could (about a dozen), and take them over as excavators; and when I was ready, to go to Peto’s and get what money I wanted. But when I’d got the men, sold off all my sticks, and went for the money, they told me my brother had got plenty, and that if he wanted me he ought to be ashamed of hisself not to send some over hisself; so I just got together these few things again, and I ain’t heard of nothing at all about it since.”

After I had satisfied him that I was not a collector of dog-tax, trying to find out how many animals he kept, he gave me what he evidently thought was “a treat”—a peep at his bull-dog, which he fetched from upstairs, and let it jump about the room with a most unpleasant liberty, informing me the while how he had given five pound for him, and that one of the first pups he got by a bull he had got five pounds for, and that cleared him. “That Punch” (the bull-dog’s name), he said, “is as quiet as a lamb—wouldn’t hurt nobody; I frequently takes him through the streets without a lead. Sartainly he killed a cat the t’other afternoon, but he couldn’t help that, ’cause the cat flew at him; though he took it as quietly as a man would a woman in a passion, and only went at her just to save his eyes. But you couldn’t easy get him off, master, when he once got a holt. He was a good one for rats, and, he believed, the stanchest and tricksiest dog in London.”

When he had taken the brute upstairs, for which I was not a little thankful, the man made the following statement:—

“I a’n’t a Londoner. I’ve travelled all about the country. I’m a native of Iver, in Buckinghamshire. I’ve been three year here at these lodgings, and five year in London altogether up to last September.

“Before I come to London I was nothink, sir—a labouring man, an eshkewator. I come to London the same as the rest, to do anythink I could. I was at work at the eshkewations at King’s Cross Station. I work as hard as any man in London, I think.

“When the station was finished, I, having a large family, thought I’d do the best I could, so I went to be foreman at the Caledonian Sawmills. I stopped there a twelvemonth; but one day I went for a load and a-half of lime, and where you fetches a load and a-half of lime they always gives you fourpence. So as I was having a pint of beer out of it, my master come by and saw me drinking, and give me the sack. Then he wanted me to ax his pardon, and I might stop; but I told him I wouldn’t beg no one’s pardon for drinking a pint of beer as was give me. So I left there.

“Ever since the Great Western was begun, my family has been distributed all over the country, wherever there was a railway making. My brothers were contractors for Peto, and I generally worked for my brothers; but they’ve gone to America, and taken a contract for a railway at St. John’s, New Brunswick, British North America. I can do anything in the eshkewating way—I don’t care what it is.

“After I left the Caledonian Sawmills I went to Billingsgate, and bought anythink I could see a chance of gettin’ a shilling out on, or to’ards keeping my family.

“All my lifetime I’ve been a-dealing a little in rats; but it was not till I come to London that I turned my mind fully to that sort of thing. My father always had a great notion of the same. We all like the sport. When any on us was in the country, and the farmers wanted us to, we’d do it. If anybody heerd tell of my being an activish chap like, in that sort of way, they’d get me to come for a day or so.

“If anybody has a place that’s eaten up with rats, I goes and gets some ferruts, and takes a dog, if I’ve got one, and manages to kill ’em. Sometimes I keep my own ferruts, but mostly I borrows them. This young man that’s with me, he’ll sometimes have an order to go fifty or sixty mile into the country, and then he buys his ferruts, or gets them the best way he can. They charges a good sum for the loan of ’em—sometimes as much as you get for the job.

“You can buy ferruts at Leadenhall-market for 5s. or 7s.—it all depends; you can’t get them all at one price, some of ’em is real cowards to what others is; some won’t even kill a rat. The way we tries ’em is, we puts ’em down anywhere, in a room maybe, with a rat, and if they smell about and won’t go up to it, why they won’t do; ’cause you see, sometimes the ferrut has to go up a hole, and at the end there may be a dozen or sixteen rats, and if he hasn’t got the heart to tackle one on ’em, why he ain’t worth a farden.

“I have kept ferruts for four or five months at a time, but they’re nasty stinking things. I’ve had them get loose; but, bless you, they do no harm, they’re as hinnocent as cats; they won’t hurt nothink; you can play with them like a kitten. Some puts things down to ketch rats—sorts of pison, which is their secret—but I don’t. I relies upon my dogs and ferruts, and nothink else.

“I went to destroy a few rats up at Russell-square; there was a shore come right along, and a few holes—they was swarmed with ’em there—and didn’t know how it was; but the cleverest men in the world couldn’t ketch many there, ’cause you see, master, they run down the hole into the shore, and no dog could get through a rat-hole.

“I couldn’t get my living, though, at that business. If any gentleman comes to me and says he wants a dog cured, or a few rats destroyed, I does it.

“In the country they give you fourpence a rat, and you can kill sometimes as many in a farmyard as you can in London. The most I ever got for destroying rats was four bob, and then I filled up the brickwork and made the holes good, and there was no more come.

“I calls myself a coster; some calls theirselves general dealers, but I doesn’t. I goes to market, and if one thing don’t suit, why I buys another.

“I don’t know whether you’ve heerd of it, master, or not, but I’m the man as they say kills rats—that’s to say, I kills ’em like a dog. I’m almost ashamed to mention it, and I shall never do it any more, but I’ve killed rats for a wager often. You see it’s only been done like for a lark; we’ve bin all together daring one another, and trying to do something as nobody else could. I remember the first time I did it for a wager, it was up at ——, where they’ve got a pit. There was a bull-dog a killing rats, so I says,

“‘Oh, that’s a duffin’ dog; any dog could kill quicker than him. I’d kill again him myself.’

“Well, then they chaffed me, and I warn’t goin’ to be done; so I says,

“‘I’ll kill again that dog for a sov’rin.’

“The sov’rin was staked. I went down to kill eight rats again the dog, and I beat him. I killed ’em like a dog, with my teeth. I went down hands and knees and bit ’em. I’ve done it three times for a sov’rin, and I’ve won each time. I feels very much ashamed of it, though.

“On the hind part of my neck, as you may see, sir, there’s a scar; that’s where I was bit by one; the rat twisted hisself round and held on like a vice. It was very bad, sir, for a long time; it festered, and broke out once or twice, but it’s all right now.”

Rats.

“The rat, though small, weak, and contemptible in its appearance, possesses properties that render it a more formidable enemy to mankind, and more injurious to the interests of society, than even those animals that are endued with the greatest strength and the most rapacious dispositions. To the one we can oppose united powers and superior arts; with regard to the other, experience has convinced us that no art can counteract the effects of its amazing fecundity, and that force is ineffectually directed against an animal possessed of such variety of means to elude it.

“There are two kinds of rats known in this country,—the black rat, which was formerly universal here, but is now very rarely seen, having been almost extirpated by the large brown kind, which is generally distinguished by the name of the Norway rat.

“This formidable invader is now universally diffused through the whole country, from whence every method has been tried in vain to exterminate it. This species is about nine inches long, of a light-brown colour, mixed with tawny and ash; the throat and belly are of a dirty white, inclining to grey; its feet are naked, and of a pale flesh-colour; the tail is as long as the body, covered with minute dusky scales, thinly interspersed with short hairs. In summer it frequents the banks of rivers, ponds, and ditches, where it lives on frogs, fishes, and small animals. But its rapacity is not entirely confined to these. It destroys rabbits, poultry, young pigeons, &c. It infests the granary, the barn, and the storehouse; does infinite mischief among corn and fruit of all kinds; and not content with satisfying its hunger, frequently carries off large quantities to its hiding-place. It is a bold and fierce little animal, and when closely pursued, will turn and fasten on its assailant. Its bite is keen, and the wound it inflicts is painful and difficult to heal, owing to the form of its teeth, which are long, sharp, and of an irregular shape.

“The rat is amazingly prolific, usually producing from twelve to eighteen young ones at one time. Their numbers would soon increase beyond all power of restraint, were it not for an insatiable appetite, that impels them to destroy and devour each other. The weaker always fall a prey to the stronger; and a large male rat, which usually lives by itself, is dreaded by those of its own species as their most formidable enemy.

“It is a singular fact in the history of those animals, that the skins of such of them as have been devoured in their holes have frequently been found curiously turned inside out, every part being completely inverted, even to the ends of the toes. How the operation is performed it would be difficult to ascertain; but it appears to be effected in some peculiar mode of eating out the contents.

“Besides the numbers that perish in these unnatural conflicts, they have many fierce and inveterate enemies, that take every occasion to destroy them. Mankind have contrived various methods of exterminating these bold intruders. For this purpose traps are often found ineffectual, such being the sagacity of the animals, that when any are drawn into the snare, the others by such means learn to avoid the dangerous allurement, notwithstanding the utmost caution may have been used to conceal the design. The surest method of killing them is by poison. Nux vomica ground and mixed with oatmeal, with a small proportion of oil of rhodium and musk, have been found from experience to be very effectual.

“The water-rat is somewhat smaller than the Norway rat; its head larger and its nose thicker; its eyes are small; its ears short; scarcely appearing through the hair; its teeth are large, strong, and yellow; the hair on its body thicker and longer than that of the common rat, and chiefly of a dark brown colour mixed with red; the belly is grey; the tail five inches long, covered with short black hairs, and the tip with white.

“The water-rat generally frequents the sides of rivers, ponds, and ditches, where it burrows and forms its nest. It feeds on frogs, small fish and spawn, swims and dives remarkably fast, and can continue a long time under water.”[1]

In Mr. Charles Fothergill’s Essay on the Philosophy, Study, and Use of Natural History (1813), we find some reflections which remind us of Ray and Derham. We shall extract a few paragraphs which relate to the subject in hand.

“Nothing can afford a finer illustration of the beautiful order and simplicity of the laws which govern the creation, than the certainty, precision, and regularity with which the natural checks in the superabundant increase of each tribe of animals are managed; and every family is subject to the operation of checks peculiar to the species—whatever it may be—and established by a wise law of the Most High, to counteract the fatal effects that might arise from an ever-active populative principle. It is by the admirable disposition of these checks, the contemplation of which is alone sufficient to astonish the loftiest and most comprehensive soul of man, that the whole system of animal life, in all its various forms, is kept in due strength and equilibrium.

“This subject is worthy of the naturalist’s most serious consideration.”

“This great law,” Mr. F. proceeds, “pervades and affects the whole animal creation, and so active, unwearied, and rapid is the principle of increase over the means of subsistence amongst the inferior animals, that it is evident whole genera of carnivorous beings amongst beasts, birds, fish, reptiles, and insects, have been created for the express purpose (?) of suppressing the redundancy of others, and restraining their numbers within proper limits.

“But even the natural checks are insufficient to restrain the effects of a too-rapid populative principle in some animals, which have, therefore, certain destructive propensities given to them by the Creator, that operate powerfully upon themselves and their offspring, as may be particularly observed in the natural history of the rabbit, but which is still more evidently and strikingly displayed in the life and economy of the rat.

“It has been calculated by Mr. Pennant, and there can be no doubt of the truth of the statement, that the astonishing number of 1,274,840 may be produced from a single pair of rabbits in the short space of four years, as these animals in their wild state breed seven times in a-year, and generally produce eight young ones each time. They are capable of procreation at the age of five or six months, and the doe carries her burthen no more than thirty days.

“But the principle of increase is much more powerful, active, and effective in the common grey rat than in any other animal of equal size. This destructive animal is continually under the furor of animal love. The female carries her young for one month only; and she seldom or never produces a less number than twelve, but sometimes as many as eighteen at a litter—the medium number may be taken for an average—and the period of gestation, though of such short continuance, is confined to no particular season of the year.

“The embraces of the male are admitted immediately after the birth of the vindictive progeny; and it is a fact which I have ascertained beyond any doubt, that the female suckles her young ones almost to the very moment when another litter is dropping into the world as their successors.

“A celebrated Yorkshire rat-catcher whom I have occasionally employed, one day killed a large female rat, that was in the act of suckling twelve young ones, which had attained a very considerable growth; nevertheless, upon opening her swollen body, he found thirteen quick young, that were within a few days of their birth. Supposing, therefore, that the rat produces ten litters in the course of a year, and that no check on their increase should operate destructively for the space of four years, a number not far short of 3,000,000 might be produced from a single pair in that time!

“Now, the consequence of such an active and productive principle of increase, if suffered continually to operate without check, would soon be fatally obvious. We have heard of fertile plains devastated, and large towns undermined, in Spain, by rabbits; and even that a military force from Rome was once requested of the great Augustus to suppress the astonishing numbers of the same animal overrunning the island of Majorca and Minorca. This circumstance is recorded by Pliny.

“If, therefore, rats were suffered to multiply without the restraint of the most powerful and positive natural checks, not only would fertile plains and rich cities be undermined and destroyed, but the whole surface of the earth in a very few years would be rendered a barren and hideous waste, covered with myriads of famished grey rats, against which man himself would contend in vain. But the same Almighty Being who perceived a necessity for their existence, has also restricted their numbers within proper bounds, by creating to them many very powerful enemies, and still more effectually by establishing a propensity in themselves, the gratification of which has continually the effect of lessening their numbers, even more than any of their foreign enemies.

“The male rat has an insatiable thirst for the blood of his own offspring; the female, being aware of this passion, hides her young in such secret places as she supposes likely to escape notice or discovery, till her progeny are old enough to venture forth and stand upon their own energies; but, notwithstanding this precaution, the male rat frequently discovers them, and destroys as many as he can; nor is the defence of the mother any very effectual protection, since she herself sometimes falls a victim to her temerity and her maternal tenderness.

“Besides this propensity to the destruction of their own offspring, when other food fails them, rats hunt down and prey upon each other with the most ferocious and desperate avidity, inasmuch as it not unfrequently happens, in a colony of these destructive animals, that a single male of more than ordinary powers, after having overcome and devoured all competitors with the exception of a few females, reigns the sole bloody and much-dreaded tyrant over a considerable territory, dwelling by himself in some solitary hole, and never appearing abroad without spreading terror and dismay even amongst the females whose embraces he seeks. In this relentless and bloody character may be found one of the most powerful and positive of the checks which operate to the repression of this species within proper bounds; a character which attaches, in a greater or less degree, to the whole Mus genus, and in which we may readily perceive the cause of the extirpation of the old black rats of England, Mus rathus; for the large grey rats, having superior bodily powers united to the same carnivorous propensities, would easily conquer and destroy their black opponents wherever they could be found, and whenever they met to dispute the title of possession or of sovereignty.”

When the young rats begin to issue from their holes, the mother watches, defends, and even fights with the cats, in order to save them. A large rat is more mischievous than a young cat, and nearly as strong: the rat uses her fore-teeth, and the cat makes most use of her claws; so that the latter requires both to be vigorous and accustomed to fight, in order to destroy her adversary.

The weasel, though smaller, is a much more dangerous and formidable enemy to the rat, because it can follow it into its retreat. Its strength being nearly equal to that of the rat, the combat often continues for a long time, but the method of using their arms by the opponents is very different. The rat wounds only by repeated strokes with his fore-teeth, which are better formed for gnawing than biting; and, being situated at the extremity of the lever or jaw, they have not much force. But the weasel bites cruelly with the whole jaw, and, instead of letting go its hold, sucks the blood from the wounded part, so that the rat is always killed.

A Night at Rat-Killing.

Considering the immense number of rats which form an article of commerce with many of the lower orders, whose business it is to keep them for the purpose of rat matches, I thought it necessary, for the full elucidation of my subject, to visit the well-known public-house in London, where, on a certain night in the week, a pit is built up, and regular rat-killing matches take place, and where those who have sporting dogs, and are anxious to test their qualities, can, after such matches are finished, purchase half a dozen or a dozen rats for them to practise upon, and judge for themselves of their dogs’ “performances.”

To quote the words printed on the proprietor’s card, “he is always at his old house at home, as usual, to discuss the fancy generally.”

I arrived at about eight o’clock at the tavern where the performances were to take place. I was too early, but there was plenty to occupy my leisure in looking at the curious scene around me, and taking notes of the habits and conversation of the customers who were flocking in.

The front of the long bar was crowded with men of every grade of society, all smoking, drinking, and talking about dogs. Many of them had brought with them their “fancy” animals, so that a kind of “canine exhibition” was going on; some carried under their arm small bull-dogs, whose flat pink noses rubbed against my arm as I passed; others had Skye-terriers, curled up like balls of hair, and sleeping like children, as they were nursed by their owners. The only animals that seemed awake, and under continual excitement, were the little brown English terriers, who, despite the neat black leathern collars by which they were held, struggled to get loose, as if they smelt the rats in the room above, and were impatient to begin the fray.

There is a business-like look about this tavern which at once lets you into the character of the person who owns it. The drinking seems to have been a secondary notion in its formation, for it is a low-roofed room without any of those adornments which are now generally considered so necessary to render a public-house attractive. The tubs where the spirits are kept are blistered with the heat of the gas, and so dirty that the once brilliant gilt hoops are now quite black.

Sleeping on an old hall-chair lay an enormous white bulldog, “a great beauty,” as I was informed, with a head as round and smooth as a clenched boxing-glove, and seemingly too large for the body. Its forehead appeared to protrude in a manner significant of water on the brain, and almost overhung the short nose, through which the animal breathed heavily. When this dog, which was the admiration of all beholders, rose up, its legs were as bowed as a tailor’s, leaving a peculiar pear-shaped opening between them, which, I was informed, was one of its points of beauty. It was a white dog, with a sore look, from its being peculiarly pink round the eyes, nose, and indeed at all the edges of its body.

On the other side of the fire-place was a white bull-terrier dog, with a black patch over the eye, which gave him rather a disreputable look. This animal was watching the movements of the customers in front, and occasionally, when the entrance-door was swung back, would give a growl of inquiry as to what the fresh-comer wanted. The proprietor was kind enough to inform me, as he patted this animal’s ribs, which showed like the hoops on a butter-firkin, that he considered there had been a “little of the greyhound in some of his back generations.”

About the walls were hung clusters of black leather collars, adorned with brass rings and clasps, and pre-eminent was a silver dog-collar, which, from the conversation of those about me, I learnt was to be the prize in a rat-match to be “killed for” in a fortnight’s time.

As the visitors poured in, they, at the request of the proprietor “not to block up the bar,” took their seats in the parlour, and, accompanied by a waiter, who kept shouting, “Give your orders, gentlemen,” I entered the room.

I found that, like the bar, no pains had been taken to render the room attractive to the customers, for, with the exception of the sporting pictures hung against the dingy paper, it was devoid of all adornment. Over the fireplace were square glazed boxes, in which were the stuffed forms of dogs famous in their day. Pre-eminent among the prints was that representing the “Wonder” Tiny, “five pounds and a half in weight,” as he appeared killing 200 rats. This engraving had a singular look, from its having been printed upon a silk handkerchief. Tiny had been a great favourite with the proprietor, and used to wear a lady’s bracelet as a collar.

Among the stuffed heads was one of a white bull-dog, with tremendous glass eyes sticking out, as if it had died of strangulation. The proprietor’s son was kind enough to explain to me the qualities that had once belonged to this favourite. “They’ve spoilt her in stuffing, sir,” he said; “made her so short in the head; but she was the wonder of her day. There wasn’t a dog in England as would come nigh her. There’s her daughter,” he added, pointing to another head, something like that of a seal, “but she wasn’t reckoned half as handsome as her mother, though she was very much admired in her time.

“That there is a dog,” he continued, pointing to one represented with a rat in its mouth, “it was as good as any in England, though it’s so small. I’ve seen her kill a dozen rats almost as big as herself, though they killed her at last; for sewer-rats are dreadful for giving dogs canker in the mouth, and she wore herself out with continually killing them, though we always rinsed her mouth out well with peppermint and water while she were at work. When rats bite they are pisonous, and an ulcer is formed, which we are obleeged to lance; that’s what killed her.”

The company assembled in “the parlour” consisted of sporting men, or those who, from curiosity, had come to witness what a rat-match was like. Seated at the same table, talking together, were those dressed in the costermonger’s suit of corduroy, soldiers with their uniforms carelessly unbuttoned, coachmen in their livery, and tradesmen who had slipped on their evening frock-coats, and run out from the shop to see the sport.

The dogs belonging to the company were standing on the different tables, or tied to the legs of the forms, or sleeping in their owners’ arms, and were in turn minutely criticised—their limbs being stretched out as if they were being felt for fractures, and their mouths looked into, as if a dentist were examining their teeth. Nearly all the little animals were marked with scars from bites. “Pity to bring him up to rat-killing,” said one, who had been admiring a fierce-looking bull-terrier, although he did not mention at the same time what line in life the little animal ought to pursue.

At another table one man was declaring that his pet animal was the exact image of the celebrated rat-killing dog “Billy,” at the same time pointing to the picture against the wall of that famous animal, “as he performed his wonderful feat of killing 500 rats in five minutes and a half.”

There were amongst the visitors some French gentlemen, who had evidently witnessed nothing of the kind before; and whilst they endeavoured to drink their hot gin and water, they made their interpreter translate to them the contents of a large placard hung upon a hatpeg, and headed—

“Every Man has his Fancy.
RATTING SPORTS IN REALITY.”

About nine o’clock the proprietor took the chair in the parlour, at the same time giving the order to “shut up the shutters in the room above, and light up the pit.” This announcement seemed to rouse the spirits of the impatient assembly, and even the dogs tied to the legs of the tables ran out to the length of their leathern thongs, and their tails curled like eels, as if they understood the meaning of the words.

“Why, that’s the little champion,” said the proprietor, patting a dog with thighs like a grasshopper, and whose mouth opened back to its ears. “Well, it is a beauty! I wish I could gammon you to take a ‘fiver’ for it.” Then looking round the room, he added, “Well, gents, I’m glad to see you look so comfortable.”

RATTING—“THE GRAHAM ARMS,” GRAHAM STREET.

[From a Photograph.]

The performances of the evening were somewhat hurried on by the entering of a young gentleman, whom the waiters called “Cap’an.”

“Now, Jem, when is this match coming off?” the Captain asked impatiently; and despite the assurance that they were getting ready, he threatened to leave the place if kept waiting much longer. This young officer seemed to be a great “fancier” of dogs, for he made the round of the room, handling each animal in its turn, feeling and squeezing its feet, and scrutinising its eyes and limbs with such minuteness, that the French gentlemen were forced to inquire who he was.

There was no announcement that the room above was ready, though everybody seemed to understand it; for all rose at once, and mounting the broad wooden staircase, which led to what was once the “drawing-room,” dropped their shillings into the hand of the proprietor, and entered the rat-killing apartment.

“The pit,” as it is called, consists of a small circus, some six feet in diameter. It is about as large as a centre flower-bed, and is fitted with a high wooden rim that reaches to elbow height. Over it the branches of a gas lamp are arranged, which light up the white painted floor, and every part of the little arena. On one side of the room is a recess, which the proprietor calls his “private box,” and this apartment the Captain and his friend soon took possession of, whilst the audience generally clambered upon the tables and forms, or hung over the sides of the pit itself.

All the little dogs which the visitors had brought up with them were now squalling and barking, and struggling in their masters’ arms, as if they were thoroughly acquainted with the uses of the pit; and when a rusty wire cage of rats, filled with the dark moving mass, was brought forward, the noise of the dogs was so great that the proprietor was obliged to shout out—“Now, you that have dogs do make ’em shut up.”

The Captain was the first to jump into the pit. A man wanted to sell him a bull-terrier, spotted like a fancy rabbit, and a dozen of rats was the consequent order.

The Captain preferred pulling the rats out of the cage himself, laying hold of them by their tails and jerking them into the arena. He was cautioned by one of the men not to let them bite him, for “believe me,” were the words, “you’ll never forget, Cap’an; these ’ere are none of the cleanest.”

Whilst the rats were being counted out, some of those that had been taken from the cage ran about the painted floor and climbed up the young officer’s legs, making him shake them off and exclaim, “Get out, you varmint!” whilst others of the ugly little animals sat upon their hind legs, cleaning their faces with their paws.

When the dog in question was brought forth and shown the dozen rats, he grew excited, and stretched himself in his owner’s arms, whilst all the other animals joined in a full chorus of whining.

“Chuck him in,” said the Captain, and over went the dog; and in a second the rats were running round the circus, or trying to hide themselves between the small openings in the boards round the pit.

Although the proprietor of the dog endeavoured to speak up for it, by declaring “it was a good ’un, and a very pretty performer,” still it was evidently not worth much in a rat-killing sense; and if it had not been for his “second,” who beat the sides of the pit with his hand, and shouted “Hi! hi! at ’em!” in a most bewildering manner, we doubt if the terrier would not have preferred leaving the rats to themselves, to enjoy their lives. Some of the rats, when the dog advanced towards them, sprang up in his face, making him draw back with astonishment. Others, as he bit them, curled round in his mouth and fastened on his nose, so that he had to carry them as a cat does its kittens. It also required many shouts of “Drop it—dead ’un,” before he would leave those he had killed.

We cannot say whether the dog was eventually bought; but from its owner’s exclaiming, in a kind of apologetic tone, “Why, he never saw a rat before in all his life,” we fancy no dealings took place.

The Captain seemed anxious to see as much sport as he could, for he frequently asked those who carried dogs in their arms whether “his little ’un would kill,” and appeared sorry when such answers were given as—“My dog’s mouth’s a little out of order, Cap’an,” or “I’ve only tried him at very small ’uns.”

One little dog was put in the pit to amuse himself with the dead bodies. He seized hold of one almost as big as himself, shook it furiously till the head thumped the floor like a drumstick, making those around shout with laughter, and causing one man to exclaim, “He’s a good ’un at shaking heads and tails, ain’t he?”

Preparations now began for the grand match of the evening, in which fifty rats were to be killed. The “dead ’uns” were gathered up by their tails and flung into the corner. The floor was swept, and a big flat basket produced, like those in which chickens are brought to market, and under whose iron wire top could be seen small mounds of closely packed rats.

This match seemed to be between the proprietor and his son, and the stake to be gained was only a bottle of lemonade, of which the father stipulated he should have first drink.

It was strange to observe the daring manner in which the lad introduced his hand into the rat cage, sometimes keeping it there for more than a minute at a time, as he fumbled about and stirred up with his fingers the living mass, picking out, as he had been requested, “only the big ’uns.”

When the fifty animals had been flung into the pit, they gathered themselves together into a mound which reached one-third up the sides, and which reminded one of the heap of hair-sweepings in a barber’s shop after a heavy day’s cutting. These were all sewer and water-ditch rats, and the smell that rose from them was like that from a hot drain.

The Captain amused himself by flicking at them with his pocket handkerchief, and offering them the lighted end of his cigar, which the little creatures tamely snuffed at, and drew back from, as they singed their noses.

It was also a favourite amusement to blow on the mound of rats, for they seemed to dislike the cold wind, which sent them fluttering about like so many feathers; indeed, whilst the match was going on, whenever the little animals collected together, and formed a barricade as it were to the dog, the cry of “Blow on ’em! blow on ’em!” was given by the spectators, and the dog’s second puffed at them as if extinguishing a fire, when they would dart off like so many sparks.

The company was kept waiting so long for the match to begin that the impatient Captain again threatened to leave the house, and was only quieted by the proprietor’s reply of “My dear friend, be easy, the boy’s on the stairs with the dog;” and true enough we shortly heard a wheezing and a screaming in the passage without, as if some strong-winded animal were being strangled, and presently a boy entered, carrying in his arms a bull-terrier in a perfect fit of excitement, foaming at the mouth and stretching its neck forward, so that the collar which held it back seemed to be cutting its throat in two.

The animal was nearly mad with rage—scratching and struggling to get loose. “Lay hold a little closer up to the head or he’ll turn round and nip yer,” said the proprietor to his son.

Whilst the gasping dog was fastened up in a corner to writhe its impatience away, the landlord made inquiries for a stop-watch, and also for an umpire to decide, as he added, “whether the rats were dead or alive when they’re ‘killed,’ as Paddy says.”

When all the arrangements had been made the “second” and the dog jumped into the pit, and after “letting him see ’em a bit,” the terrier was let loose.

The moment the dog was “free,” he became quiet in a most business-like manner, and rushed at the rats, burying his nose in the mound till he brought out one in his mouth. In a short time a dozen rats with wetted necks were lying bleeding on the floor, and the white paint of the pit became grained with blood.

In a little time the terrier had a rat hanging to his nose, which, despite his tossing, still held on. He dashed up against the sides, leaving a patch of blood as if a strawberry had been smashed there.

“He doesn’t squeal, that’s one good thing,” said one of the lookers-on.

As the rats fell on their sides after a bite they were collected together in the centre, where they lay quivering in their death-gasps!

“Hi, Butcher! hi, Butcher!” shouted the second, “good dog! bur-r-r-r-r-h!” and he beat the sides of the pit like a drum till the dog flew about with new life.

“Dead ’un! drop it!” he cried, when the terrier “nosed” a rat kicking on its side, as it slowly expired of its broken neck.

“Time!” said the proprietor, when four of the eight minutes had expired, and the dog was caught up and held panting, his neck stretched out like a serpent’s, staring intently at the rats which still kept crawling about.

The poor little wretches in this brief interval, as if forgetting their danger, again commenced cleaning themselves, some nibbling the ends of their tails, others hopping about, going now to the legs of the lad in the pit, and sniffing at his trousers, or, strange to say, advancing, smelling, to within a few paces of their enemy the dog.

The dog lost the match, and the proprietor, we presume, honourably paid the bottle of lemonade to his son. But he was evidently displeased with the dog’s behaviour, for he said, “He won’t do for me—he’s not one of my sort! Here, Jim, tell Mr. G. he may have him if he likes; I won’t give him house room.”

A plentiful shower of halfpence was thrown into the pit as a reward for the second who had backed the dog.

A slight pause now took place in the proceedings, during which the landlord requested that the gentlemen “would give their minds up to drinking; you know the love I have for you,” he added jocularly, “and that I don’t care for any of you;” whilst the waiter accompanied the invitation with a cry of “Give your orders, gentlemen,” and the lad with the rats asked if “any other gentleman would like any rats.”

Several other dogs were tried, and amongst them one who, from the size of his stomach, had evidently been accustomed to large dinners, and looked upon rat-killing as a sport and not as a business. The appearance of this fat animal was greeted with remarks such as “Why don’t you feed your dog?” and “You shouldn’t give him more than five meals a-day.”

Another impatient bull-terrier was thrown into the midst of a dozen rats. He did his duty so well, that the admiration of the spectators was focussed upon him.

“Ah,” said one, “he’d do better at a hundred than twelve;” whilst another observed, “Rat-killing’s his game, I can see;” while the landlord himself said, “He’s a very pretty creetur’, and I’d back him to kill against anybody’s dog at eight and a half or nine.”

The Captain was so startled with this terrier’s “cleverness,” that he vowed that if she could kill fifteen in a minute “he’d give a hundred guineas for her.”

It was nearly twelve o’clock before the evening’s performance concluded. Several of the spectators tried their dogs upon two or three rats, either the biggest or the smallest that could be found: and many offers as to what “he wanted for the dog,” and many inquiries as to “who was its father,” were made before the company broke up.

At last the landlord, finding that no “gentleman would like a few rats,” and that his exhortations to “give their minds up to drinking” produced no further effect upon the company, spoke the epilogue of the rat tragedies in these words;—

“Gentlemen, I give a very handsome solid silver collar to be killed for next Tuesday. Open to all the world, only they must be novice dogs, or at least such as is not considered pheenomenons. We shall have plenty of sport, gentlemen, and there will be loads of rat-killing. I hope to see all my kind friends, not forgetting your dogs, likewise; and may they be like the Irishman all over, who had good trouble to catch and kill ’em, and took good care they didn’t come to life again. Gentlemen, there is a good parlour down-stairs, where we meets for harmony and entertainment.”

Jimmy Shaw.

The proprietor of one of the largest sporting public-houses in London, who is celebrated for the rat-matches which come off weekly at his establishment, was kind enough to favour me with a few details as to the quality of those animals which are destroyed in his pit. His statement was certainly one of the most curious that I have listened to, and it was given to me with a readiness and a courtesy of manner such as I have not often met with during my researches. The landlord himself is known in pugilistic circles as one of the most skilful boxers among what is termed the “light weights.”

His statement is curious, as a proof of the large trade which is carried on in these animals, for it would seem that the men who make a business of catching rats are not always employed as “exterminators,” for they make a good living as “purveyors” for supplying the demands of the sporting portion of London.

“The poor people,” said the sporting landlord, “who supply me with rats, are what you may call barn-door labouring poor, for they are the most ignorant people I ever come near. Really you would not believe people could live in such ignorance. Talk about Latin and Greek, sir, why English is Latin to them—in fact, I have a difficulty to understand them myself. When the harvest is got in, they go hunting the hedges and ditches for rats. Once the farmers had to pay 2d. a-head for all rats caught on their grounds, and they nailed them up against the wall. But now that the rat-ketchers can get 3d. each by bringing the vermin up to town, the farmers don’t pay them anything for what they ketch, but merely give them permission to hunt them in their stacks and barns, so that they no longer get their 2d. in the country, though they get their 3d. in town.

“I have some twenty families depending upon me. From Clavering, in Essex, I suppose I have hundreds of thousands of rats sent to me in wire cages fitted into baskets. From Enfield I have a great quantity, but the ketchers don’t get them all there, but travel round the country for scores of miles, for you see 3d. a-head is money; besides, there are some liberal farmers who will still give them a halfpenny a-head into the bargain. Enfield is a kind of head-quarters for rat-ketchers.

“It’s dangerous work, though, for you see there is a wonderful deal of difference in the specie of rats. The bite of sewer or water-ditch rats is very bad. The water and ditch rat lives on filth, but your barn-rat is a plump fellow, and he lives on the best of everything. He’s well off. There’s as much difference between the barn and sewer-rats as between a brewer’s horse and a costermonger’s. Sewer-rats are very bad for dogs, their coats is poisonous.

“Some of the rats that are brought to me are caught in the warehouses in the City. Wherever there is anything in the shape of provisions, there you are sure to find Mr. Rat an intruder. The ketchers are paid for ketching them in the warehouses, and then they are sold to me as well, so the men must make a good thing of it. Many of the more courageous kind of warehousemen will take a pleasure in hunting the rats themselves.

“I should think I buy in the course of the year, on the average, from 300 to 700 rats a-week.” (Taking 500 as the weekly average, this gives a yearly purchase of 26,000 live rats.) “That’s what I kill taking all the year round, you see. Some first-class chaps will come here in the day-time, and they’ll try their dogs. They’ll say, ‘Jimmy, give the dog 100.’ After he’s polished them off they’ll say, perhaps, ‘Hang it, give him another 100.’ Bless you!” he added, in a kind of whisper, “I’ve had noble ladies and titled ladies come here to see the sport—on the quiet, you know. When my wife was here they would come regular, but now she’s away they don’t come so often.

“The largest quantity of rats I’ve bought from one man was five guineas’ worth, or thirty-five dozen at 3d. a-head, and that’s a load for a horse. This man comes up from Clavering in a kind of cart, with a horse that’s a regular phenomena, for it ain’t like a beast nor nothing. I pays him a good deal of money at times, and I’m sure I can’t tell what he does with it; but they do tell me that he deals in old iron, and goes buying it up, though he don’t seem to have much of a head-piece for that sort of fancy neither.

“During the harvest-time the rats run scarcer you see, and the ketcher turns up rat-ketching for harvest work. After the harvest rats gets plentiful again.

“I’ve had as many as 2000 rats in this very house at one time. They’ll consume a sack of barley-meal a week, and the brutes, if you don’t give ’em good stuff, they’ll eat one another, hang ’em!

“I’m the oldest canine fancier in London, and I’m the first that started ratting; in fact, I know I’m the oldest caterer in rat-killing in the metropolis. I began as a lad, and I had many noble friends, and was as good a man then as I am now. In fact, when I was seventeen or eighteen years of age I was just like what my boy is now. I used at that time to be a great public charakter, and had many liberal friends—very liberal friends. I used to give them rat sports, and I have kept to it ever since. My boy can handle rats now just as I used to then.

“Have I been bit by them? Aye, hundreds of times. Now, some people will say, ‘Rub yourself over with caraway and stuff, and then rats won’t bite you.’ But I give you my word and honour it’s all nonsense, sir.

“As I said, I was the first in London to give rat sports, and I’ve kept to it ever since. Bless you, there’s nothing that a rat won’t bite through. I’ve seen my lads standing in the pit with the rats running about them, and if they haven’t taken the precaution to tie their trousers round with a bit of string at the bottom, they’d have as many as five or six rats run up their trouser-legs. They’ll deliberately take off their clothes and pick them out from their shirts, and bosoms, and breeches. Some people is amused, and others is horror-struck. People have asked them whether they ain’t rubbed? They’ll say ‘Yes,’ but that’s as a lark; ’cos, sometimes when my boy has been taking the rats out of the cage, and somebody has taken his attention off, talking to him, he has had a bite, and will turn to me with his finger bleeding, and say, ‘Yes, I’m rubbed, ain’t I, father? look here!’

“A rat’s bite is very singular, it’s a three-cornered one, like a leech’s, only deeper, of course, and it will bleed for ever such a time. My boys have sometimes had their fingers go dreadfully bad from rat-bites, so that they turn all black and putrid like—aye, as black as the horse-hair covering to my sofa. People have said to me, ‘You ought to send the lad to the hospital, and have his finger took off;’ but I’ve always left it to the lads, and they’ve said, ‘Oh, don’t mind it, father; it’ll get all right by and by.’ And so it has.

“The best thing I ever found for a rat-bite was the thick bottoms of porter-casks put on as a poultice. The only thing you can do is to poultice, and these porter bottoms is so powerful and draws so, that they’ll actually take thorns out of horses’ hoofs and feet after steeplechasing.

“In handling rats, it’s nothing more in the world but nerve that does it. I should faint now if a rat was to run up my breeches, but I have known the time when I’ve been kivered with ’em.

“I generally throw my dead rats away now; but two or three years since my boys took the idea of skinning them into their heads, and they did about 300 of them, and their skins was very promising. The boys was, after all, obliged to give them away to a furrier, for my wife didn’t like the notion, and I said, ‘Throw them away;’ but the idea strikes me to be something, and one that is lost sight of, for the skins are warm and handsome-looking—a beautiful grey.

“There’s nothing turns so quickly as dead rats, so I am obleeged to have my dustmen come round every Wednesday morning; and regularly enough they call too, for they know where there is a bob and a pot. I generally prefers using the authorised dustmen, though the others come sometimes—the flying dustmen they call ’em—and if they’re first, they has the job.

“It strikes me, though, that to throw away so many valuable skins is a good thing lost sight of.

“The rats want a deal of watching, and a deal of sorting. Now you can’t put a sewer and a barn-rat together, it’s like putting a Roosshian and a Turk under the same roof.

“I can tell a barn-rat from a ship-rat or a sewer-rat in a minute, and I have to look over my stock when they come in, or they’d fight to the death. There’s six or seven different kinds of rats, and if we don’t sort ’em they tear one another to pieces. I think when I have a number of rats in the house, that I am a lucky man if I don’t find a dozen dead when I go up to them in the morning; and when I tell you that at times—when I’ve wanted to make up my number for a match—I’ve given 21s. for twenty rats, you may think I lose something that way every year. Rats, even now, is occasionally 6s. a-dozen; but that, I think, is most inconsistent.

“If I had my will, I wouldn’t allow sewer ratting, for the rats in the shores eats up a great quantity of sewer filth and rubbish, and is another specie of scavenger in their own way.”

After finishing his statement, the landlord showed me some very curious specimens of tame rats—some piebald, and others quite white, with pink eyes, which he kept in cages in his sitting-room. He took them out from their cages, and handled them without the least fear, and even handled them rather rudely, as he showed me the peculiarities of their colours; yet the little tame creatures did not once attempt to bite him. Indeed, they appeared to have lost the notion of regaining their liberty, and when near their cages struggled to return to their nests.

In one of these boxes a black and a white rat were confined together, and the proprietor, pointing to them, remarked, “I hope they’ll breed, for though white rats is very scarce, only occurring in fact by a freak of nature, I fancy I shall be able, with time and trouble, to breed ’em myself. The old English rat is a small jet-black rat; but the first white rat as I heard of come out of a burial-ground. At one time I bred rats very largely, but now I leaves that fancy to my boys, for I’ve as much as I can do continuing to serve my worthy patrons.”

Jack Black.

JACK BLACK, HER MAJESTY’S RATCATCHER.

[From a Photograph.]

As I wished to obtain the best information about rat and vermin destroying, I thought I could not do better now than apply to that eminent authority “the Queen’s ratcatcher,” and accordingly I sought an interview with Mr. “Jack” Black, whose hand-bills are headed—“V.R. Rat and mole destroyer to Her Majesty.”

I had already had a statement from the royal bug-destroyer relative to the habits and means of exterminating those offensive vermin, and I was desirous of pairing it with an account of the personal experience of the Queen of England’s ratcatcher.

In the sporting world, and among his regular customers, the Queen’s ratcatcher is better known by the name of Jack Black. He enjoys the reputation of being the most fearless handler of rats of any man living, playing with them—as one man expressed it to me—“as if they were so many blind kittens.”

The first time I ever saw Mr. Black was in the streets of London, at the corner of Hart-street, where he was exhibiting the rapid effects of his rat poison, by placing some of it in the mouth of a living animal. He had a cart then with rats painted on the panels, and at the tailboard, where he stood lecturing, he had a kind of stage rigged up, on which were cages filled with rats, and pills, and poison packages.

Here I saw him dip his hand into this cage of rats and take out as many as he could hold, a feat which generally caused an “oh!” of wonder to escape from the crowd, especially when they observed that his hands were unbitten. Women more particularly shuddered when they beheld him place some half-dozen of the dusty-looking brutes within his shirt next his skin; and men swore the animals had been tamed, as he let them run up his arms like squirrels, and the people gathered round beheld them sitting on his shoulders cleaning their faces with their front-paws, or rising up on their hind legs like little kangaroos, and sniffing about his ears and cheeks.

But those who knew Mr. Black better, were well aware that the animals he took up in his hand were as wild as any of the rats in the sewers of London, and that the only mystery in the exhibition was that of a man having courage enough to undertake the work.

I afterwards visited Jack Black at his house in Battersea. I had some difficulty in discovering his country residence, and was indebted to a group of children gathered round and staring at the bird-cage in the window of his cottage for his address. Their exclamations of delight at a grey parrot climbing with his beak and claws about the zinc wires of his cage, and the hopping of the little linnets there, in the square boxes scarcely bigger than a brick, made me glance up at the door to discover who the bird-fancier was; when painted on a bit of zinc—just large enough to fit the shaft of a tax cart—I saw the words, “J. Black, Rat Destroyer to Her Majesty,” surmounted by the royal initials, V.R., together with the painting of a white rat.

Mr. Black was out “sparrer ketching,” as his wife informed me, for he had an order for three dozen, “which was to be shot in a match” at some tea-gardens close by.

When I called again Mr. Black had returned, and I found him kneeling before a big, rusty iron-wire cage, as large as a sea-chest, and transferring the sparrows from his bird-catching apparatus to the more roomy prison.

He transacted a little business before I spoke to him, for the boys about the door were asking, “Can I have one for a penny, master?”

There is evidently a great art in handling birds; for when Mr. Black held one, he took hold of it by the wings and tail, so that the little creature seemed to be sitting upright and had not a feather rumpled, while it stretched out its neck and looked around it; the boys, on the contrary, first made them flutter their feathers as rough as a hair ball, and then half smothered them between their two hands, by holding them as if they wished to keep them hot.

I was soon at home with Mr. Black. He was a very different man from what I had expected to meet, for there was an expression of kindliness in his countenance, a quality which does not exactly agree with one’s preconceived notions of ratcatchers. His face had a strange appearance, from his rough, uncombed hair, being nearly grey, and his eyebrows and whiskers black, so that he looked as if he wore powder.

Mr. Black informed me that the big iron-wire cage, in which the sparrows were fluttering about, had been constructed by him for rats, and that it held over a thousand when full—for rats are packed like cups, he said, one over the other. “But,” he added, “business is bad for rats, and it makes a splendid havery; besides, sparrers is the rats of birds, sir, for if you look at ’em in a cage they always huddles up in a corner like rats in a pit, and they are a’most vermin in colour and habits, and eats anything.”

The ratcatcher’s parlour was more like a shop than a family apartment. In a box, with iron bars before it, like a rabbit-hutch, was a white ferret, twisting its long thin body with a snake-like motion up and down the length of its prison, as restlessly as if it were a miniature polar bear.

When Mr. Black called “Polly” to the ferret, it came to the bars and fixed its pink eyes on him. A child lying on the floor poked its fingers into the cage, but Polly only smelt at them, and, finding them not good to eat, went away.

Mr. Black stuffs animals and birds, and also catches fish for vivaria. Against the walls were the furred and feathered remains of departed favourites, each in its glazed box and appropriate attitude. There was a famous polecat—“a first-rater at rats” we were informed. Here a ferret “that never was equalled.” This canary “had earned pounds.” That linnet “was the wonder of its day.” The enormous pot-bellied carp, with the miniature rushes painted at the back of its case, was caught in the Regent’s Park waters.

In another part of the room hung fishing-lines, and a badger’s skin, and lead-bobs and curious eel-hooks—the latter as big as the curls on the temples of a Spanish dancer, and from here Mr. Black took down a transparent-looking fish, like a slip of parchment, and told me that it was a fresh-water smelt, and that he caught it in the Thames—“the first he ever heard of.” Then he showed me a beetle suspended to a piece of thread, like a big spider to its web, and this he informed me was the Thames beetle, “which either live by land or water.”

“You ketch ’em,” continued Mr. Black, “when they are swimming on their backs, which is their nature, and when they turns over you finds ’em beautifully crossed and marked.”

Round the room were hung paper bags, like those in which housewives keep their sweet herbs. “All of them there, sir, contain cured fish for eating,” Mr. Black explained to me.

“I’m called down here the Battersea otter,” he went on, “for I can go out at four in the morning, and come home by eight with a barrowful of freshwater fish. Nobody knows how I do it, because I never takes no nets or lines with me. I assure them I ketch ’em with my hands, which I do, but they only laughs increderlous like. I knows the fishes’ harnts, and watches the tides. I sells fresh fish—perch, roach, dace, gudgeon, and such-like, and even small jack, at threepence a pound, or what they’ll fetch; and I’ve caught near the Wandsworth ‘Black Sea,’ as we calls it, half a hundred weight sometimes, and I never took less than my handkerchey full.”

I was inclined—like the inhabitants of Battersea—to be incredulous of the ratcatcher’s hand-fishing, until, under a promise of secrecy, he confided his process to me, and then not only was I perfectly convinced of its truth, but startled that so simple a method had never before been taken advantage of.

Later in the day Mr. Black became very communicative. We sat chatting together in his sanded bird shop, and he told me all his misfortunes, and how bad luck had pressed upon him, and driven him out of London.

“I was fool enough to take a public-house in Regent-street, sir,” he said. “My daughter used to dress as the ‘Ratketcher’s Daughter,’ and serve behind the bar, and that did pretty well for a time; but it was a brewer’s house, and they ruined me.”

The costume of the “ratketcher’s daughter” was shown to me by her mother. It was a red velvet bodice, embroidered with silver lace.

“With a muslin skirt, and her hair down her back, she looked wery genteel,” added the parent.

Mr. Black’s chief complaint was that he could not “make an appearance,” for his “uniform”—a beautiful green coat and red waistcoat—“were pledged.”

Whilst giving me his statement, Mr. Black, in proof of his assertions of the biting powers of rats, drew my attention to the leathern breeches he wore, “as were given him twelve years ago by Captain B——.”

These were pierced in some places with the teeth of the animals, and in others were scratched and fringed like the washleather of a street knife-seller.

His hands, too, and even his face, had scars upon them from bites.

Mr. Black informed me that he had given up tobacco “since a haccident he met with from a pipe. I was smoking a pipe,” he said, “and a friend of mine by chance jobbed it into my mouth, and it went right through to the back of my palate, and I nearly died.”

Here his wife added, “There’s a hole there to this day you could put your thumb into; you never saw such a mouth.”

Mr. Black informed me in secret that he had often, “unbeknown to his wife,” tasted what cooked rats were like, and he asserted that they were as moist as rabbits, and quite as nice.

“If they are shewer-rats,” he continued, “just chase them for two or three days before you kill them, and they are as good as barn-rats, I give you my word, sir.”

Mr. Black’s statement was as follows:—

“I should think I’ve been at ratting a’most for five-and-thirty year; indeed, I may say from my childhood, for I’ve kept at it a’most all my life. I’ve been dead near three times from bites—as near as a toucher. I once had the teeth of a rat break in my finger, which was dreadful bad, and swole, and putrified, so that I had to have the broken bits pulled out with tweezers. When the bite is a bad one, it festers and forms a hard core in the ulcer, which is very painful, and throbs very much indeed; and after that core comes away, unless you cleans ’em out well, the sores, even after they seemed to be healed, break out over and over again, and never cure perfectly. This core is as big as a boiled fish’s eye, and as hard as a stone. I generally cuts the bite out clean with a lancet, and squeege the humour well from it, and that’s the only way to cure it thorough—as you see my hands is all covered with scars from bites.

“The worst bite I ever had was at the Manor House, Hornsey, kept by Mr. Burnell. One day when I was there, he had some rats get loose, and he asked me to ketch ’em for him, as they was wanted for a match that was coming on that afternoon. I had picked up a lot—indeed, I had one in each hand, and another again my knee, when I happened to come to a sheaf of straw, which I turned over, and there was a rat there. I couldn’t lay hold on him ’cause my hands was full, and as I stooped down he ran up the sleeve of my coat, and bit me on the muscle of the arm. I shall never forget it. It turned me all of a sudden, and made me feel numb. In less than half-an-hour I was took so bad I was obleeged to be sent home, and I had to get some one to drive my cart for me. It was terrible to see the blood that came from me—I bled awful. Burnell seeing me go so queer, says, ‘Here, Jack, take some brandy, you look so awful bad.’ The arm swole, and went as heavy as a ton weight pretty well, so that I couldn’t even lift it, and so painful I couldn’t bear my wife to ferment it. I was kept in bed for two months through that bite at Burnell’s. I was so weak I couldn’t stand, and I was dreadful feverish—all warmth like. I knew I was going to die, ’cause I remember the doctor coming and opening my eyes, to see if I was still alive.

“I’ve been bitten nearly everywhere, even where I can’t name to you, sir, and right through my thumb nail too, which, as you see, always has a split in it, though it’s years since I was wounded. I suffered as much from that bite on my thumb as anything. It went right up to my ear. I felt the pain in both places at once—a regular twinge, like touching the nerve of a tooth. The thumb went black, and I was told I ought to have it off; but I knew a young chap at the Middlesex Hospital who wasn’t out of his time, and he said, ‘No, I wouldn’t, Jack;’ and no more I did; and he used to strap it up for me. But the worst of it was, I had a job at Camden Town one afternoon after he had dressed the wound, and I got another bite lower down on the same thumb, and that flung me down on my bed, and there I stopped, I should think, six weeks.

“I was bit bad, too, in Edwards-street, Hampstead-road; and that time I was sick near three months, and close upon dying. Whether it was the poison of the bite, or the medicine the doctor give me, I can’t say; but the flesh seemed to swell up like a bladder—regular blowed like. After all, I think I cured myself by cheating the doctor, as they calls it; for instead of taking the medicine, I used to go to Mr. ——’s house in Albany-street (the publican), and he’d say, ‘What’ll yer have, Jack?’ and I used to take a glass of stout, and that seemed to give me strength to overcome the pison of the bite, for I began to pick up as soon as I left off doctor’s stuff.

“When a rat’s bite touches the bone, it makes you faint in a minute, and it bleeds dreadful—ah, most terrible—just as if you had been stuck with a penknife. You couldn’t believe the quantity of blood that come away, sir.

“The first rats I caught was when I was about nine years of age. I ketched them at Mr. Strickland’s, a large cow-keeper, in Little Albany-street, Regent’s-park. At that time it was all fields and meaders in them parts, and I recollect there was a big orchard on one side of the sheds. I was only doing it for a game, and there was lots of ladies and gents looking on, and wondering at seeing me taking the rats out from under a heap of old bricks and wood, where they had collected theirselves. I had a little dog—a little red ’un it was, who was well known through the fancy—and I wanted the rats for to test my dog with, I being a lad what was fond of the sport.

“I wasn’t afraid to handle rats even then; it seemed to come nat’ral to me. I very soon had some in my pocket, and some in my hands, carrying them away as fast as I could, and putting them into my wire cage. You see, the rats began to run as soon as we shifted them bricks, and I had to scramble for them. Many of them bit me, and, to tell you the truth, I didn’t know the bites were so many, or I dare say I shouldn’t have been so venturesome as I was.

“After that I bought some ferruts—four of them—of a man of the name of Butler, what was in the rat-ketching line, and afterwards went out to Jamaicer, to kill rats there. I was getting on to ten years of age then, and I was, I think, the first that regularly began hunting rats to sterminate them; for all those before me used to do it with drugs, and perhaps never handled rats in their lives.

“With my ferruts I at first used to go out hunting rats round by the ponds in Regent’s-park, and the ditches, and in the cow-sheds roundabout. People never paid me for ketching, though, maybe, if they was very much infested, they might give me a trifle; but I used to make my money by selling the rats to gents as was fond of sport, and wanted them for their little dogs.

“I kept to this till I was thirteen or fourteen year of age, always using the ferruts; and I bred from them, too,—indeed, I’ve still got the ‘strain’ (breed) of them same ferruts by me now. I’ve sold them ferruts about everywhere; to Jim Burn I’ve sold some of the strain; and to Mr. Anderson, the provision-merchant; and to a man that went to Ireland. Indeed, that strain of ferruts has gone nearly all over the world.

“I never lost a ferrut out ratting. I always let them loose, and put a bell on mine—arranged in a peculiar manner, which is a secret—and I then puts him into the main run of the rats, and lets him go to work. But they must be ferruts that’s well trained for working dwellings, or you’ll lose them as safe as death. I’ve had ’em go away two houses off, and come back to me. My ferruts is very tame, and so well trained, that I’d put them into a house and guarantee that they’d come back to me. In Grosvenor-street I was clearing once, and the ferruts went next door, and nearly cleared the house—which is the Honourable Mrs. F——’s—before they came back to me.

“Ferruts are very dangerous to handle if not well trained. They are very savage, and will attack a man or a child as well as a rat. It was well known at Mr. Hamilton’s at Hampstead—it’s years ago this is—there was a ferrut that got loose what killed a child, and was found sucking it. The bite of ’em is very dangerous—not so pisonous as a rat’s—but very painful; and when the little things is hungry they’ll attack anythink. I’ve seen two of them kill a cat, and then they’ll suck the blood till they fills theirselves, after which they’ll fall off like leeches.

“The weasel and the stoat are, I think, more dangerous than the ferrut in their bite. I had a stoat once, which I caught when out ratting at Hampstead for Mr. Cunningham, the butcher, and it bit one of my dogs—Black Bess by name, the truest bitch in the world, sir—in the mouth, and she died three days arterwards at the Ball at Kilburn. I was along with Captain K——, who’d come out to see the sport, and whilst we were at dinner, and the poor bitch lying under my chair, my boy says, says he, ‘Father, Black Bess is dying;’ and had scarce spoke the speech when she was dead. It was all through the bite of that stoat, for I opened the wound in the lip, and it was all swole, and dreadful ulcerated, and all down the throat it was inflamed most shocking, and so was the lungs quite red and fiery. She was hot with work when she got the bite, and perhaps that made her take the pison quicker.

“To give you a proof, sir, of the savage nature of the ferruts, I was one night at Jimmy Shaw’s, where there was a match to come off with rats, which the ferrut was to kill; and young Bob Shaw (Jim’s son) was holding the ferrut up to his mouth and giving it spittle, when the animal seized him by the lip, and bit it right through, and hung on as tight as a vice, which shows the spitefulness of the ferrut, and how it will attack the human frame. Young Shaw still held the ferrut in his hand whilst it was fastened to his lip, and he was saying, ‘Oh, oh!’ in pain. You see, I think Jim kept it very hard to make it kill the rats better. There was some noblemen there, and also Mr. George, of Kensal New-town, was there, which is one of the largest dog-fanciers we have. To make the ferrut leave go of young Shaw, they bit its feet and tail, and it wouldn’t, ’cos—as I could have told ’em—it only made it bite all the more. At last Mr. George, says he to me, ‘For God’s sake, Jack, take the ferrut off.’ I didn’t like to intrude myself upon the company before, not being in my own place, and I didn’t know how Jimmy would take it. Everybody in the room was at a standstill, quite horrerfied, and Jimmy himself was in a dreadful way for his boy. I went up, and quietly forced my thumb into his mouth and loosed him, and he killed a dozen rats after that. They all said, ‘Bravo, Jack, you are a plucked one;’ and the little chap said, ‘Well, Jack, I didn’t like to holla, but it was dreadful painful.’ His lip swole up directly as big as a nigger’s, and the company made a collection for the lad of some dozen shillings. This shows that, although a ferrut will kill a rat, yet, like the rat, it is always wicious, and will attack the human frame.

“When I was about fifteen, sir, I turned to bird-fancying. I was very fond of the sombre linnet. I was very successful in raising them, and sold them for a deal of money. I’ve got the strain of them by me now. I’ve ris them from some I purchased from a person in the Coal-yard, Drury-lane. I give him 2l. for one of the periwinkle strain, but afterwards I heard of a person with, as I thought, a better strain—Lawson of Holloway—and I went and give him 30s. for a bird. I then ris them. I used to go and ketch the nestlings off the common, and ris them under the old trained birds.

“Originally linnets was taught to sing by a bird-organ—principally among the weavers, years ago,—but I used to make the old birds teach the young ones. I used to molt them off in the dark, by kivering the cages up, and then they’d learn from hearing the old ones singing, and would take the song. If any did not sing perfectly I used to sell ’em as cast-offs.

“The linnet’s is a beautiful song. There are four-and-twenty changes in a linnet’s song. It’s one of the beautifullest song-birds we’ve got. It sings ‘toys,’ as we call them; that is, it makes sounds which we distinguish in the fancy as the ‘tollock eeke eeke quake le wheet; single eke eke quake wheets, or eek eek quake chowls; eege pipe chowl; laugh; eege poy chowls; rattle; pipe; fear; pugh and poy.’

“This seems like Greek to you, sir, but it’s the tunes we use in the fancy. What we terms ‘fear’ is a sound like fear, as if they was frightened; ‘laugh’ is a kind of shake, nearly the same as the ‘rattle.’

“I know the sounds of all the English birds, and what they say. I could tell you about the nightingale, the black cap, hedge warbler, garden warbler, petty chat, red start—a beautiful song-bird—the willow wren—little warblers they are—linnets, or any of them, for I have got their sounds in my ear and my mouth.”

As if to prove this, he drew from a side-pocket a couple of tin bird-whistles, which were attached by a string to a button-hole. He instantly began to imitate the different birds, commencing with their call, and then explaining how, when answered to in such a way, they gave another note, and how, if still responded to, they uttered a different sound.

In fact, he gave me the whole of the conversation he usually carried on with the different kinds of birds, each one being as it were in a different language. He also showed me how he allured them to him, when they were in the air singing in the distance, and he did this by giving their entire song. His cheeks and throat seemed to be in constant motion as he filled the room with his loud imitations of the lark, and so closely did he resemble the notes of the bird, that it was no longer any wonder how the little things could be deceived.

In the same manner he illustrated the songs of the nightingale, and so many birds, that I did not recognise the names of some of them. He knew all their habits as well as notes, and repeated to me the peculiar chirp they make on rising from the ground, as well as the sound by which he distinguishes that it is “uneasy with curiosity,” or that it has settled on a tree. Indeed, he appeared to be acquainted with all the chirps which distinguished any action in the bird up to the point when, as he told me, it “circles about, and then falls like a stone to the ground with its pitch.”

“The nightingale,” he continued, “is a beautiful song-bird. They’re plucky birds, too, and they hear a call and answer to anybody; and when taken in April they’re plucked enough to sing as soon as put in a cage. I can ketch a nightingale in less than five minutes; as soon as he calls, I calls to him with my mouth, and he’ll answer me (both by night or day), either from a spinny (a little copse), a dell, or a wood, wherever he may be. I make my scrapes, (that is, clear away the dirt), set my traps, and catch ’em almost before I’ve tried my luck. I’ve ketched sometimes thirty in a day, for although people have got a notion that nightingales is scarce, still those who can distinguish their song in the daytime know that they are plentiful enough—almost like the lark. You see persons fancy that them nightingales as sings at night is the only ones living, but it’s wrong, for many on them only sings in the day.

“You see it was when I was about eighteen, I was beginning to get such a judge about birds, sir. I sold to a butcher, of the name of Jackson, the first young un that I made money out of—for two pounds it was—and I’ve sold loads of ’em since for thirty shillings or two pounds each, and I’ve got the strain by me now. I’ve also got by me now the bird that won the match at Mr. Lockwood’s in Drury-lane, and won the return match at my own place in High-street, Marabun. It was in the presence of all the fancy. He’s moulted pied (pie-bald) since, and gone a little white on the head and the back. We only sang for two pounds a side—it wasn’t a great deal of money. In our matches we sing by both gas and daylight. He was a master-baker I sang against, but I forget his name. They do call him ‘Holy Face,’ but that’s a nick-name, because he’s very much pock-marked. I wouldn’t sell that bird at all for anythink; I’ve been offered ten pounds for it. Captain K—— put ten sovereigns down on the counter for him, and I wouldn’t pick ’em up, for I’ve sold lots of his strain for a pound each.

“When I found I was a master of the birds, then I turned to my rat business again. I had a little rat dog—a black tan terrier of the name of Billy—which was the greatest stock dog in London of that day. He is the father of the greatest portion of the small black tan dogs in London now, which Mr. Isaac, the bird-fancier in Princes-street, purchased one of the strain for six or seven pounds; which Jimmy Massey afterwards purchased another of the strain, for a monkey, a bottle of wine, and three pounds. That was the rummest bargain I ever made.

“I’ve ris and trained monkeys by shoals. Some of mine is about now in shows exhibiting; one in particular—Jimmy.

“One of the strain of this little black tan dog would draw a badger twelve or fourteen lbs. to his six lbs., which was done for a wager, ’cos it was thought the badger had his teeth drawn, but he hadn’t, as was proved by his biting Mr. P—— from Birmingham, for he took a piece clean out of his trousers, which was pretty good proof, and astonished them all in the room.

“I’ve been offered a sovereign a-pound for some of my little terriers, but it wouldn’t pay me at that price, for they weren’t heavier than two or three pounds. I once sold one of the dogs, of this same strain, for fourteen pounds, to the Austrian Ambassador. Mrs. H—— the banker’s lady, wished to get my strain of terriers, and she give me five pounds for the use of him; in fact, my terrier dog was known to all the London fancy. As rat-killing dogs, there’s no equal to that strain of black tan terriers.

“It’s fifteen year ago since I first worked for Goverment. I found that the parks was much infested with rats, which had underminded the bridges and gnawed the drains, and I made application to Mr. Westley, who was superintendent of the park, and he spoke of it, and then it was wrote to me that I was to fulfil the siterwation, and I was to have six pounds a-year. But after that it was altered, and I was to have so much a-head, which is threepence. After that, Newton, what was a warmint destroyer to her Majesty, dying, I wrote in to the Board of Hordnance, when they appointed me to each station in London—that was, to Regentsey-park-barracks, to the Knightsbridge and Portland-barracks, and to all the other barracks in the metropolis. I’ve got the letter now by me, in which they says ‘they is proud to appint me.’

“I’ve taken thirty-two rats out of one hole in the islands in Regentsey-park, and found in it fish, birds, and loads of eggs—duck-eggs, and every kind.

“It must be fourteen year since I first went about the streets exhibiting with rats. I began with a cart and a’most a donkey; for it was a pony scarce bigger; but I’ve had three or four big horses since that, and ask anybody, and they’ll tell you I’m noted for my cattle. I thought that by having a kind of costume, and the rats painted on the cart, and going round the country, I should get my name about, and get myself knowed; and so I did, for folks ’ud come to me, so that sometimes I’ve had four jobs of a-day, from people seeing my cart. I found I was quite the master of the rat, and could do pretty well what I liked with him; so I used to go round Finchley, Highgate, and all the sububs, and show myself, and how I handled the warmint.

“I used to wear a costume of white leather breeches, and a green coat and scarlet waistkit, and a goold band round my hat, and a belt across my shoulder. I used to make a first-rate appearance, such as was becoming the uniform of the Queen’s rat-ketcher.

“Lor’ bless you! I’ve travell’d all over London, and I’ll kill rats again anybody. I’m open to all the world for any sum, from one pound to fifty. I used to have my belts painted at first by Mr. Bailey, the animal painter—with four white rats; but the idea come into my head that I’d cast the rats in metal, just to make more appearance for the belt, to come out in the world. I was nights and days at it, and it give me a deal of bother. I could manage it no how; but by my own ingenuity and persewerance I succeeded. A man axed me a pound a-piece for casting the rats—that would ha’ been four pound. I was very certain that my belt, being a handsome one, would help my business tremenjous in the sale of my composition. So I took a mould from a dead rat in plaster, and then I got some of my wife’s sarsepans, and, by G—, I casted ’em with some of my own pewter-pots.”

The wife, who was standing by, here exclaimed—

“Oh, my poor sarsepans! I remember ’em. There was scarce one left to cook our wittels with.”

“Thousands of moulders,” continued Jack Black, “used to come to see me do the casting of the rats, and they kept saying, ‘You’ll never do it, Jack.’ The great difficulty, you see, was casting the heye—which is a black bead—into the metal.

“When the belt was done, I had a great success; for, bless you, I couldn’t go a yard without a crowd after me.

“When I was out with the cart selling my composition, my usual method was this. I used to put a board across the top, and form a kind of counter. I always took with me a iron-wire cage—so big a one, that Mr. Barnet, a Jew, laid a wager that he could get into it, and he did. I used to form this cage at one end of the cart, and sell my composition at the other. There were rats painted round the cart—that was the only show I had about the wehicle. I used to take out the rats, and put them outside the cage; and used to begin the show by putting rats inside my shirt next my buzzum, or in my coat and breeches pockets, or on my shoulder—in fact, all about me, anywhere. The people would stand to see me take up rats without being bit. I never said much, but I used to handle the rats in every possible manner, letting ’em run up my arm, and stroking their backs and playing with ’em. Most of the people used to fancy they had been tamed on purpose, until they’d see me take fresh ones from the cage, and play with them in the same manner. I all this time kept on selling my composition, which my man Joe used to offer about; and whenever a packet was sold, I always tested its wirtues by killing a rat with it afore the people’s own eyes.

“I once went to Tottenham to sell my composition, and to exhibit with my rats afore the country people. Some countrymen, which said they were rat-ketchers, came up to me whilst I was playing with some rats, and said—‘Ugh, you’re not a rat-ketcher; that’s not the way to do it.’ They were startled at seeing me selling the pison at such a rate, for the shilling packets was going uncommon well, sir. I said, ‘No, I ain’t a rat-ketcher, and don’t know nothink about it. You come up and show me how to do it.’ One of them come up on the cart, and put his hand in the cage, and curous enough he got three bites directly, and afore he could take his hands out they was nearly bit to ribands. My man Joe, says he, ‘I tell you, if we ain’t rat-ketchers, who is? We are the regular rat-ketchers; my master kills ’em, and then I eats ’em’—and he takes up a live one and puts its head into his mouth, and I puts my hand in the cage and pulls out six or seven in a cluster, and holds ’em up in the air, without even a bite. The countrymen bust out laughing; and they said, ‘Well, you’re the best we ever see.’ I sold near 4l. worth of composition that day.

“Another day, when I’d been out flying pigeons as well—carriers, which I fancies to—I drove the cart, after selling the composition, to the King’s Arms, Hanwell, and there was a feller there—a tailor by trade—what had turned rat-ketcher. He had got with him some fifty or sixty rats—the miserablest mangey brutes you ever seed in a tub—taking ’em up to London to sell. I, hearing of it, was determined to have a lark, so I goes up and takes out ten of them rats, and puts them inside my shirt, next my buzzum, and then I walks into the parlour and sits down, and begins drinking my ale as right as if nothink had happened. I scarce had seated myself, when the landlord—who was in the lay—says, ‘I know a man who’ll ketch rats quicker than anybody in the world.’ This put the tailor chap up, so he offers to bet half-a-gallon of ale he would, and I takes him. He goes to the tub and brings out a very large rat, and walks with it into the room to show to the company. ‘Well,’ says I to the man, ‘why I, who ain’t a rat-ketcher, I’ve got a bigger one here,’ and I pulls one out from my buzzum. ‘And here’s another, and another, and another,’ says I, till I had placed the whole ten on the table. ‘That’s the way I ketch ’em,’ says I,—‘they comes of their own accord to me.’ He tried to handle the warmints, but the poor fellow was bit, and his hands was soon bleeding fur’ously, and I without a mark. A gentleman as knowed me said, ‘This must be the Queen’s rat-ketcher,’ and that spilt the fun. The poor fellow seemed regular done up, and said, ‘I shall give up rat-ketching, you’ve beat me! Here I’ve been travelling with rats all my life, and I never see such a thing afore.’

“When I’ve been in a mind for travelling I’ve never sold less than ten shillings’ worth of my composition, and I’ve many a time sold five pounds’ worth. Ten shillings’ worth was the least I ever sold. During my younger career, if I’d had a backer, I might, one week with another, have made my clear three pounds a-week, after paying all my expenses and feeding my horse and all.

“I challenge my composition, and sell the art of rat-destroying, against any chemical rat-destroyer in the world, for any sum—I don’t care what it is. Let anybody, either a medical or druggist manufacturer of composition, come and test with rats again me, and they’ll pretty soon find it out. People pay for composition instead of employing the Queen’s rat-ketcher, what kills the warmint and lays down his composition for nothink into the bargain likewise.

“I also destroy black beedles with a composition which I always keep with me again it’s wanted. I often have to destroy the beedles in wine-cellars, which gnaw the paper off the bottles, such as is round the champagne and French wine bottles. I’ve killed lots of beedles too for bakers. I’ve also sterminated some thousands of beedles for linen-drapers and pork-sassage shops. There’s two kinds of beedles, the hard-shell and the soft-shell beedle. The hard-shell one is the worst, and that will gnaw cork, paper, and anythink woollen. The soft-shell’d one will gnaw bread or food, and it also lays its eggs in the food, which is dreadful nasty.

“There’s the house ant too, which there is some thousands of people as never saw—I sterminate them as well. There’s a Mrs. B. at the William the Fourth public-house, Hampstead; she couldn’t lay her child’s clothes down without getting ’em full of ants. They’ve got a sting something in feel like a horse-fly’s, and is more annoying than dangerous. It’s cockroaches that are found in houses. They’re dreadful nasty things, and will bite, and they are equal to the Spanish flies for blistering. I’ve tried all insects on my flesh to see how they bite me. Cockroaches will undermine similar to the ant, and loosen the bricks the same as the cricket. It’s astonishing how so small an insect as them will scrape away such a quantity of mortar as they do—which thing infests grates, floorings, and such-like.

“The beedle is a most ’strordinary thing, which will puzzle most people to sterminate, for they lays sitch a lot of eggs as I would never guarantee to do away with beedles—only to keep them clear; for if you kills the old ones the eggs will rewive, and young ones come out of the wainskitting and sitch-like, and then your employers will say, ‘Why you were paid for sterminating, and yet here they are.’

“One night in August—the night of a very heavy storm, which, maybe, you may remember, sir—I was sent for by a medical gent as lived opposite the Load of Hay, Hampstead, whose two children had been attacked by rats while they was sleeping in their little cots. I traced the blood, which had left lines from their tails, through the openings in the lath and plaster, which I follered to where my ferruts come out of, and they must have come up from the bottom of the house to the attics. The rats gnawed the hands and feet of the little children. The lady heard them crying, and got out of her bed and called to the servant to know what the child was making such a noise for, when they struck a light, and then they see the rats running away to the holes; their little night-gownds was kivered with blood, as if their throats had been cut. I asked the lady to give me one of the night-gownds to keep as a cur’osity, for I considered it a pheenomenon, and she give it to me, but I never was so vexed in all my life as when I was told the next day that a maid had washed it. I went down the next morning and sterminated them rats. I found they was of the specie of rat which we term the blood-rat, which is a dreadful spiteful feller—a snake-headed rat, and infests the dwellings. There may have been some dozens of ’em altogether, but it’s so long ago I a’most forget how many I took in that house. The gent behaved uncommon handsome, and said, ‘Mr. Black, I can never pay you for this;’ and ever arterwards, when I used to pass by that there house, the little dears when they see me used to call out to their mamma, ‘O, here’s Mr. Ratty, ma!’ They were very pretty little fine children—uncommon handsome, to be sure.

“I once went to Mr. Hollins’s, in Edward-street Regent’s-park—a cow-keeper he was—where he was so infested that the cows could not lay down or eat their food, for the rats used to go into the manger, and fight at ’em. Mr. Hollins said to me, ‘Black, what shall I give you to get rid of them rats?’ and I said to him, says I, ‘Well, Mr. Hollins, you’re a poor man, and I leave it to you.’ (He’s got awful rich since then.) I went to work, and I actually took out 300 rats from one hole in the wall, which I had to carry them in my mouth and hands, and under my arms, and in my buzzum and pockets, to take them to the cage. I was bit dreadful by them, and suffered greatly by the bites; but nothink to lay up for, though very painful to the hands. To pervent the rats from getting out of the hole, I had to stop it up by putting my breast again it, and then they was jumping up again me and gnawing at my waistkit. I should think I sterminated 500 from them premises. Ah! I did wonders round there, and everybody was talking of my feats.

“I’ll tell you about another cow-keeper’s, which Mr. Hollins was so gratified with my skill what I had done, that he pays me handsome and generous, and gives me a recommendation to Mrs. Brown’s, of Camden-town, and there I sterminated above 700 rats; and I was a-near being killed, for I was stooping down under the manger, when a cow heerd the rats squeak, and she butts at me and sends me up again the bull. The bull was very savage, and I fainted; but I was picked up and washed, and then I come to.

“Whilst doing that job at Mrs. Brown’s I had to lie down on the ground, and push my naked arm into the hole till I could reach the rats as I’d driven up in the corner, and then pull them out with my hand. I was dreadful bit, for I was obleeged to handle them anyhow; my flesh was cut to ribands and dreadful lacerated.

“There was a man Mrs. Brown had got of the name of John, and he wouldn’t believe about the rats, and half thought I brought ’em with me. So I showed him how to ketch rats.

“You see rats have always got a main run, and from it go the branch runs on each side like on a herring-bone, and at the end of the branch runs is the bolt-holes, for coming in and out at. I instantly stopped up all the bolt-holes and worked the rats down to the end of the main run, then I broke up the branch runs and stopped the rats getting back, and then, when I’d got ’em all together at the end of the main run, I put my arm down and lifted them up. I have had at times to put half my body into a hole and thrust down my arm just like getting rabbits out of their burrers.

“Sometimes I have to go myself into the holes, for the rats make such big ones, there’s plenty of room. There was a Mrs. Perry in Albany-street, that kept an oil and coke shop—she were infested with rats dreadful. Three of her shop-boys had been sent away on suspicion of stealing fat, instead of which it was the rats, for between the walls and the vault I found a hundred and a half of fat stowed away. The rats was very savage, and I should think there was 200 of them. I made a good bit of money by that job, for Mrs. Perry give the fat to me.

“I have had some good finds at times, rat-hunting. I found under one floor in a gent’s house a great quantity of table napkins and silver spoons and forks, which the rats had carried away for the grease on ’em—shoes and boots gnawed to pieces, shifts, aprons, gownds, pieces of silk, and I don’t know what not. Sarvants had been discharged accused of stealing them there things. Of course I had to give them up; but there they was.

“I was once induced to go to a mews in Tavistock-place, near Russell-square, which was reg’lar infested by rats. They had sent to a man before, and he couldn’t do nothink with ’em, but I soon sterminated them. The rats there had worried a pair of beautiful chestnut horses, by gnawing away their hoofs and nearly driving them mad, which I saw myself, and there was all their teeth-marks, for I could scarcely believe it myself till I see it. I found them near a cart-load of common bricks, under the floor, and near the partition of the stable, which, when the men pulled the wood-work down, the coachman, says he, ‘Well, rat-ketcher, if you’d been employed years ago a deal more corn would have gone into the horses.’

“This coachman give me a recommendation to a muffin-maker in Hanway-yard, and I went there and killed the rats. But a most sing’lar thing took place there; my ferret got away and run through into a house in Oxford-street kept by a linen-draper, for the young men come to say that the rat-ketcher’s ferret was in their shop, and had bit one of their lady customers. I worked the ferrut through three times to make sure of this; and each time my little dog told me it was true. You see a well-trained dog will watch and stand and point to the ferrut working under ground just as a pinter does to game; and although he’s above ground, yet he’ll track the ferrut through the runs underneath by the smell. If the ferrut is lost—which I tell by the dog being uneasy—I say to the dog, ‘Hi, lost;’ and then he instantly goes on scent, and smells about in every direction, and I follers him, till he stands exactly over the spot where it may be, and then I have either to rise a stone or lift a board to get him out.

“I’ve ratted for years for Mr. Hodges, of Hodges and Lowman’s, in Regent-street; and he once said to me, that he was infested dreadful with rats at the house, which he took for the children, at Hampstead; so I went there, and witnessed, certainly, the most cur’ous circumstance, which puzzles me to this day. I had to lay on my belly half in the hole and pull out the rats; and, on looking at them, as I brings them up, I am astonished to find that nearly every one of them is blind, and has a speck in the eye. I was never so much astonished in my life, for they was as a wall-eyed dog might be. I supposed it to be from lightning (I couldn’t account for it no other ways), for at that time there was very heavy lightning and floods up there, which maybe you might remember, sir. They was chiefly of the blood-rat specie—small snake-headed rats, with a big, fine tail. They was very savage with me, and I had them run all over me before I ketched them.

“Rats are everywhere about London, both in rich and poor places. I’ve ketched rats in 44 Portland-place, at a clergyman’s house there. There was 200 and odd. They had underminded the oven so, that they could neither bile nor bake; they had under-pinioned the stables, and let every stone down throughout the premises, pretty well. I had to crawl under a big leaden cistern which the rats had under-pinioned, and I expected it would come down upon me every minute. I had one little ferrut kill thirty-two rats under one stone, and I lifted the dead ones up in the presence of the cook and the butler. He didn’t behave well to me—the gent didn’t—for I had to go to my lawyer’s afore I could get paid, and after the use of my skill; and I had to tell the lawyer I’d pawn my bed to stick to him and get my earnings; but, after all, I had to take one-third less than my bill. This, thinks I, isn’t the right thing for Portland-place.

“Rats will eat each other like rabbits, which I’ve watched them, and seen them turn the dead one’s skins out like pusses, and eat the flesh off beautiful clean. I’ve got cages of iron-wire, which I made myself, which will hold 1000 rats at a time, and I’ve had these cages piled up with rats, solid like. No one would ever believe it; to look at a quantity of rats, and see how they will fight and tear one another about,—it’s astonishing, so it is! I never found any rats smothered, by putting them in a cage so full; but if you don’t feed them every day, they’ll fight and eat one another—they will, like cannibals.

“I general contracts with my customers, by the year, or month, or job. There’s some gents I’ve worked for these fifteen years—sitch as Mr. Robson, the coach-builder, Mivart’s Hotel, Shoulbreds’, Mr. Lloyds, the large tobacconist, the Commercial Life Assurance, Lord Duncannon’s, and I can’t recollect how many more. My terms is from one guinea to five pounds per annum, according to the premises. Besides this, I have all the rats that I ketch, and they sell for threepence each. But I’ve done my work too well, and wherever I went I’ve cleared the rats right out, and so my customers have fell off. I have got the best testimonials of any man in London, and I could get a hatful more to-morrer. Ask anybody I’ve worked for, and they’ll tell you about Jack Black.

“One night I had two hundred rats in a cage, placed in my sitting-room, and a gent’s dog happened to get at the cage, and undid the door, snuffing about, and let ’em all loose. Directly I come in I knew they was loose by the smell. I had to go on my knees and stomach under the beds and sofas, and all over the house, and before twelve o’clock that night I had got ’em all back again into the cage, and sold them after for a match. I was so fearful they’d get gnawing the children, having sterminated them in a house where children had been gnawed.

“I’ve turned my attention to everything connected with animals. I’ve got the best composition for curing the mange in a horse or a dog, which has reg’lar astonished medical gents. I’ve also been bit by a mad dog—a black retriever dog, that died raving mad in a cellar afterwards. The only thing I did was, I washed the wound with salt and water, and used a turpentine poultice.”

Mrs. Black here interposed, exclaiming,—

“O dear me! the salt and water he’s had to his flesh, it ought to be as hard as iron. I’ve seen him put lumps of salt into his wounds.”

Mr. Black then continued:—

“I never had any uneasiness from that bite of a mad dog; indeed, I never troubled myself about it, or even thought of it.

“I’ve caught some other things besides rats in my time. One night, I saw a little South African cat going along the New-road. I thought it was a cur’ous specie of rat, and chased it, and brought it home with me; but it proved to belong to Mr. Herring’s menagerie in the New-road, so I let him have it back again.

“Another time I met with two racoons, which I found could handle me just as well as I could handle a rat, for they did bite and scratch awful. I put ’em in the cart, and brought them home in a basket. I never found out to whom they belonged. I got them in Ratcliffe-highway, and no doubt some sailors had brought them over, and got drunk, and let ’em loose. I tried them at killing rats, but they weren’t no good at that.

“I’ve learnt a monkey to kill rats, but he wouldn’t do much, and only give them a good shaking when they bit him. After I found the racoons no good, I trained a badger to kill rats, and he was superior to any dog, but very difficult in training to get him to kill, though they’ll kill rabbits fast enough, or any other kind of game, for they’re rare poachers are badgers. I used to call her Polly. She killed in my own pit, for I used to obleege my friends that wouldn’t believe it possible with the sight. She won several matches—the largest was in a hundred match.

“I also sterminate moles for her Majesty, and the Woods and Forests, and I’ve sterminated some hundreds for different farmers in the country. It’s a cur’ous thing, but a mole will kill a rat and eat it afterwards, and two moles will fight wonderful. They’ve got a mouth exactly like a shark, and teeth like saws; ah, a wonderful saw mouth. They’re a very sharp-biting little animal, and very painful. A rat is frightened of one, and don’t like fighting them at all.

“I’ve bred the finest collection of pied rats which has ever been knowed in the world. I had above eleven hundred of them—all wariegated rats, and of a different specie and colour, and all of them in the first instance bred from the Norwegian and the white rat, and afterwards crossed with other specie.

“I have ris some of the largest tailed rats ever seen. I’ve sent them to all parts of the globe, and near every town in England. When I sold ’em off, three hundred of them went to France. I ketched the first white rat I had at Hampstead; and the black ones at Messrs. Hodges and Lowman’s, in Regent-street, and them I bred in. I have ’em fawn and white, black and white, brown and white, red and white, blue-black and white, black-white and red.

“People come from all parts of London to see them rats, and I supplied near all the ‘happy families’ with them. Burke, who had the ‘happy family’ showing about London, has had hundreds from me. They got very tame, and you could do anythink with them. I’ve sold many to ladies for keeping in squirrel cages. Years ago I sold ’em for five and ten shillings a-piece, but towards the end of my breeding them, I let ’em go for two-and-six. At a shop in Leicester-square, where Cantello’s hatching-eggs machine was, I sold a sow and six young ones for ten shillings, which formerly I have had five pounds for, being so docile, like a sow sucking her pigs.”

The Sewerman.

He is a broad-shouldered, strongly-built man, with a stoop in his shoulders, and a rather dull cast of features; from living so much in the “shores” (sewers), his eyes have assumed a peering kind of look, that is quite rat-like in its furtiveness.

He answered our questions with great good humour, but in short monosyllabic terms, peculiar to men who have little communion with their fellows.

The “parlour” in which the man lives was literally swarming with children when we paid him a visit (they were not all “belonging” to him). Nor was it quite pleasant to find that the smell of the tea, which had just been made, was overpowered by the odour of the rats which he keeps in the same room.

The week’s wash was hanging across the apartment, and gave rather a slovenly aspect to the room, not otherwise peculiar for its untidyness; against the wall were pasted some children’s “characters,” which his second son, who is at the coal-shed, has a taste for, and which, as the “shoreman” observed, “is better than sweet-stuff for him, at all events.”

A little terrier was jumping playfully about the room, a much more acceptable companion than the bull-dog whose acquaintance we had been invited to make (in the same court) by the “rat-killer.”

The furniture and appointments of the “parlour” were extremely humble—not to say meagre in their character. After some trouble in getting sufficiently lucid answers, the following was the result:—

“There are not so many rats about as there used to be—not a five-hundredth part so many. I’ve seen long ago twenty or thirty in a row near where the slaughter-houses are, and that like. I ketch them all down the shores. I run after them and pick them up with my hand, and I take my lantern with me.

“I have caught rats these six or seven years. When the money got to be lowered, I took to ketching on them. One time I used to take a dog with me, when I worked down St. John’s-wood way.

“They fetches all prices, does rats; some I get threepence a-piece for, some twopence, some twopence-halfpenny—’cordin’ who has ’em.

“I works on the shores, and our time to leave off is four. I comes home and gets my tea, and if there’s sale for them, why I goes out and ketches a few rats. When I goes out I can ketch a dozen; but, years ago, I could ketch two or three dozen without going so far, and that shows there’s not so many now about.

“I finds some difficulty in ketching on them. If they gets into the drain you can’t get ’em. Where the drains lay low to the shore it’s most difficult, but where the drain is about two feet and a-half from the shore you gets a better chance.

“Three or four dozen I used to ketch, but I haven’t ketched any this last two or three weeks. In this hot weather people don’t like to be in a room where ‘killing’ is going on; but in the winter time a man will have his pint of beer and see a little sport that way. Three or four year ago I did ketch a good many; there was a sale for ’em. I could go and ketch two dozen in three hours, and that sooner than I can do a dozen now. It’s varmint as wants to be destroyed.

“Rats’ll turn round when they finds theirselves beat, and sometimes fly at your hand. Sometimes I’ve got bit—not very badly, though. To tell the truth, I don’t like it. When they grip, they do holt so tight before they’ll let go.

“I’ve been a shoreman these fifteen or sixteen year, ever since this flushing commenced. I was put on by the Commissioners in Hatting Garding; but the Commissioners is all done away with since Government took to it. I’m employed by the parish now. Every parish has to do its own flushing.

“We cleanses away all the soil what’s down below, and keeps the shore as sweet as what we possibly can.

“Before I took to this life I was what they call a navvy; I used to help to make the shores, and before that, I was in the country at farmers’ work.

“Ketching them rats ain’t all profit, ’cause you have to keep ’em and feed ’em. I’ve some here, if I was to get sixpence a-piece for, why it wouldn’t pay me for their feed. I give them barley generally, and bits of bread.

“There’s a many about now ketchin’ who does nothink else, and who goes down in the shores when they have no business there at all. They does well by rats when they’ve good call for ’em. They can go down two or three times a-day, and ketch a dozen and a half a time; but they can’t do much now, there’s no killing going on. They takes ’em to beer-shops, and sells ’em to the landlords, who gets their own price for ’em if there’s a pit.

“Time ago you couldn’t get a rat under sixpence. But the tax on dogs has done away wonderful with rat-killing. London would swarm with rats if they hadn’t been ketched as they has been. I can go along shores and only see one or two now, sometimes see none. Times ago I’ve drove away twenty or thirty afore me. Round Newport-market I’ve seen a hundred together, and now I go round there and perhaps won’t ketch one.

“As for poisonin’ ’em under buildings, that’s wrong; they’re sure to lay there and rot, and then they smells so. No, pisoning a’n’t no good, specially where there’s many on ’em.

“I’ve sold Jack Black a good many. He don’t ketch so many as he gets killed. He’s what they call rat-ketcher to her Majesty.

“When I goes rat ketching, I generally takes a bag with me; a trap is too much to lug about.

“Some parts of the shores I can find my way about better than I can up above. I could get in nigh here and come out at High Park; only the worst of it is, you’re always on the stoop. I never heerd talk of anybody losing theirselves in the shores, but a stranger might.

“There’s some what we calls ‘gully-hunters’ as goes about with a sieve, and near the gratings find perhaps a few ha’pence. Years ago we used to find a little now and then, but we may go about now and not find twopence in a week. I don’t think any shoreman ever finds much. But years ago, in the city, perhaps a robbery might be committed, and then they might be afraid of being found out, and chuck the things down the drains.

“I come from Oxfordshire, about four miles from Henley-’pon-Thames. I haven’t got now quite so many clods to tramp over, nor so many hills to climb.

“I gets two shillings a-dozen if I sells the rats to a dealer, but if I takes ’em to the pit myself I gets three shillings. Rats has come down lately. There’s more pits, and they kills ’em cheaper; they used to kill ’em at six shillings a-dozen.

“I’ve got five children. These here are not all belonging to me. Their mother’s gone out a-nussing, and my wife’s got to mind ’em.

“My oldest son is sixteen. He’s off for a sailor. I had him on me for two years doin’ nothink. He couldn’t get a place, and towards the last he didn’t care about it. He would go to sea; so he went to the Marine School, and now he’s in the East Ingy Sarvice. My second is at a coal-shed. He gets three shillings a-week; but, Lord, what’s that? He eats more than that, let alone clothes, and he wears out such a lot of shoe-leather. There’s a good deal of wear and tear, I can tell yer, in carrying out coals and such-like.”

The Penny Mouse-trap Maker.

This man lived in a small cottage at the back of Bethnal Green-road, and the little railed space in front of the humble dwelling was littered with sundry evidences of the inmate’s ingenuity. Here was a mechanical carriage the crippled father had made to drive himself along, and a large thaumatrope, or disc of painted figures, that seemed to move while revolving rapidly before the eye; and this, I afterwards learnt, the ingenious cripple had made, as a street exhibition, for a poor man, whom he was anxious to put in the way of doing something for himself.

The principal apartment in the little two-roomed house was blocked up with carpenters’ benches, and long planks were resting against the wall, while the walls themselves were partly covered with tools and patterns of the craft pursued; and in one corner there were heaps of the penny mouse-traps and penny money-boxes, that formed the main articles of manufacture.

In a little room adjoining this, and about the size of a hen-house, I found the cripple himself in bed, but still sitting up with a small desk-like bench before him, and engaged in the act of cutting and arranging the wires for the little wooden traps in which he dealt. And as I sat by his bedside he told me the following story:—

“I am,” he said, “a white-wood toy-maker, in a small way; that is, I make a variety of cheap articles,—nothing beyond a penny,—in sawed and planed pine-wood. I manufacture penny and halfpenny money-boxes, penny and halfpenny toy bellows, penny carts, penny garden-rollers, penny and halfpenny dolls’ tables and washhand-stands, chiefly for baby-houses; penny dressers, with drawers, for the same purpose; penny wheelbarrows and bedsteads; penny crossbows; and the mouse-trap that I am about now. I make all the things I have named for warehouses—for what are called the cheap Birmingham and Sheffield houses. I am paid the same price for whatever I make, with the exception of the mouse-trap. For the principal part of the penny articles that I make I get 7s. for twelve dozen, that is 7d. a-dozen; and for the halfpenny articles I get 3s. 6d., at the rate of 3½d. a-dozen. For the penny mouse-traps, however, I am paid only 1l. for thirty-six dozen, and that’s a shilling less than I get for the same quantity of the other shilling articles; whilst for the penny boxes I’m paid only at the rate of a halfpenny each.

“You will please to look at that, sir,” he said, handing me his account-book with one of his employers for the last year; “you will see there that what I am saying is perfectly correct, for there is the price put to every article; and it is but right that you should have proof that what I’m a-telling you is the truth. I took of one master, for penny mouse-traps alone, you perceive, 36l. 10s. from January to December, 1849; but that is not all gain, you’ll understand. Out of that I have to pay above one half for material. I think, altogether, my receipts of the different masters I worked for last year came to about 120l.—I can’t lay my hands on the bills just now.—Yes, it’s about 120l. I know, for our income,—that is, my clear gains is about 1l. to 1l. 5s. every week. So, calculating more than one half what I take to go for the expense for material, that will bring it to just about to what I state. To earn the 25s. a-week, you’ll understand, there are four of us engaged,—myself, my wife, my daughter, and son. My daughter is eighteen, and my son eleven: that is my boy, sir; he’s reading the Family Friend just now. It’s a little work I take in for my girl, for her future benefit. My girl is as fond of reading as I am, and always was. My boy goes to school every evening, and twice on a Sunday. I am willing that they should find as much pleasure from reading as I have in my illness. I found books often lull my pain. Yes, I have, indeed, for many hours. For nine months I couldn’t handle a tool; and my only comfort was the love of my family, and my books. I can’t afford them now, for I have no wish to incur any extraneous expense, while the weight of the labour lies on my family more than it does on myself. Over and over again, when I have been in acute pain with my thigh, a scientific book, or a work on history, or a volume of travels, would carry my thoughts far away, and I should be happy in all my misery—hardly conscious that I had a trouble, a care, or a pang to vex me. I always had love of solid works. For an hour’s light reading, I have often turned to a work of imagination, such as Milton’s Paradise Lost, and Shakspeare’s Plays; but I prefer science to poetry. I think every working man ought to be acquainted with general science. If he is a mechanic—let his station be ever so simple,—he will be sure to find the benefit of it. It gives a man a greater insight into the world and creation, and it makes his labour a pleasure and a pride to him, when he can work with his head as well as his hands. I think I have made, altogether, about one hundred and six gross of mouse-traps for the master whose account I have given you, and as many more for other employers, in the course of the last year. I calculate that I made more than thirty thousand mouse-traps from January to December, 1849. There are three or four other people in London making penny mouse-traps, besides myself. I reckon they may make among them near upon half as many as I do; and that would give about forty-five or fifty thousand penny mouse-traps made in London in the course of the year. I myself brought out the penny mouse-trap in its improved shape, and with the improved lever spring. I have no calculations as to the number of mice in the country, or how soon we should have caught them if we go on at this rate; but I think my traps have to do with that. They are bought more for toys than for use, though they are good for mice as well as children; and though we have so many dozen mouse-traps about the house, I can assure you we are more troubled with mice here than most people. The four of us here can make twenty-four dozen traps in the day, but that is all we can get through comfortable. For eighteen dozen we get about 10s. at the warehouse, and out of that I reckon our clear gains are near upon 4s., or a little less than 1s. a head. Take one with the other, we can earn about a penny an hour; and if it wasn’t for me having been a tailor originally, and applying some of my old tools to the business, we shouldn’t get on so quick as we do. With my shears I can cut twenty-four wires at a time, and with my thimble I thread the wires through the holes in the sides. I make the springs, cut the wires, and put them in the traps. My daughter planes the wood and gauges out the sides and bottom, bores the wire-holes and makes the door as well. My wife nails the frames ready for wiring, and my son fixes the wires in their places when I have entered them; then the wife springs them, after which the daughter puts in the doors and so completes them. I can’t form an idea as to how many penny and halfpenny money-boxes I made last year. I might have made, altogether, eight thousand, or five thousand halfpenny and three thousand penny ones. I was originally brought up to the tailoring business, but my master failed, and my sight kept growing weaker every year; so, as I found a good deal of trouble in getting employment at my own trade, I thought I would take to the bird-cage making—I had been doing a little at it before, as a pastime. I was fond of birds, and fonder still of mechanics, so I was always practising my hands at some craft or other in my over-time. I used to make dissected maps and puzzles, and so, when standing for employment, I managed to get through the slack of the year. I think it is solely due to my taste for mechanics and my love of reading scientific books that I am able to live so comfortably as I do in my affliction. After I took to bird-cage making, I found the employment at it so casual that I could not support my family at it. This led my mind to toy making, for I found that cheap toys were articles of more general sale. Then I got my children and my wife to help me, and we managed to get along somehow, for you see they were learning the business, and I myself was not in much of a condition to teach them, being almost as inexperienced at the trade as they were; and, besides that, we were continually changing the description of toy that we manufactured, so we had no time to perfect ourselves. One day we were all at work at garden-rollers; the next, perhaps, we should be upon little carts; then, may-be, we should have to go to dolls’ tables or wheelbarrows: so that, with the continual changing the description of toy that we manufactured from one thing to another, we had a great difficulty in getting practised in anything. While we were all learning you may imagine that, not being so quick then as we are now, we found a great difficulty in making a living at the penny-toy business: often we had merely dry bread for breakfast, tea, and supper, but we ate it with a light heart, for I knew repining wouldn’t mend it, and I always taught myself and those about me to bear our trials with fortitude. At last I got to work regularly at the mouse-traps, and having less changing we learnt to turn them out of hand quicker, and to make more money at the business: that was about four years ago, and then I was laid up with a strumous abscess in the thigh. This caused necrosis, or decay of the thigh-bone, to take place, and it was necessary that I should be confined to my bed until such time as a new thigh-bone was formed, and the old decayed one had sloughed away. Before I lay up I stood at the bench until I was ready to drop, for I had no one who could plane the boards for me; and what could I do? If I didn’t keep up, I thought we should all starve. The pain was dreadful, and the anxiety of mind I suffered for my wife and children made it a thousand times worse. I couldn’t bear the idea of going to the workhouse, and I kept on my feet until I couldn’t stand no longer. My daughter was only sixteen then, and I saw no means of escape. It was at that time my office to prepare the boards for my family, and without that they could do nothing. Well, sir, I saw utter ruin and starvation before us. The doctor told me it would take four years before a new bone would be formed, and that I must lay up all the while. What was to become of us all in the mean time I could not tell. Then it was that my daughter, seeing the pain I suffered both in body and mind, came to me, and told me not to grieve, for that she would do all the heavy work for me, and plane up the boards and cut out the work as I had done; but I thought it impossible for her to get through such hard work, even for my sake. I knew she could do almost anything that she set her mind to, but I little dreamt that she would be able to compass that. However, with the instinct of her affection—I can’t call it anything else (for she learnt at once what it had taken me months to acquire), she planed and shaped the boards as well as I myself could have done after years of practice. The first board she did was as cleanly done as she can do it now, and when you think of the difficulties she had to overcome, what a mere child she was, and that she had never handled a plane before, how she had the grain of the wood to find out, to learn the right handling of her tools, and a many little niceties of touch that workmen only can understand, it does seem to me as if some superior Power had inspired her to aid me. I have often heard of birds building their nests of the most beautiful structure, without ever having seen one built before, and my daughter’s handiwork seemed to me exactly like that. It was a thing not learnt by practice, but done in an instant, without teaching or experience of any kind. She is the best creature I ever knew or ever heard tell of on earth—at least, so she has been to me all her life; aye, without a single exception. If it hadn’t been for her devotion I must have gone to the workhouse, and perhaps never been able to have got away from it, and had my children brought up as paupers. Where she got the strength to do it is as much a mystery to me as how she did it. Though she was but a mere child, so to speak, she did the work of a grown man, and I assure you the labour of working at the bench all day is heavy, even for the strongest workman, and my girl is not over-strong now; indeed she was always delicate from a baby: nevertheless she went through the labour, and would stand to the bench the whole of the day, and with such cheerful good humour too that I cannot but see the hand of the Almighty in it all. I never knew her to complain of fatigue, or ever go to her work without a smile on her face. Her only anxiety was to get done, and to afford me every comfort in my affliction that she could. For three years and two months now have I been confined to my bed, and for two years and a half of that time I have not left it, even to breathe the fresh open air. Almost all that period I have been suffering intense and continued pain from the formation of abscesses in my thigh previous to the sloughing away of the decayed bones. I have taken out of the sores at least two hundred pieces, some as small as needles and some not less than an inch and a half long, which required to be pulled out with tweezers from the wound. Often, when I was getting a bit better and able to go about in the cart you see there outside, with the gravel in it—(I made that on this bed here, so as to be able to move about on it; the two front wheels I made myself, and the two back were old ones that I repaired here. I made the whole of the body, and my daughter planed up the boards for me)—well, often when I could just get along in that, have I gone about with a large piece of decayed bone projecting through my thigh, in hopes that the jolting would force it through the wound. The pain before the bone came away was often intense, especially when it had to work its way through the thick of the muscle. Night after night have I laid awake here. I didn’t wish, of course, to distress the minds of my family any more than I could help. It would not have been fair; so I bore all with patience, and since I have been here I have got through a great deal of work in my little way. In bed, as I sit with my little bench, I do my share of eight dozen of these penny traps a-day. Last August I made a ‘thaumatrope’ for a young man that I had known since a lad of twelve years of age; he got off work and couldn’t find anything to turn his hand to, so I advised him to get up an exhibition: anything was better than starving. He had a wife and two children, and I can’t bear to see any one want, let alone the young ones; and so, cripple as I was, I set to work here in my bed and made him a large set of magic circles. I painted all the figures myself in this place, though I had never handled a brush before, and that has kept him in bread up to this time. I did it to cause him to exert himself, but now he has got a situation, and is doing middling to what he has been: there’s one thing though, a little money, with care, will go farther than a great deal without it. I shall never be able to get about as I used, for you see the knee is set stiff and the thigh-bone is arched with the hip, so that the one leg is three inches shorter than the other. The bone broke spontaneously, like a bit of rotten wood, the other day, while I was rubbing my hand down my thigh, and in growing together again it got out of straight. I am just able to stir about now with a crutch and stick. I can sometimes treat myself to a walk about the house and yard, but that is not often, and last Saturday night I did make a struggle to get out in the Bethnal Green-road, and there, as I was coming along, my stick tripped against a stone and I fell. If it hadn’t been for my crutch throwing me forward, I might have fallen on my new bone and broken it again. But as it was, the crutch threw me forward and saved me. My doctor tells me my new bone would bear a blow, but I shouldn’t like to try after all I have gone through. I shall not be about again till I get my carriage done, and that I intend to construct so as to drive it with one hand, by means of a new ratchet lever motion.”

The daughter of the toy-maker, with whom I spoke afterwards, and who was rather “good-looking,” in the literal sense of the word, than beautiful, said that she could not describe how it was that she had learnt to plane and gauge the boards. It seemed to come to her all of a sudden—quite natural-like, she told me; though, she added, it was most likely her affection for her poor father that made her take to it so quick. “I felt it deeply” she said, “to see him take to his bed, and knew that I alone could save him from the workhouse. No! I never felt tired over the work,” she continued, in answer to my questions, “because I know that it is to make him comfortable.”

I should add, that I was first taken to this man by the surgeon who attended him during his long suffering, and that gentleman not only fully corroborated all I heard from his ingenious and heroic patient, but spoke in the highest possible terms of both father and daughter.

Flies.

These winged tormentors are not, like most of our apterous enemies, calculated to excite disgust and nausea when we see or speak of them; nor do they usually steal upon us during the silent hours of repose (though the gnat or mosquito must be here excepted), but are many of them very beautiful, and boldly make their attack upon us in open day, when we are best able to defend ourselves.

The active fly, so frequently an unbidden guest at your table (Mouffet, 56), whose delicate palate selects your choicest viands, at one time extending his proboscis to the margin of a drop of wine, and then gaily flying to take a more solid repast from a pear or a peach—now gambolling with his comrades in the air, now gracefully carrying his furled wings with his taper feet—was but the other day a disgusting grub, without wings, without legs, without eyes, wallowing, well pleased, in the midst of a mass of excrement.

“The common house-fly,” says Kirby, “is with us sufficiently annoying at the close of summer, so as to have led the celebrated Italian Ugo Foscolo, when residing here, to call it one of the ‘three miseries of life.’” But we know nothing of it as a tormentor, compared with the inhabitants of southern Europe. “I met,” says Arthur Young, in his interesting Travels through France, between Pradelles and Thurytz, “mulberries and flies at the same time. By the term flies, I mean those myriads of them which form the most disagreeable circumstances of the southern climates. They are the first torments in Spain, Italy, and the olive district of France; it is not that they bite, sting, or hurt, but they buzz, teaze, and worry; your mouth, eyes, ears, and nose are full of them: they swarm on every eatable—fruit, sugar, everything is attacked by them in such myriads, that if they are not incessantly driven away by a person who has nothing else to do, to eat a meal is impossible. They are, however, caught on prepared paper, and other contrivances, with so much ease and in such quantities, that were it not for negligence they could not abound in such incredible quantities. If I farmed in these countries, I should manure four or five acres every year with dead flies. I have been much surprised that the learned Mr. Harmer should think it odd to find, by writers who treated of southern climates, that driving away flies was of importance. Had he been with me in Spain and in Languedoc in July and August, he would have been very far from thinking there was anything odd in it.”—(Young’s Travels in France, i. 298.)

It is a remarkable, and, as yet, unexplained fact, that if nets of thread or string, with meshes a full inch square, be stretched over the open windows of a room in summer or autumn, when flies are the greatest nuisance, not a single one will venture to enter from without; so that by this simple plan, a house may be kept free from these pests, while the adjoining ones which have not had nets applied to their windows will swarm with them. In order, however, that the protection should be efficient, it is necessary that the rooms to which it is applied should have the light enter by one side only; for in those which have a thorough light, the flies, strange to say, pass through the meshes without scruple.

For a fuller account of these singular facts, the reader is referred to a paper by W. Spence, in Trans. Ent. Soc. vol. i. p. 1, and also to one in the same work by the Rev. E. Stanley, late Lord Bishop of Norwich, who, having made some of the experiments suggested by Mr. Spence, found that by extending over the outside of his windows nets of a very fine pack-thread, with meshes one inch and a quarter to the square, so fine and comparatively invisible that there was no apparent diminution either of light or the distant view, he was enabled for the remainder of the summer and autumn to enjoy the fresh air with open windows, without the annoyance he had previously experienced from the intrusion of flies—often so troublesome that he was obliged on the hottest days to forego the luxury of admitting the air by even partially raising the sashes.

“But no sooner,” he observes, “had I set my nets than I was relieved from my disagreeable visitors. I could perceive and hear them hovering on the other side of my barriers; but though they now and then settled on the meshes, I do not recollect a single instance of one venturing to cross the boundary.”

“The number of house-flies,” he adds, “might be greatly lessened in large towns, if the stable-dung in which their larvæ are chiefly supposed to feed were kept in pits closed by trap-doors, so that the females could not deposit their eggs in it. At Venice, where no horses are kept, it is said there are no house-flies; a statement which I regret not having heard before being there, that I might have inquired as to its truth.”—(Kirby and Spence’s Entom. i. 102, 3.)

This short account of flies would be incomplete without a description of their mode of proceeding when they regale themselves upon a piece of loaf-sugar, and an account of the apparatus with which the Creator has furnished them in order to enable them to walk on bodies possessing smooth surfaces, and in any position.

“It is a remark[2] which will be found to hold good, both in animals and vegetables, that no important motion or feeling can take place without the presence of moisture. In man, the part of the eye which is the seat of vision is always bedewed with moisture; the skin is softened with a delicate oil; the sensitive part of the ear is filled with a liquid; but moisture is still more abundant in our organs of taste and smell than in any of the other senses. In the case of taste, moisture is supplied to our mouth and tongue from several reservoirs (glands) in their neighbourhood, whence pipes are laid and run to the mouth. The whole surface, indeed, of the mouth and tongue, as well as the other internal parts of our body, give out more or less moisture; but besides this, the mouth, as we have just mentioned, has a number of fountains expressly for its own use. The largest of these fountains lies as far off as the ear on each side, and is formed of a great number of round, soft bodies, about the size of garden-peas, from each of which a pipe goes out, and all of these uniting together, form a common channel on each side. This runs across the cheek, nearly in a line with the lap of the ear and the corner of the mouth, and enters the mouth opposite to the second or third of the double teeth (molares) by a hole, into which a hog’s bristle can be introduced. There are, besides, several other pairs of fountains, in different parts adjacent, for a similar purpose.

“We have been thus particular in our description, in order to illustrate an analogous structure in insects, for they also seem to be furnished with salivary fountains for moistening their organs of taste. One of the circumstances that first awakened our curiosity with regard to insects, was the manner in which a fly contrives to suck up through its narrow sucker (haustellum) a bit of dry lump-sugar; for the small crystals are not only unfitted to pass, from their angularity, but adhere too firmly together to be separated by any force the insect can exert. Eager to solve the difficulty, for there could be no doubt of the fly’s sucking the dry sugar, we watched its proceedings with no little attention; but it was not till we fell upon the device of placing some sugar on the outside of a window, while we looked through a magnifying-glass on the inside, that we had the satisfaction of repeatedly witnessing a fly let fall a drop of fluid upon the sugar, in order to melt it, and thereby render it fit to be sucked up; on precisely the same principle that we moisten with saliva, in the process of mastication, a mouthful of dry bread, to fit it for being swallowed—the action of the jaws, by a beautiful contrivance of Providence, preparing the moisture along the channels at the time it is most wanted. Readers who may be disposed to think the circumstance of the fly thus moistening a bit of sugar fanciful, may readily verify the fact themselves in the way we have described. At the time when we made this little experiment, we were not aware that several naturalists of high authority had actually discovered by dissection the vessels which supply the saliva in more than one species of insect.”

“In the case of their drinking fluids, like water, saliva is not wanted; and it may be remarked, when we drink cold water it actually astringes and shuts up the openings of the salivary pipes. Hence it is that drinking does not quench thirst when the saliva is rendered viscid and scanty by heat, by fatigue, or by the use of stimulant food and liquor; and sometimes a draught of cold water, by carrying off all the saliva from the mouth, and at the same time astringing the orifices of the ducts, may actually produce thirst. Ices produce this effect on many persons. It is, no doubt, in consequence of their laborious exertions, as well as of the hot nature of their acid fluids producing similar effects, that ants are so fond of water. We have seen one quaff a drop of dew almost as large as its whole body; and when we present those in our glass formicaries with water, they seem quite insatiable in drinking it.”[3]

Rennie, in his Insect Miscellanies, after describing the pedestrian contrivances with which various insects are furnished, says,[4]—“The most perfect contrivance of this kind, however, occurs in the domestic fly (Musca domestica), and its congeners, as well as in several other insects. Few can have failed to remark that flies walk with the utmost ease along the ceiling of a room, and no less so upon a perpendicular looking-glass; and though this were turned downwards, the flies would not fall off, but could maintain their position undisturbed with their backs hanging downwards. The conjectures devised by naturalists to account for this singular circumstance, previous to the ascertaining of the actual facts, are not a little amusing. ‘Some suppose,’ says the Abbé de la Pluche, ‘that when the fly marches over any polished body, on which neither its claws nor its points can fasten, it sometimes compresses her sponge and causes it to evacuate a fluid, which fixes it in such a manner as prevents its falling without diminishing the facility of its progress; but it is much more probable that the sponges correspond with the fleshy balls which accompany the claws of dogs and cats, and that they enable the fly to proceed with a softer pace, and contribute to the preservation of the claws, whose pointed extremities would soon be impaired without this prevention.’ (Spect. de la Nat. vol. i. p. 116.) ‘Its ability to walk on glass,’ says S. Shaw, ‘proceeds partly from some little ruggedness thereon, but chiefly from a tarnish, or dirty, smoky substance, adhering to the surface; so that, though the sharp points on the sponges cannot penetrate the surface of the glass, it may easily catch hold of the tarnish.’ (Nature Displ. vol. iii. p. 98, Lond. 1823.) But,” adds Rennie, “it is singular that none of these fanciers ever took the trouble to ascertain the existence of either a gluten squeezed out by the fly, or of the smoky tarnish on glass. Even the shrewd Réaumur could not give a satisfactory explanation of the circumstance.”

“The earliest correct notion on this curious subject was entertained by Derham, who, in mentioning the provision made for insects that hang on smooth surfaces, says, ‘I might here name divers flies and other insects who, besides their sharp-hooked nails, have also skinny palms to their feet, to enable them to stick to glass and other smooth bodies by means of the pressure of the atmosphere—after the manner as I have seen boys carry heavy stones with only a wet piece of leather clapped on the top of the stone.’ (Physico-Theology, vol. ii. p. 194, note b, 11th edit.) The justly-celebrated Mr. White, of Selborne, apparently without the aid of microscopical investigation, adopted Derham’s opinion, adding the interesting illustration, that in the decline of the year, when the flies crowd to windows and become sluggish and torpid, they are scarcely able to lift their legs, which seem glued to the glass, where many actually stick till they die; whereas they are, during warm weather, so brisk and alert, that they easily overcome the pressure of the atmosphere.”—(Nat. Hist. of Selborne, vol. ii. p. 274.)

“This singular mechanism, however,” continues Rennie, “is not peculiar to flies, for some animals a hundred times as large can walk upon glass by the same means.” St. Pierre mentions “a very small lizard, about a finger’s length, which climbs along the walls, and even along glass, in pursuit of flies and other insects” (Voyage to the Isle of France, p. 73); and Sir Joseph Banks noticed another lizard, named the Gecke (Lacerta Gecha, Linn.), which could walk against gravity, and which made him desirous of having the subject thoroughly investigated. On mentioning it to Sir Everard Home, he and Mr. Bauer commenced a series of researches, by which they proved incontrovertibly, that in climbing upon glass, and walking along the ceilings with the back downwards, a vacuum is produced by a particular apparatus in the feet, sufficient to cause atmospheric pressure upon their exterior surface.

“The apparatus in the feet of the fly consists of two or three membranous suckers, connected with the last joint of the foot by a narrow neck, of a funnel-shape, immediately under the base of each jaw, and movable in all directions. These suckers are convex above and hollow below, the edges being margined with minute serratures, and the hollow portion covered with down. In order to produce the vacuum and the pressure, these membranes are separated and expanded, and when the fly is about to lift its foot, it brings them together, and folds them up, as it were, between the two claws. By means of a common microscope, these interesting movements may be observed when a fly is confined in a wine-glass.” (Phil. Trans. for 1816, p. 325.)

“It must have attracted the attention of the most incurious to see, during the summer, swarms of flies crowding about the droppings of cattle, so as almost to conceal the nuisance, and presenting instead a display of their shining corslets and twinkling wings. The object of all this busy bustle is to deposit their eggs where their progeny may find abundant food; and the final cause is obviously both to remove the nuisance, and to provide abundant food for birds and other animals which prey upon flies or their larvæ.

“The same remarks apply with no less force to the ‘blow-flies,’ which deposit their eggs, and in some cases their young, upon carcases. The common house-fly (the female of which generally lays 144 eggs) belongs to the first division, the natural food of its larvæ being horse-dung; consequently, it is always most abundant in houses in the vicinity of stables, cucumber-beds, &c., to which, when its numbers become annoying, attention should be primarily directed, rather than having recourse to fly-waters.”—(Rennie’s Insect Miscellany, p. 265.)

Besides the common house-fly, and the other genera of the dipterous order of insects, there is another not unfrequent intruding visitor of the fly kind which we must not omit to mention, commonly known as the blue-bottle (Musca vomitoria, Linn.). The disgust with which these insects are generally viewed will perhaps be diminished when our readers are informed that they are destined to perform a very important part in the economy of nature. Amongst a number of the insect tribe whose office it is to remove nuisances the most disgusting to the eye, and the most offensive to the smell, the varieties of the blue-bottle fly belong to the most useful.

“When the dead carcases of animals begin to grow putrid, every one knows what dreadful miasmata exhale from them, and taint the air we breathe. But no sooner does life depart from the body of any creature—at least from any which, from its size, is likely to become a nuisance—than myriads of different sorts of insects attack it, and in various ways. First come the histers, and pierce the skin. Next follow the flesh-flies, covering it with millions of eggs, whence in a day or two proceed innumerable devourers. An idea of the despatch made by these gourmands may be gained from the combined consideration of their numbers, voracity, and rapid development. The larvæ of many flesh-flies, as Redi ascertained, will in twenty-four hours devour so much food, and gnaw so quickly, as to increase their weight two hundred-fold! In five days after being hatched they arrive at their full growth and size, which is a remarkable instance of the care of Providence in fitting them for the part they are destined to act; for if a longer time was required for their growth, their food would not be a fit aliment for them, or they would be too long in removing the nuisance it is given them to dissipate. Thus we see there was some ground for Linnæus’s assertion, under Musca vomitoria, that three of these flies will devour a dead horse as quickly as would a lion.”—(Kirby and Spence, i.)

The following extraordinary fact, given by Kirby and Spence, concerning the voracity of the larvæ of the blow-fly, or blue-bottle (Musca vomitoria), is worth while appending:—

“On Thursday, June 25th, died at Asbornby, Lincolnshire, John Page, a pauper belonging to Silk-Willoughby, under circumstances truly singular. He being of a restless disposition, and not choosing to stay in the parish workhouse, was in the habit of strolling about the neighbouring villages, subsisting on the pittance obtained from door to door. The support he usually received from the benevolent was bread and meat; and after satisfying the cravings of nature, it was his custom to deposit the surplus provision, particularly the meat, between his shirt and skin. Having a considerable portion of this provision in store, so deposited, he was taken rather unwell, and laid himself down in a field in the parish of Stredington; when, from the heat of the season at that time, the meat speedily became putrid, and was of course struck by the flies. These not only proceeded to devour the inanimate pieces of flesh, but also literally to prey upon the living substance; and when the wretched man was accidentally found by some of the inhabitants, he was so eaten by the maggots, that his death seemed inevitable. After clearing away, as well as they were able, these shocking vermin, those who found Page conveyed him to Asbornby, and a surgeon was immediately procured, who declared that his body was in such a state that dressing it must be little short of instantaneous death; and, in fact, the man did survive the operation but for a few hours. When first found, and again when examined by the surgeon, he presented a sight loathsome in the extreme. White maggots of enormous size were crawling in and upon his body, which they had most shockingly mangled, and the removal of the external ones served only to render the sight more horrid.” Kirby adds, “In passing through this parish last spring, I inquired of the mail-coachman whether he had heard this story; and he said the fact was well known.”

One species of fly infests our houses (Stomoxys calcitrans), which so nearly resembles the common house-fly (Musca domestica), that the difference is not easily detected except by an entomologist; indeed the resemblance is so close as to have led to the vulgar error that the common house-fly occasionally indulges itself by a feast upon our blood, after it has fed to satiety upon the delicacies which it picks from our tables. It is even a greater torment than the horse-fly.

“This little pest,” says Kirby, referring to the Stomoxys, “I speak feelingly, incessantly interrupts our studies and comfort in showery weather, making us even stamp like the cattle by its attacks on our legs, and if we drive it away ever so often, returning again and again to the charge.” In Canada they are infinitely worse. “I have sat down to write,” says Lambert, (who, though he calls it the house-fly, is evidently speaking of the Stomoxys), “and have been obliged to throw away my pen in consequence of their irritating bite, which has obliged me every moment to raise my hand to my eyes, nose, mouth, and ears, in constant succession. When I could no longer write, I began to read, and was always obliged to keep one hand constantly on the move towards my head. Sometimes, in the course of a few minutes, I would take half-a-dozen of my tormentors from my lips, between which I caught them just as they perched.”—(Travels. &c. i. 126.)

But of all the insect-tormentors of man, none are so loudly and universally complained of as the species of the genus Culex, L., whether known by the name of gnats or mosquitos. It has been generally supposed by naturalists that the mosquitos of America belong to the Linnæan genus Culex; but Humboldt asserts that the term mosquito, signifying a little fly, is applied there to a Senicilium, Latr. (Senicilia, Meig.), and that the Culices, which are equally numerous and annoying, are called Zancudoes, which means long-legs. The former, he says, are what the French call Moustiques, and the latter Maringouins. (Personal Narrative, E. T., v. 93.)

Humboldt’s remark, however, refers only to South America. Mr. Westwood informs us that Mosquito is certainly applied to a species of Culex in the United States, the inhabitants giving the name of black-fly to a small Senicilium. Pliny, after Aristotle, distinguishes well between Hymenoptera and Diptera, when he says the former have their sting in the tail, and the latter in the mouth; and that to the one this instrument is given as the instrument of vengeance, and to the other of avidity.

But the instrument of avidity in the genus of which I am speaking is even more terrible than that of vengeance in most insects that are armed with it. It instils into its wound a poison (as appears from the consequent inflammation and tumour), the principal use of which is to render the blood more fluid and fitter for suction. This weapon, which is more complex than the sting of hymenopterous insects, consisting of five pieces besides the exterior sheath—some of which seem simply lancets, while others are barbed like the spiculæ of a bee’s sting—is at once calculated for piercing the flesh and forming a syphon adapted to imbibe the blood. There are several species of this genus whose bite is severe; but none is to be compared to the common gnat (Culex pipiens, L.), if, as has been generally affirmed, it be synonymous with the mosquito, though, in all probability, several species are confounded under both names.

In this country they are justly regarded as no trifling evil; for they follow us to all our haunts, intrude into our most secret retirements, assail us in the city and in the country, in our houses and in our fields, in the sun and in the shade; nay, they pursue us to our pillows, and keep us awake by the ceaseless hum of their rapid wings (which, according to the Baron C. de Latour, are vibrated 3000 times per minute), and their incessant endeavours to fix themselves upon our face, or some uncovered part of our body; whilst, if in spite of them we fall asleep, they awaken us by the acute pain which attends the insertion of their oral stings, attacking with most avidity the softer sex, and trying their temper by disfiguring their beauty.

In Marshland in Norfolk, the inhabitants are said to be so annoyed by the gnats, that the better sort of them, as in many hot climates, have recourse to a gauze covering for their beds, to keep them off during the night.

“Catch-’em-Alive” Sellers.

I discovered a colony of “catch-’em-alive” boys residing in Pheasant-court, Gray’s-inn-lane.

From the pleasing title given to this alley, one might almost be led to imagine it was a very delightful spot, though it is only necessary to look down the little bricken archway that marks its entrance, and see the houses—dirty as the sides of a dust-bin, and with the patched counterpanes and yellow sheets hanging from the windows—to feel assured that it is one of the most squalid of the many wretched courts that branch out from Gray’s-inn-lane.

I found the lads playing at “pitch and toss” in the middle of the paved yard. They were all willing enough to give me their statements; indeed, the only difficulty I had was in making my choice among the youths.

“Please, sir, I’ve been at it longer than him,” cried one with teeth ribbed like celery.

“Please, sir, he ain’t been out this year with the papers,” said another, who was hiding a handful of buttons behind his back.

“He’s been at shoe-blacking, sir; I’m the only reg’lar fly-boy,” shouted a third, eating a piece of bread as dirty as London snow.

A big lad with a dirty face, and hair like hemp, was the first of the “catch-’em-alive” boys who gave me his account of the trade. He was a swarthy-featured boy, with a broad nose like a negro’s, and on his temple was a big half-healed scar, which he accounted for by saying that “he had been runned over” by a cab, though, judging from the blackness of one eye, it seemed to have been the result of some street-fight. He said:—

“I’m an Irish boy, and near turned sixteen, and I’ve been silling fly-papers for between eight and nine year. I must have begun to sill them when they first come out. Another boy first tould me of them, and he’d been silling them about three weeks before me. He used to buy them of a party as lives in a back-room near Drury-lane, what buys paper and makes the catch ’em alive himself. When they first came out they used to charge sixpence a-dozen for ’em, but now they’ve got ’em to twopence ha’penny. When I first took to silling ’em, there was a tidy lot of boys at the business, but not so many as now, for all the boys seem at it. In our court alone I should think there was above twenty boys silling the things.

“At first, when there was a good time, we used to buy three or four gross together, but now we don’t do more than half a gross. As we go along the streets we call out different cries. Some of us says, ‘Fly-papers, fly-papers, ketch ’em all alive.’ Others make a kind of song of it, singing out, ‘Fly-paper, ketch ’em all alive, the nasty flies, tormenting the baby’s eyes. Who’d be fly-blow’d, by all the nasty blue-bottles, beetles, and flies?’

“People likes to buy of a boy as sings out well, ’cos it makes ’em laugh.

“I don’t think I sell so many in town as I do in the borders of the country, about Highbury, Croydon, and Brentford. I’ve got some regular customers in town about the City-prison and the Caledonian-road; and after I’ve served them and the town custom begins to fall off, then I goes to the country.

“We goes two of us together, and we takes about three gross. We keep on silling before us all the way, and we comes back the same road. Last year we sould very well in Croydon, and it was the best place for gitting a price for them; they’d give a penny a-piece for ’em there, for they didn’t know nothing about them. I went off one day at tin o’clock and didn’t come home till two in the morning. I sould eighteen dozen out in that d’rection the other day, and got rid of them before I had got half-way.

“But flies are very scarce at Croydon this year, and we haven’t done so well. There ain’t half as many flies this summer as last.

“Some people says the papers draws more flies than they ketches, and that when one gets in, there’s twenty others will come to see him.

“It’s according to the weather as the flies is about. If we have a fine day it fetches them out, but a cold day kills more than our papers.

“We sills the most papers to little cook-shops and sweetmeat-shops. We don’t sill so many at private-houses. The public-houses is pretty good customers, ’cos the beer draws the flies. I sould nine dozen at one house—a school—at Highgate, the other day. I sould ’em two for three-ha’pence. That was a good hit, but then t’other days we loses. If we can make a ha’penny each we thinks we does well.

“Those that sills their papers at three a-penny buys them at St. Giles’s, and pays only three-ha’pence a dozen for them, but they an’t half as big and good as those we pays tuppence-ha’penny a dozen for.

“Barnet is a good place for fly-papers; there’s a good lot of flies down there. There used to be a man at Barnet as made ’em, but I can’t say if he do now. There’s another at Brentford, so it ain’t much good going that way.

“In cold weather the papers keep pretty well, and will last for months with just a little warming at the fire; for they tears on opening when they are dry. You see we always carry them with the sticky sides doubled up together like a sheet of writing-paper. In hot wither, if you keep them folded up, they lasts very well; but if you opens them, they dry up. It’s easy opening them in hot weather, for they comes apart as easy as peeling a horrange.

“We generally carries the papers in a bundle on our arm, and we ties a paper as is loaded with flies round our cap, just to show the people the way to ketch ’em. We get a loaded paper given to us at a shop.

“When the papers come out first, we used to do very well with fly-papers; but now it’s hard work to make our own money for ’em. Some days we used to make six shillings a-day regular. But then we usen’t to go out every day, but take a rest at home. If we do well one day, then we might stop idle another day, resting. You see, we had to do our twenty or thirty miles silling them to get that money, and then the next day we was tired.

“The silling of papers is gradual fallen off. I could go out and sill twenty dozen wonst where I couldn’t sill one now.

“I think I does a very grand day’s work if I yearns a shilling. Perhaps some days I may lose by them. You see, if it’s a very hot day, the papers gets dusty; and beside, the stuff gets melted and oozes out; though that don’t do much harm, ’cos we gets a bit of whitening and rubs ’em over.

“Four years ago we might make ten shillings a-day at the papers, but now, taking from one end of the fly-paper sason to the other, which is about three months, I think we makes about one shilling a-day out of papers, though even that aint quite certain. I never goes out without getting rid of mine, somehow or another, but then I am obleeged to walk quick and look about me.

“When it’s a bad time for silling the papers, such as a wet, could day, then most of the fly-paper boys goes out with brushes, cleaning boots. Most of the boys is now out hopping. They goes reg’lar every year after the sason is give over for flies.

“The stuff as they puts on the paper is made out of boiled oil and turpentine and resin. It’s seldom as a fly lives more than five minutes after it gets on the paper, and then it’s as dead as a house. The blue-bottles is tougher, but they don’t last long, though they keeps on fizzing as if they was trying to make a hole in the paper. The stuff is only p’isonous for flies, though I never heard of any body as ever eat a fly-paper.”

The second lad I chose from among the group of applicants was of a middle age, and although the noisiest when among his companions, had no sooner entered the room with me, than his whole manner changed. He sat himself down, bent up like a monkey, and scarcely ever turned his eyes from me. He seemed as nervous as if in a witness-box, and kept playing with his grubby fingers till he had almost made them white.

“They calls me ‘Curley.’ I come from Ireland too. I’m about fourteen year, and have been in this line now, sir, about five year. I goes about the borders of the country. We general takes up the line about the beginning of June, that is, when we gets a good summer. When we gets a good close dull day like this, we does pretty well, but when we has first one day hot, and then another rainy and could, a’ course we don’t get on so well.

“The most I sould was one day when I went to Uxbridge, and then I sould a gross and a half. I paid half-a-crown a gross for them. I was living with mother then, and she give me the money to buy ’em, but I had to bring her back again all as I took. I al’us give her all I makes, except sixpence as I wants for my dinner, which is a kipple of pen’orth of bread and cheese and a pint of beer. I sould that gross and a half I spoke on at a ha’penny each, and I took nine shillings, so that I made five and sixpence. But then I’d to leave London at three or four o’clock in the morning, and to stop out till twelve o’clock at night. I used to live out at Hammersmith then, and come up to St. Giles’s every morning and buy the papers. I had to rise by half-past two in the morning, and I’d get back again to Hammersmith by about six o’clock. I couldn’t sill none on the road, ’cos the shops wasn’t open.

“The flies is getting bad every summer. This year they a’n’t half so good as they was last year or the year before. I’m sure I don’t know why there aint so many, but they aint so plentiful like. The best year was three year ago. I know that by the quantity as my customers bought of me, and in three days the papers was swarmed with flies.

“I’ve got regular customers, where I calls two or three times a week to ’em. If I was to walk my rounds over I could at the lowest sell from six to eight dozen at ha’penny each at wonst. If it was nice wither, like to-day, so that it wouldn’t come wet on me, I should make ten shillings a-week regular, but it depends on the wither. If I was to put my profits by, I’m sure I should find I make more than six shillings a-week, and nearer eight. But the season is only for three months at most, and then we takes to boot-cleaning. Near all the poor boys about here is fly-paper silling in the hot weather, and boot-cleaners at other times.

“Shops buys the most of us in London. In Barnet I sell sometimes as much as six or seven dozen to some of the grocers as buys to sell again, but I don’t let them have them only when I can’t get rid of ’em to t’other customers. Butchers is very fond of the papers, to catch the blue-bottles as gets in their meat, though there is a few butchers as have said to me, ‘Oh, go away, they draws the flies more than they ketches ’em.’ Clothes-shops, again, is very fond of ’em. I can’t tell why they is fond of ’em, but I suppose ’cos the flies spots the goods.

“There’s lots of boys going silling ‘ketch ’em alive oh’s’ from Golden-lane, and Whitechapel, and the Borough. There’s lots, too, comes out of Gray’s-inn-lane and St. Giles’s. Near every boy who has nothing to do goes out with fly-papers. Perhaps it aint that the flies is falled off that we don’t sill so many papers now, but because there’s so many boys at it.”

The most intelligent and the most gentle in his demeanour was a little boy, who was scarcely tall enough to look on the table at which I was writing. If his face had been washed, he would have been a pretty-looking lad; for, despite the black marks made by his knuckles during his last fit of crying, he had large expressive eyes, and his features were round and plump, as though he were accustomed to more food than his companions.

Whilst taking his statement I was interrupted by the entrance of a woman, whose fears had been aroused by the idea that I belonged to the Ragged School, and had come to look after the scholars. “It’s no good you’re coming here for him, he’s off hopping to-morrow with his mother, as has asked me to look after him, and it’s only your saxpence he’s wanting.”

It was with great difficulty that I could get rid of this lady’s company; and, indeed, so great appeared to be the fear in the court that the object of my visit was to prevent the young gentlemen from making their harvest trip into the country, that a murmuring crowd began to assemble round the house where I was, determined to oppose me by force, should I leave the premises accompanied by any of the youths.

“I’ve been longer at it than that last boy, though I’m only getting on for thirteen, and he’s older than I’m; ’cos I’m little and he’s big, getting a man. But I can sell them quite as well as he can, and sometimes better, for I can holler out just as loud, and I’ve got reg’lar places to go to. I was a very little fellow when I first went out with them, but I could sell them pretty well then, sometimes three or four dozen a-day. I’ve got one place, in a stable, where I can sell a dozen at a time to countrypeople.

“I calls out in the streets, and I goes into the shops, too, and calls out, ‘Ketch ’em alive, ketch ’em alive; ketch all the nasty black-beetles, blue-bottles, and flies; ketch ’em from teazing the baby’s eyes.’ That’s what most of us boys cries out. Some boys who is stupid only says, ‘Ketch ’em alive,’ but people don’t buy so well from them.

“Up in St. Giles’s there is a lot of fly-boys, but they’re a bad set, and will fling mud at gentlemen, and some prigs the gentlemen’s pockets. Sometimes, if I sells more than a big boy, he’ll get mad and hit me. He’ll tell me to give him a halfpenny and he won’t touch me, and that if I don’t he’ll kill me. Some of the boys takes an open fly-paper, and makes me look another way, and then they sticks the ketch ’em alive on my face. The stuff won’t come off without soap and hot water, and it goes black, and looks like mud. One day a boy had a broken fly-paper, and I was taking a drink of water, and he come behind me and slapped it up in my face. A gentleman as saw him give him a crack with a stick and me twopence. It takes your breath away, until a man comes and takes it off. It all sticked to my hair, and I couldn’t rack (comb) right for some time.

“When we are selling papers we have to walk a long way. Some boys go as far as Croydon, and all about the country; but I don’t go much further than Copenhagen-fields, and straight down that way. I don’t like going along with other boys, they take your customers away; for perhaps they’ll sell ’em at three a-penny to ’em, and spoil the customers for you. I won’t go with the big boy you saw ’cos he’s such a blackgeyard; when he’s in the country he’ll go up to a lady and say, ‘Want a fly-paper, marm?’ and if she says ‘No,’ he’ll perhaps job his head in her face—butt at her like.

“When there’s no flies, and the ketch ’em alive’s is out, then I goes tumbling. I can turn a cat’enwheel over on one hand. I’m going to-morrow to the country, harvesting and hopping—for, as we says, ‘Go out hopping, come in jumping.’ We start at three o’clock to-morrow, and we shall get about twelve o’clock at night at Dead Man’s Barn. It was left for poor people to sleep in, and a man there was buried in a corner. The man had got six farms of hops; and if his son hadn’t buried him there, he wouldn’t have had none of the riches.

“The greatest number of fly-papers I’ve sold in a day is about eight dozen. I never sells no more than that; I wish I could. People won’t buy ’em now. When I’m at it I makes, taking one day with another, about ten shilling a-week. You see, if I sold eight dozen, I’d make four shillings. I sell them at a penny each, at two for three-ha’pence, and three for twopence. When they gets stale I sells ’em at three a-penny. I always begin by asking a penny each, and perhaps they’ll say, ‘Give me two for three-ha’pence.’ I’ll say, ‘Can’t, ma’am,’ and then they pulls out a purse full of money and gives a penny.

“The police is very kind to us, and don’t interfere with us. If they sees another boy hitting us they’ll take off their belts and hit ’em. Sometimes I’ve sold a ketch ’em alive to a policeman; he’ll fold it up and put it in his pocket to take home with him. Perhaps he’s got a kid, and the flies teazes its eyes.

“Some ladies like to buy fly-cages better than ketch ’em alive’s, because sometimes when they’re putting ’em up they falls in their faces, and then they screams.”

The Fly-paper Maker.

In a small attic-room, in a house near Drury-lane, I found the “catch ’em alive” manufacturer and his family busy at their trade.

Directly I entered the house where I had been told he lodged, I knew that I had come to the right address; for the staircase smelt of turpentine as if it had been newly painted, the odour growing more and more powerful as I ascended.

The little room where the man and his family worked was as hot as an oven; for although it was in the heat of summer, still his occupation forced him to have a fire burning for the purpose of melting and keeping fluid the different ingredients he spread upon his papers.

When I opened the door of his room, I was at first puzzled to know how I should enter the apartment; for the ceiling was completely hidden by the papers which had been hung up to dry from the many strings stretched across the place, so that it resembled a washerwoman’s back-yard, with some thousands of red pocket-handkerchiefs suspended in the air. I could see the legs of the manufacturer walking about at the further end, but the other part of his body was hidden from me.

On his crying, “Come in!” I had to duck my head down, and creep under the forest of paper strips rustling above us.

The most curious characteristic of the apartment was the red colour with which everything was stained. The walls, floor, and tables were all smeared with ochre, like the pockets of a drover. The papers that were drying were as red as the pages of a gold-leaf book. This curious appearance was owing to part of the process of “catch ’em alive” making consisting in first covering the paper with coloured size, to prevent the sticky solution from soaking into it.

The room was so poorly furnished, that it was evident the trade was not a lucrative one. An old Dutch clock, with a pendulum as long as a walking-stick, was the only thing in the dwelling which was not indispensable to the calling. The chimneypiece—that test of “well-to-do” in the houses of the poorer classes—had not a single ornament upon it. The long board on which the family worked served likewise as the table for the family meals, and the food they ate had to be laid upon the red-smeared surface. There was but one chair, and that the wife occupied; and when the father or son wished to sit down, a tub of size was drawn out with its trembling contents from under the work-table, and on this they rested themselves.

“We are called in the trade,” said the father, “fly-paper makers. They used to put a nice name to the things once, and call ’em Egyptian fly-papers, but now they use merely the word ‘fly-papers,’ or ‘fly-destroyers,’ or ‘fly-catchers,’ or ‘catch ’em alive, oh.’

“I never made any calculation about flies, and how often they breeds. You see, it depends upon so many things how they’re produced: for instance, if I was to put my papers on a dung-heap, I might catch some thousands; and if I was to put a paper in an ice-well, I don’t suppose I should catch one.

“I know the flies produce some thousands each, because if you look at a paper well studded over with flies, you’ll see—that is, if you look very carefully—where each fly has blown, as we call it, there’ll be some millions on a paper, small grubs or little mites, like; for whilst struggling the fly shoots forth the blows, and eventually these blows would turn to flies.

“I have been at fly-catcher making for the last nine years. It’s almost impossible to make any calculation as to the number of papers I make during the season, and this is the season. If it’s fine weather, then flies are plentiful, and the lads who sell the papers in the streets keep me busy; but if it’s at all bad weather, then they turn their attention to blacking boots.

“It’s quite a speculation, my business is, for all depends upon the lads coming to me to buy, and there’s no certainty beyond. I every season expect that these lads who bought papers of me the last year will come back and deal with me again. First of all, these lads will come for a dozen, or a kipple of dozen, of papers; and so it goes on till perhaps they are able to sell half a gross a-day, and then from that they will, if the weather is fine, get up to ten dozen, or perhaps a gross, but seldom or never over that.

“In the very busiest and hottest time as is, I have, for about two or three weeks, made as many as thirty-six gross of papers in a week. We generally begins about the end of June or the beginning of July, and then for five or six weeks we goes on very busy; after that it dies out, and people gets tired of laying out their money.

“It’s almost impossible to get at any calculation of the quantity I make. You see, to-day I haven’t sold a gross, and yesterday I didn’t sell more than a gross; and the last three days I haven’t sold a single paper, it’s been so wet. But last week I sold more than five gross a-day,—it varies so. Oh yes, I sell more than a hundred gross during the season. You may say, that for a month I make about five gross a-day, and that—taking six days to the week, and thirty days to the month—makes a hundred and thirty gross: and then for another month I do about three gross a-day, and that, at the same calculation, makes seventy-eight gross, or altogether one hundred and ninety-eight gross, or 28,512 single papers, and that is as near as I can tell you.

“Sometimes our season lasts more than two months. You may reckon it from the latter end of June to the end of August, or if the weather is very hot, then we begins early in June, and runs it into September. The prime time is when the flies gets heavy and stings—that’s when the papers sells most.

“There’s others in the business besides myself; they lives up in St. Giles’s, and they sells ’em rather cheaper. At one time the shopkeepers used to make the papers. When they first commenced, they was sold at twopence and threepence and fourpence a-piece, but now they’re down to three a-penny in the streets, or a halfpenny for a single one. The boys when they’ve got back the money they paid me for their stock, will sell what papers they have left at anything they’ll fetch, because the papers gets dusty and spiles with the dust.

“I use the very best ‘Times’ paper for my ‘catch ’em alives.’ I gets them kept for me at stationers’ shops and liberaries, and such-like. I pays threepence a-pound, or twenty-eight shillings the hundred weight. That’s a long price, but you must have good paper if you want to make a good article. I could get paper at twopence a-pound, but then it’s only the cheap Sunday papers, and they’re too slight.

“The morning papers are the best, and will stand the pulling in opening the papers; for we always fold the destroyers with the sticky sides together when finished. The composition I use is very stiff; if the paper is bad, they tear when you force them open for use. Some in the trade cut up their newspapers into twelve for the full sheet, but I cut mine up into only eight.

“The process is this. First of all the paper is sized and coloured. We colour them by putting a little red lead into the size, because if the sticky side is not made apparent the people wont buy ’em, ’cause they might spile the furniture by putting the composition-side downwards. After sizing the papers, they are hung up to dry, and then the composition is laid on. This composition is a secret, and I’m obligated to keep it so, for of course all the boys who come here would be trying to make ’em, and not only would it injure me, but I’d warrant they’d injure theirselves as well, by setting the house on fire. You may say that my composition is made from a mixture of resinous substances. Everything in making it depends upon using the proper proportions. There’s some men who deal with me who know the substances to make the composition from, but because they haven’t got the exact proportions of the quantities, they can’t make it right.

“The great difficulty in making them is drying the papers after they are sized. Some days when it’s fine they’ll dry as fast as you can hang ’em up a’most, and other days they won’t dry at all—in damp weather ’specially. There is some makers who sizes and colours their papers in the winter, and then puts ’em to dry; and when the summer comes, then they has only to put on the composition.

“I’m a very quick hand in the trade (if you can call it one, for it only lasts three months at most, and is a very uncertain one, too; indeed, I don’t know what you can style our business—it ain’t a purfession and it ain’t a trade, I suppose it’s a calling): I’m a quick hand I say at spreading the composition, and I can, taking the day through, do about two gross an hour—that is, if the papers was sized ready for me; but as it is, having to size ’em first, I can’t do more than three gross a-day myself, but with my wife helping me we can do such a thing as five gross a-day.

“It’s most important that the size should dry. Now those papers (producing some covered with a dead red coating of the size preparation) have been done four days, and yet they’re not dry, although to you they appear so, but I can tell that they feel tough, and not crisp as they ought to. When the size is damp it makes them adhere to one another when I am laying the stuff on, and it sweats through and makes them heavy, and then they tears when I opens them.

“When I’m working, I first size the entire sheet. We put it on the table, and then we have a big brush and plaster it over. Then I gives it to my wife, and she hangs it up on a line. We can hang up a gross at a time here, and then the room is pretty full, and must seem strange to anybody coming in, though to us it’s ordinary enough.”

The man was about to exhibit to us his method of proceeding, when his attention was drawn off by a smell which the moving of the different pots had caused. “How strong this size smells, Charlotte!” he said to his wife.

“It’s the damp and heat of the room does it,” the wife replied; and then the narrative went on.

“Before putting on the composition I cut up the papers into slips as fast as possible, that don’t take long.”

“We can cut ’em in first style,” interrupted the wife.

“I can cut up four gross an hour,” said a boy, who was present.

“I don’t think you could, Johnny,” said the man. “Two gross is nearer the mark, to cut ’em evenly.”

“It’s only seventy sheets,” remonstrated the lad, “and that’s only a little more than one a minute.”

A pile of entire newspapers was here brought out, and all of them coloured red on one side, like the leaves of the books in which gold-leaf is kept.

Judging from the trial at cutting which followed, we should conclude that the lad was correct in his calculation.

“When we put on the composition,” continued the catch-’em-alive maker, “we has the cut slips piled up in a tall mound like, and then we have a big brush, and dips it in the pot of stuff and rubs it in; we folds each catcher up as we does it, like a thin slice of bread and butter, and put it down. As I said before, at merely putting on the composition I could do about two gross an hour.

“My price to the boys is twopence-halfpenny a dozen, or two-and-sixpence a gross, and out of that I don’t get more than ninepence profit, for the paper, the resin, and the firing for melting the size and composition, all takes off the profit.

“This season nearly all my customers have been boys. Last season I had a few men who dealt with me. The principal of those who buys of me is Irish. A boy will sometimes sell his papers for a halfpenny each, but the usual price is three a-penny. Many of the blacking-boys deal with me. If it’s a fine day it don’t suit them at boot-cleaning, and then they’ll run out with my papers; and so they have two trades to their backs—one for fine, and the other for wet weather.

“The first man as was the inventor of these fly-papers kept a barber’s shop in St. Andrew-street, Seven Dials, of the name of Greenwood or Greenfinch, I forget which. I expect he diskivered it by accident, using varnish and stuff, for stale varnish has nearly the same effect as our composition. He made ’em and sold ’em at first at threepence and fourpence a-piece. Then it got down to a penny. He sold the receipt to some other parties, and then it got out through their having to employ men to help ’em. I worked for a party as made ’em, and then I set to work making ’em for myself, and afterwards hawking them. They was a greater novelty then than they are now, and sold pretty well. Then men in the streets, who had nothing to do, used to ask me where I bought ’em, and then I used to give ’em my own address, and they’d come and find me.”

Of Bugs and Fleas.

A numerous family of a large order of insects is but too well known, both in gardens and houses, under the general name of Bugs (Cimicidæ) most, if not all, of the species being distinguished by an exceedingly disagreeable smell, particularly when pressed or bruised.

The sucking instrument of these insects has been so admirably dissected and delineated by M. Savigny, in his “Theory of the Mouth of Six-legged (hexapod) Insects,”[5] that we cannot do better than follow so excellent a guide.

The sucker is contained in a sheath, and this sheath is composed of four pieces, which, according to Savigny’s theory, represent an under-lip much prolonged. The edges bend downwards, and form a canal receiving the four bristles, which he supposes to correspond with the two mandibles and the two lower jaws. It is probable that the two middle of these bristles act as piercers, while the other two, being curved at the extremity (though not at all times naturally so), assist in the process of suction.

The plant-bugs are all furnished with wings and membranous wing-cases, many of them being of considerable size, and decked in showy colours. These differ in all those points from their congener, the bed-bug (Cimex lectularius), which is small, without wings, and of a dull uniform brown. The name is of Welsh origin, being derived from the same root as bug-bear, and hence the passage in the Psalms, “thou shalt not be afraid for the terror by night,”[6] is rendered in Matthew’s Bible, “thou shalt not nede to be afraide of any bugs by night.”

In earlier times this insect was looked upon with no little fear, no doubt because it was not so abundant as at present. “In the year 1503,” says Mouffet, “Dr. Penny was called in great haste to a little village called Mortlake, near the Thames, to visit two noblemen who were much frightened by the appearance of bug-bites, and were in fear of I know not what contagion; but when the matter was known, and the insects caught, he laughed them out of all fear.”[7] This fact, of course, disproves the statement of Southall, that bugs were not known in England before 1670.

Linnæus was of opinion, however, that the bug was not originally a native of Europe, but had been imported from America. Be this as it may, it seems to thrive but too well in our climate, though it multiplies less in Britain than in the warmer regions of the Continent, where it is also said to grow to a larger size, and to bite more keenly. This insect, it is said, is never seen in Ireland.[8]

“Commerce,” says a learned entomologist, “with many good things, has also introduced amongst us many great evils, of which noxious insects form no small part; and one of her worst presents was, doubtless, the disgusting animals called bugs. They seem, indeed,” he adds, “to have been productive of greater alarm at first than mischief,—at least, if we may judge from the change of name which took place upon their becoming common. Their original English name was Chinche, or Wall-louse; and the term bug, which is a Celtic word, signifying a ghost or goblin, was applied to them after Ray’s time, most probably because they were considered as ‘terrors by night.’ Hence our English word bug-bear. The word in this sense often occurs in Shakspeare, Winter’s Tale, act iii. sc. 2, 3; Henry VI. act v. sc. 2; Hamlet, act v. sc. 2. See Douce’s Illustrations of Shakspeare, i. 329.”

Even in our own island these obtrusive insects often banish sleep. “The night,” says Goldsmith, in his Animated Nature, “is usually the season when the wretched have rest from their labour; but this seems the only season when the bug issues from its retreats to make its depredations. By day it lurks, like a robber, in the most secret parts of the bed, takes the advantage of every chink and cranny to make a secure lodgment, and contrives its habitation with so much art that it is no easy matter to discover its retreat. It seems to avoid the light with great cunning, and even if candles be kept burning, this formidable insect will not issue from its hiding-place. But when darkness promises security, it then issues from every corner of the bed, drops from the tester, crawls from behind the arras, and travels with great assiduity to the unhappy patient, who vainly wishes for rest. It is generally vain to destroy one only, as there are hundreds more to revenge their companion’s fate; so that the person who thus is subject to be bitten (some individuals are exempt), remains the whole night like a sentinel upon duty, rather watching the approach of fresh invaders than inviting the pleasing approaches of sleep.”[9]

Mouffet assures us, that against these enemies of our rest in the night our merciful God hath furnished us with remedies, which we may fetch out of old and new writers, either to drive them away or kill them.[10] The following is given as the best poison for bugs, by Mr. Brande, of the Royal Institution:—Reduce an ounce of corrosive sublimate (perchloride of mercury) and one ounce of white arsenic to a fine powder; mix with it one ounce of muriate of ammonia in powder, two ounces each of oil of turpentine and yellow wax, and eight ounces of olive oil; put all these into a pipkin, placed in a pan of boiling water, and when the wax is melted, stir the whole, till cold, in a mortar.[11] A strong solution of corrosive sublimate, indeed, applied as a wash, is a most efficacious bug-poison.

Though most people dislike this insect, others have been known to regard it with protecting care. One gentleman would never suffer the bugs to be disturbed in his house, or his bedsteads removed, till, in the end, they swarmed to an incredible degree, crawling up even the walls of his drawing-room; and after his death millions were found in his bed and chamber furniture.[12]

In the Banian hospital, at Surat, the overseers are said frequently to hire beggars from the streets, at a stipulated sum, to pass the night among bugs and other vermin, on the express condition of suffering them to enjoy their feast without molestation.[13]

The bed-bug is not the only one of its congeners which preys upon man. St. Pierre mentions a bug found in the Mauritius, the bite of which is more venomous than the sting of a scorpion, being succeeded by a swelling as big as the egg of a pigeon, which continues for four or five days.[14] Ray tells us that his friend Willoughby had suffered severe temporary pain, in the same way, from a water-bug. (Notonecta glauca, Linn.)[15]

The winged insects of the order to which the bed-bug belongs often inflict very painful wounds, and it is even stated, upon good authority, that an insect of the order, commonly known in the West Indies by the name of the wheel-bug, can communicate an electric shock to the person whose flesh it touches. The late Major-General Davies, R.A. (well known as a most accurate observer of nature and an indefatigable collector of her treasures, as well as a most admirable painter of them), having taken up this animal and placed it upon his hand, assures us that it gave him, with its legs, a considerable shock, as if from an electric jar, which he felt as high as his shoulders; and then dropping the creature, he observed six marks upon his hand where the six feet had stood.

Bugs are very voracious, and seem to bite most furiously in the autumn, as if determined to feast themselves before they retire to their winter quarters.

There is another pernicious bed insect—the flea (Pulex irritans, Linn.), which, being without wings, some of our readers may suppose to be nearly allied to the bed-bug, though it does not belong even to the same order, but to a new one (Aphaniptera, Kirby), established on the principle that the wings are obsolescent or inconspicuous.

Fleas, it may be worth remarking, are not all of one species; those which infest animals and birds differing in many particulars from the common bed-flea (Pulex irritans). As many as twelve distinct sorts of fleas have been found in Britain alone.[16] The most annoying species, however, is, fortunately, not indigenous, being a native of the tropical latitudes, and variously named in the West Indies, chigoe, jigger, nigua, tungua, and pique (Pulex penetrans, Linn.). According to Stedman, “this is a kind of small sand-flea, which gets in between the skin and the flesh without being felt, and generally under the nails of the toes, where, while it feeds, it keeps growing till it becomes of the size of a pea, causing no further pain than a disagreeable itching. In process of time its operation appears in the form of a small bladder, in which are deposited thousands of eggs, or nits, and which, if it breaks, produce so many young chigoes, which in course of time create running ulcers, often of very dangerous consequence to the patient. So much so, indeed, that I knew a soldier, the soles of whose feet were obliged to be cut away before he could recover; and some men have lost their limbs by amputation, nay, even their lives, by having neglected, in time, to root out these abominable vermin.” Walton mentions that a Capuchin friar, in order to study the history of the chigoe, permitted a colony of them to establish themselves in his feet: but before he could accomplish his object his feet mortified and had to be amputated.[17] No wonder that Cardan calls the insect “a very shrewd plague.”[18]

Several extraordinary feats of strength have been recorded of fleas by various authors,[19] and we shall here give our own testimony to a similar fact. At the fair of Charlton, in Kent, 1830, we saw a man exhibit three fleas harnessed to a carriage in the form of an omnibus, at least fifty times their own bulk, which they pulled along with great ease; another pair drew a chariot. The exhibitor showed the whole first through a magnifying glass, and then to the naked eye, so that we were satisfied there was no deception. From the fleas being of large size they were evidently all females.[20]

It is rarely, however, that we meet with fleas in the way of amusement, unless we are of the singular humour of the old lady mentioned by Kirby and Spence, who had a liking to them; “because,” said she, “I think they are the prettiest little merry things in the world; I never saw a dull flea in all my life.”

When Ray and Willoughby were travelling, they found “at Venice and Augsburg fleas for sale, and at a small price too, decorated with steel or silver collars round their necks. When fleas are kept in a box amongst wool or cloth, in a warm place, and fed once a-day, they will live a long time. When these insects begin to suck they erect themselves almost perpendicularly, thrusting their sucker, which originates in the middle of the forehead, into the skin. The itching is not felt immediately, but a little afterwards. As soon as they are full of blood, they begin to void a portion of it; and thus, if permitted, they will continue for many hours sucking and voiding. After the first itching no uneasiness is subsequently felt. Willoughby had a flea that lived for three months, sucking in this manner the blood of his hand; it was at length killed by the cold of winter.”[21]

According to Mouffet’s account of the sucker of the flea, “the point of his nib is somewhat hard, that he may make it enter the better; and it must necessarily be hollow, that he may suck out the blood and carry it in.”[22] Modern authors, particularly Straus and Kirby, show that Rösel was mistaken in supposing this sucker to consist of two pieces, as it is really made up of seven. First, there is a pair of triangular instruments, somewhat resembling the beak of a bird, inserted on each side of the mouth, under the parts which are generally regarded as the antennæ. Next, a pair of long sharp piercers (scalpella, Kirby), which emerge from the head below the preceding instruments; whilst a pair of feelers (palpi), consisting of four joints, is attached to these near their base. In fine, there is a long, slender tongue, like a bristle, in the middle of these several pieces.

Mouffet says, “the lesser, leaner, and younger the fleas are, the sharper they bite,—the fat ones being more inclined to tickle and play. They molest men that are sleeping,” he adds, “and trouble wounded and sick persons, from whom they escape by skipping; for as soon as they find they are arraigned to die, and feel the finger coming, on a sudden they are gone, and leap here and there, and so escape the danger; but so soon as day breaks they forsake the bed. They then creep into the rough blankets, or hide themselves in rushes and dust, lying in ambush for pigeons, hens, and other birds; also for men and dogs, moles and mice, and vex such as pass by. Our hunters report that foxes are full of them, and they tell a pretty story how they get quit of them. The fox, say they, gathers some handfuls of wool from thorns and briers, and wrapping it up, holds it fast in his mouth, then he goes by degrees into a cold river, and dips himself down by little and little; when he finds that all the fleas are crept so high as his head for fear of drowning, and ultimately for shelter crept into the wool, he barks and spits out the wool, full of fleas, and thus very froliquely being delivered from their molestations, he swims to land.”[23]

This is a little more doubtful even than the story told of Christina, queen of Sweden, who is reported to have fired at the fleas that troubled her with a piece of artillery, still exhibited in the Royal Arsenal at Stockholm.[24] Nor are fleas confined to the old continent, for Lewis and Clarke found them exceedingly harassing on the banks of the Missouri, where it is said the native Indians are sometimes compelled to shift their quarters, to escape their annoyance. They are not acquainted, it would therefore seem, with the device of the shepherds in Hungary, who grease their clothes with hog’s-lard to deter the fleas;[25] nor with the old English preventive:

“While wormwood hath seed, get a handful or twaine,

To save against March, to make fleas refrain.

Where chamber is swept, and wormwood is strown,

Ne’er flea for his life dare abide to be known.”[26]

Linnæus was in error in stating that the domestic cat (Felis maniculatus, Teemminck) is not infested with fleas; for on kittens in particular they abound as numerously as upon dogs.[27]

Her Majesty’s Bug-Destroyer.

The vending of bug-poison in the London streets is seldom followed as a regular source of living. We have met with persons who remember to have seen men selling penny packets of vermin poison, but to find out the vendors themselves was next to an impossibility. The men seem merely to take to the business as a living when all other sources have failed. All, however, agree in acknowledging that there is such a street trade, but that the living it affords is so precarious that few men stop at it longer than two or three weeks.

Perhaps the most eminent firm of the bug-destroyers in London is that of Messrs. Tiffin and Son; but they have pursued their calling in the streets, and rejoice in the title of “Bug-Destroyers to Her Majesty and the Royal Family.”

Mr. Tiffin, the senior partner in this house, most kindly obliged me with the following statement. It may be as well to say that Mr. Tiffin appears to have paid much attention to the subject of bugs, and has studied with much earnestness the natural history of this vermin.

“We can trace our business back,” he said, “as far as 1695, when one of our ancestors first turned his attention to the destruction of bugs. He was a lady’s stay-maker—men used to make them in those days, though, as far as that is concerned, it was a man that made my mother’s dresses. This ancestor found some bugs in his house—a young colony of them, that had introduced themselves without his permission, and he didn’t like their company, so he tried to turn them out of doors again, I have heard it said, in various ways. It is in history, and it has been handed down in my own family as well, that bugs were first introduced into England after the fire of London, in the timber that was brought for rebuilding the city, thirty years after the fire, and it was about that time that my ancestor first discovered the colony of bugs in his house. I can’t say whether he studied the subject of bug-destroying, or whether he found out his stuff by accident, but he certainly did invent a compound which completely destroyed the bugs, and, having been so successful in his own house, he named it to some of his customers who were similarly plagued, and that was the commencement of the present connexion, which has continued up to this time.

“At the time of the illumination for the Peace, I thought I must have something over my shop, that would be both suitable for the event and to my business; so I had a transparency done, and stretched on a big frame, and lit up by gas, on which was written—

MAY THE
DESTROYERS OF PEACE
BE DESTROYED BY US.
TIFFIN & SON,
BUG-DESTROYERS TO HER MAJESTY.

“Our business was formerly carried on in the Strand, where both my father and myself were born; in fact, I may say I was born to the bug business.

“I remember my father as well as possible; indeed, I worked with him for ten or eleven years. He used, when I was a boy, to go out to his work killing bugs at his customers’ houses with a sword by his side and a cocked-hat and bag-wig on his head—in fact, dressed up like a regular dandy. I remember my grandmother, too, when she was in the business, going to the different houses, and seating herself in a chair, and telling the men what they were to do, to clean the furniture and wash the woodwork.

“I have customers in our books for whom our house has worked these 150 years; that is, my father and self have worked for them and their fathers. We do the work by contract, examining the house every year. It’s a precaution to keep the place comfortable. You see, servants are apt to bring bugs in their boxes; and, though there may be only two or three bugs perhaps hidden in the woodwork and the clothes, yet they soon breed if left alone.

“We generally go in the spring, before the bugs lay their eggs; or, if that time passes, it ought to be done before June, before their eggs are hatched, though it’s never too late to get rid of a nuisance.

“I mostly find the bugs in the bedsteads. But, if they are left unmolested, they get numerous and climb to the tops of the rooms, and about the corners of the ceilings. They colonize anywhere they can, though they’re very high-minded and prefer lofty places. Where iron bedsteads are used the bugs are more in the rooms, and that’s why such things are bad. They don’t keep a bug away from the person sleeping. Bugs’ll come, if they’re thirty yards off.

“I knew a case of a bug who used to come every night about thirty or forty feet—it was an immense large room—from a corner of the room to visit an old lady. There was only one bug, and he’d been there for a long time. I was sent for to find him out. It took me a long time to catch him. In that instance I had to examine every part of the room, and when I got him I gave him an extra nip to serve him out. The reason why I was so bothered was, the bug had hidden itself near the window, the last place I should have thought of looking for him, for a bug never by choice faces the light; but when I came to inquire about it, I found that this old lady never rose till three o’clock in the day, and the window-curtains were always drawn, so that there was no light like.

“Lord! yes, I am often sent for to catch a single bug. I’ve had to go many, many miles—even 100 or 200—into the country, and perhaps catch only half-a-dozen bugs after all; but then that’s all that are there, so it answers our employer’s purpose as well as if they were swarming.

“I work for the upper classes only; that is, for carriage company and such-like approaching it, you know. I have noblemen’s names, the first in England, on my books.

“My work is more method; and I may call it a scientific treating of the bugs rather than wholesale murder. We don’t care about the thousands, it’s the last bug we look for, whilst your carpenters and upholsterers leave as many behind them, perhaps, as they manage to catch.

“The bite of the bug is very curious. They bite all persons the same(?) but the difference of effect lays in the constitution of the parties. I’ve never noticed that a different kind of skin makes any difference in being bitten. Whether the skin is moist or dry, it don’t matter. Wherever bugs are, the person sleeping in the bed is sure to be fed on, whether they are marked or not; and as a proof, when nobody has slept in the bed for some time, the bugs become quite flat; and, on the contrary, when the bed is always occupied, they are round as a ‘lady-bird.’

“The flat bug is more ravenous, though even he will allow you time to go to sleep before he begins with you; or at least until he thinks you ought to be asleep. When they find all quiet, not even a light in the room will prevent their biting; but they are seldom or ever found under the bed-clothes. They like a clear ground to get off, and generally bite round the edges of the nightcap or the nightdress. When they are found in the bed, it’s because the parties have been tossing about, and have curled the sheets round the bugs.

“The finest and the fattest bugs I ever saw were those I found in a black man’s bed. He was the favourite servant of an Indian general. He didn’t want his bed done by me; he didn’t want it touched. His bed was full of ’em, no beehive was ever fuller. The walls and all were the same, there wasn’t a patch that wasn’t crammed with them. He must have taken them all over the house wherever he went.

“I’ve known persons to be laid up for months through bug-bites. There was a very handsome fair young lady I knew once, and she was much bitten about the arms, and neck, and face, so that her eyes were so swelled up she couldn’t see. The spots rose up like blisters, the same as if stung with a nettle, only on a very large scale. The bites were very much inflamed, and after a time they had the appearance of boils.

“Some people fancy, and it is historically recorded, that the bug smells because it has no vent; but this is fabulous, for they have a vent. It is not the human blood neither that makes them smell, because a young bug who has never touched a drop will smell. They breathe, I believe, through their sides; but I can’t answer for that, though it’s not through the head. They haven’t got a mouth, but they insert into the skin the point of a tube, which is quite as fine as a hair, through which they draw up the blood. I have many a time put a bug on the back of my hand, to see how they bite; though I never felt the bite but once, and then I suppose the bug had pitched upon a very tender part, for it was a sharp prick, something like that of a leech-bite.

“I once had a case of lice-killing, for my process will answer as well for them as for bugs, though it’s a thing I should never follow by choice. Lice seem to harbour pretty much the same as bugs do. I found them in the furniture. It was a nurse that brought them into the house, though she was as nice and clean a looking woman as ever I saw. I should almost imagine the lice must have been in her, for they say there is a disease of that kind; and if the tics breed in sheep, why should not lice breed in us? for we’re but live matter, too. I didn’t like myself at all for two or three days after that lice-killing job, I can assure you; it’s the only case of the kind I ever had, and I can promise you it shall be the last.

“I was once at work on the Princess Charlotte’s own bedstead. I was in the room, and she asked me if I had found anything, and I told her no; but just at that minute I did happen to catch one, and upon that she sprang up on the bed, and put her hand on my shoulder, to look at it. She had been tormented by the creature, because I was ordered to come directly, and that was the only one I found. When the Princess saw it, she said, ‘Oh, the nasty thing! That’s what tormented me last night; don’t let him escape.’ I think he looked all the better for having tasted royal blood.

“I also profess to kill beetles, though you can never destroy them so effectually as you can bugs; for, you see, beetles run from one house to another, and you can never perfectly get rid of them; you can only keep them under. Beetles will scrape their way and make their road round a fireplace, but how they manage to go from one house to another I can’t say, but they do.

“I never had patience enough to try and kill fleas by my process; it would be too much of a chivey to please me.

“I never heard of any but one man who seriously went to work selling bug poison in the streets. I was told by some persons that he was selling a first-rate thing, and I spent several days to find him out. But, after all, his secret proved to be nothing at all. It was train-oil, linseed and hempseed, crushed up all together, and the bugs were to eat it till they burst.

“After all, secrets for bug-poisons ain’t worth much, for all depends upon the application of them. For instance, it is often the case that I am sent for to find out one bug in a room large enough for a school. I’ve discovered it when the creature had been three or four months there, as I could tell by his having changed his jacket so often—for bugs shed their skins, you know. No, there was no reason that he should have bred; it might have been a single gentleman or an old maid.

“A married couple of bugs will lay from forty to fifty eggs at one laying. The eggs are oval, and are each as large as the thirty-second part of an inch; and when together are in the shape of a caraway comfit, and of a bluish-white colour. They’ll lay this quantity of eggs three times in a season. The young ones are hatched direct from the egg, and, like young partridges, will often carry the broken eggs about with them, clinging to their back. They get their fore-quarters out, and then they run about before the other legs are completely cleared.

“As soon as the bugs are born they are of a cream colour, and will take to blood directly; indeed, if they don’t get it in two or three days they die; but after one feed they will live a considerable time without a second meal. I have known old bugs to be frozen over in a horse-pond—when the furniture has been thrown in the water—and there they have remained for a good three weeks; still, after they have got a little bit warm in the sun’s rays they have returned to life again.

“I have myself kept bugs for five years and a half without food, and a housekeeper at Lord H——’s informed me that an old bedstead that I was then moving from a store-room was taken down forty-five years ago, and had not been used since, but the bugs in it were still numerous, though as thin as living skeletons. They couldn’t have lived upon the sap of the wood, it being worm-eaten and dry as a bone.

“A bug will live for a number of years, and we find that when bugs are put away in old furniture without food, they don’t increase in number; so that, according to my belief, the bugs I just mentioned must have existed forty-five years: besides, they were large ones, and very dark-coloured, which is another proof of age.

“It is a dangerous time for bugs when they are shedding their skins, which they do about four times in the course of a year; then they throw off their hard shell and have a soft coat, so that the least touch will kill them; whereas, at other times they will take a strong pressure. I have plenty of bug-skins, which I keep by me as curiosities, of all sizes and colours, and sometimes I have found the young bugs collected inside the old ones’ skins for warmth, as if they had put on their father’s great-coat. There are white bugs—albinoes you may call ’em—freaks of nature like.”

Black-Beetles.

Cockroaches are even more voracious than crickets. A small species (Blatta Lapponica, Linn.), occasionally met with about London, is said to swarm numerously in the huts of the Laplanders, and will sometimes, in conjunction with a carrion-beetle (Silpha Lapponica, Linn.), devour, we are told, in a single day, their whole store of dried fish.

In London, and many other parts of the country, cockroaches, originally introduced from abroad, have multiplied so prodigiously as to be a great nuisance. They are often so numerous in kitchens and lower rooms in the metropolis as literally to cover the floor, and render it impossible for them to move, except over each other’s bodies. This, indeed, only happens after dark, for they are strictly night insects, and the instant a candle is intruded upon the assembly they rush towards their hiding-places, so that in a few seconds not one of the countless multitude is to be seen.

In consequence of their numbers, independently of their carnivorous propensities, they are driven to eat anything that comes in their way; and, besides devouring every species of kitchen-stuff, they gnaw clothes, leather, and books. They likewise pollute everything they crawl over, with an unpleasant nauseous smell.

These “black-beetles,” however, as they are commonly called, are harmless when compared with the foreign species, the giant cockroach (Blatta gigantea), which is not content with devouring the stores of the larder, but will attack human bodies, and even gnaw the extremities of the dead and dying.—(Drury’s Illustrations of Nat. Hist. iii. Pref.)

Cockroaches, at least the kind that is most abundant in Britain, hate the light, and never come forth from their hiding-places till the lights are removed or extinguished (the Blatta Germanica, however, which abounds in some houses, is bolder, making its appearance in the day, and running up the walls and over the tables, to the great annoyance of the inhabitants). In the London houses, especially on the ground-floor, they are most abundant, and consume everything they can find—flour, bread, meat, clothes, and even shoes. As soon as light, natural or artificial, appears, they all scamper off as fast as they can, and vanish in an instant.

These pests are not indigenous to this country, and perhaps nowhere in Europe, but are one of the evils which commerce has imported. In Captain Cook’s last voyage, the ships, while at Husheine, were infested with incredible numbers of these creatures, which it was found impossible by any means to destroy. Every kind of food, when exposed only for a few minutes, was covered with them, and pierced so full of holes, that it resembled a honeycomb. They were so fond of ink that they ate out the writing on labels. Captain Cook’s cockroaches were of two kinds—the Blatta Orientalis and Germanica.—(Encyc. Britan.)

The following fact we give from Mr. Douglas’s World of Insects:—

“Everybody has heard of a haunted house; nearly every house in and about London is haunted. Let the doubters, if they have the courage, go stealthily down to the kitchen at midnight, armed with a light and whatever other weapon they like, and they will see that beings of which Tam o’Shanter never dreamed, whose presence at daylight was only a myth, have here ‘a local habitation and a name.’ Scared from their nocturnal revels, the creatures run and scamper in all directions, until, in a short time, the stage is clear, and, as in some legend of diablerie, nothing remains but a most peculiar odour.

“These were no spirits, had nothing even of the fairy about them, but were veritable cockroaches, or ‘black-beetles’—as they are more commonly but erroneously termed—for they are not beetles at all. They have prodigious powers of increase, and are a corresponding nuisance. Kill as many as you will, except, perhaps, by poison, and you cannot extirpate them—the cry is, ‘Still they come.’

“One of the best ways to be rid of them is to keep a hedgehog, to which creature they are a favourite food, and his nocturnal habits make him awake to theirs. I have known cats eat cockroaches, but they do not thrive upon them.”

“One article of their food would hardly have been suspected,” says Mr. Newman, in a note communicated to the Entomological Society, at the meeting in February, 1855. “‘There is nothing new under the sun;’ so says the proverb. I believed, until a few days back, that I possessed the knowledge of a fact in the dietary economy of the cockroach of which entomologists were not cognisant, but I find myself forestalled; the fact is ‘as old as the hills.’ It is, that the cockroach seeks with diligence and devours with great gusto the common bed-bug.

“I will not mention names, but I am so confident of the veracity of the narrator, that I willingly take the entire responsibility of the following narrative:—

“‘Poverty makes one acquainted with strange bedfellows;’ and my informant bears willing testimony to the truth of the adage. He had not been prosperous, and had sought shelter in a London boarding-house; every night he saw cockroaches ascending his bed-curtains; every morning he complained to his very respectable landlady, and invariably received the comforting assurance that there was not a ‘black-beetle in the house.’ Still he pursued his nocturnal investigations, and he not only saw cockroaches running along the tester of the bed, but, to his great astonishment, he positively observed one of them seize a bug, and he therefore concluded, and not without some show of reason, that the cockroach ascended the curtains with this especial object, and that the more odoriferous insect is a favourite food of the major one.

“The following extract from Mr. Webster’s ‘Narrative of Foster’s Voyage,’ corroborates this recent observation, and illustrates the proverb which I have taken as my text: ‘Cockroaches, those nuisances of ships, are plentiful at St. Helena, and yet, bad as they are, they are more endurable than bugs. Previous to our arrival here in the Chanticleer we had suffered great inconvenience from the latter; but the cockroaches no sooner made their appearance than the bugs entirely disappeared. The fact is, the cockroach preys upon them, and leaves no sign or vestige of where they have been. So far, the latter is a most valuable insect.’”

So great is the annoyance and discomfort arising from these insects in Cockney households, that the author of a paper in the Daily News discusses the best means of effecting their extirpation. The writer of the article referred to avows his conviction, that the ingenious individual who shall devise the means of effectually ridding our houses of these insect pests will deserve to be ranked amongst the benefactors of mankind. The writer details the various expedients resorted to—hedgehogs, cucumber-peel, red wafers, phosphoric paste, glazed basins or pie-dishes filled with beer, or a syrup of beer and sugar, with bits of wood set up from the floor to the edge, for the creatures to run up by, and then be precipitated into the fatal lake, but believes that “none of these methods are fundamental enough for the evil,” which, so far as he is yet aware, can only be effectually cured by heating our houses by steam!

Beetle Destroyers.

A firm, which has been established in London seven years, and which manufactures exclusively poison known to the trade as the “Phosphor Paste for the destruction of black-beetles, cockroaches, rats, mice,” &c., were kind enough to give me the following information:—

“We have now sold this vermin poison for seven years, but we have never had an application for our composition from any street-seller. We have seen, a year or two since, a man about London who used to sell beetle-wafers; but as we knew that kind of article to be entirely useless, we were not surprised to find that he did not succeed in making a living. We have not heard of him for some time, and have no doubt he is dead, or has taken up some other line of employment.

“It is a strange fact, perhaps; but we do not know anything, or scarcely anything, as to the kind of people and tradesmen who purchase our poison—to speak the truth, we do not like to make too many inquiries of our customers. Sometimes, when they have used more than their customary quantity, we have asked, casually, how it was and to what kind of business-people they disposed of it, and we have always been met with an evasive sort of answer. You see tradesmen don’t like to divulge too much; for it must be a poor kind of profession or calling that there are no secrets in; and, again, they fancy we want to know what description of trades use the most of our composition, so that we might supply them direct from ourselves.

“From this cause we have made it a rule not to inquire curiously into the matters of our customers. We are quite content to dispose of the quantity we do, for we employ six travellers to call on chemists and oilmen for the town trade, and four for the country.

“The other day an elderly lady from High-street, Camden Town, called upon us: she stated that she was overrun with black-beetles, and wished to buy some of our paste from ourselves, for she said she always found things better if you purchased them of the maker, as you were sure to get them stronger, and by that means avoided the adulteration of the shopkeepers. But as we have said we would not supply a single box to any one, not wishing to give our agents any cause for complaint, we were obliged to refuse to sell to the old lady.

“We don’t care to say how many boxes we sell in the year; but we can tell you, sir, that we sell more for beetle poisoning in the summer than in the winter, as a matter of course. When we find that a particular district uses almost an equal quantity all the year round, we make sure that that is a rat district; for where there is not the heat of summer to breed beetles, it must follow that the people wish to get rid of rats.

“Brixton, Hackney, Ball’s Pond, and Lower Road, Islington, are the places that use most of our paste, those districts lying low, and being consequently damp. Camden Town, though it is in a high situation, is very much infested with beetles; it is a clayey soil, you understand, which retains moisture, and will not allow it to filter through like gravel. This is why in some very low districts, where the houses are built on gravel, we sell scarcely any of our paste.

“As the farmers say, a good fruit year is a good fly year; so we say, a good dull, wet summer, is a good beetle summer; and this has been a very fertile year, and we only hope it will be as good next year.

“We don’t believe in rat-destroyers; they profess to kill with weasels and a lot of things, and sometimes even say they can charm them away. Captains of vessels, when they arrive in the docks, will employ these people; and, as we say, they generally use our composition, but as long as their vessels are cleared of the vermin, they don’t care to know how it is done. A man who drives about in a cart, and does a great business in this way, we have reason to believe uses a great quantity of our Phosphor Paste. He comes from somewhere down the East-end or Whitechapel way.

“Our prices are too high for the street-sellers. Your street-seller can only afford to sell an article made by a person in but a very little better position than himself. Even our small boxes cost at the trade price two shillings a dozen, and when sold will only produce three shillings; so you can imagine the profit is not enough for the itinerant vendor.

“Bakers don’t use much of our paste, for they seem to think it no use to destroy the vermin—beetles and bakers’ shops generally go together.”

Crickets.

The house-cricket may perhaps be deemed a still more annoying insect than the common cockroach, adding an incessant noise to its ravages. Though it may not be unpleasant to hear for a short time “the cricket chirrup in the hearth,” so constant a din every evening must greatly interrupt comfort and conversation.

These garrulous animals, which live in a kind of artificial torrid zone, are very thirsty souls, and are frequently found drowned in pans of water, milk, broth, and the like. Whatever is moist, even stockings or linen hung out to dry, is to them a bonne bouche; they will eat the skimmings of pots, yeast, crumbs of bread, and even salt, or anything within their reach. Sometimes they are so abundant in houses as to become absolute pests, flying into the candles and even into people’s faces.—(Kirby and Spence’s Ent. i. 206, 7.)

The house-cricket (Acheta domestica) is well known for its habit of picking out the mortar of ovens and fire-places, where it not only enjoys warmth, but can procure abundance of food. It is usually supposed that it feeds on bread. M. Latreille says it only eats insects, and it certainly thrives well in houses infested by the cockroach; but we have also known it eat and destroy lamb’s-wool stockings, and other woollen stuffs, hung near a fire to dry. Although the food of crickets consists chiefly of vegetable substances, they exhibit a propensity to carnivorous habits. The house-cricket thrives best in the vicinity of a baker’s oven, where there are plenty of bread crumbs.

Mouffet marvels at its extreme lankness, inasmuch as there is not “found in the belly any superfluity at all, although it feed on the moisture of flesh and fat of broth, to which, either poured out or reserved, it runs in the night; yea, although it feed on bread, yet is the belly always lank and void of superfluity.”—(Theatre of Insects, p. 96.)

White of Selborne, again, says, “as one would suppose, from the burning atmosphere which they inhabit, they are a thirsty race, and show a great propensity for liquids, being frequently found dead in pans of water, milk, broth, or the like. Whatever is moist they are fond of, and therefore they often gnaw holes in wet woollen stockings and aprons that are hung to the fire. These crickets are not only very thirsty, but very voracious; for they will eat the scummings of pots, yeast, bread, and kitchen offal, or sweepings of almost every description.”—(Nat. Hist. of Selborne.)

The cricket is evidently not fond of hard labour, but prefers those places where the mortar is already loosened, or at least is new, soft, and easily scooped out; and in this way it will dig covert channels from room to room. In summer, crickets often make excursions from the house to the neighbouring fields, and dwell in the crevices of rubbish, or the cracks made in the ground by dry weather, where they chirp as merrily as in the snuggest chimney-corner. Whether they ever dig retreats in such circumstances we have not ascertained, though it is not improbable they may do so for the purpose of making nests.

“Those,” says Mr. Gough of Manchester, “who have attended to the manners of the hearth-cricket, know that it passes the hottest part of the summer in sunny situations, concealed in the crevices of walls and heaps of rubbish. It quits its summer abode about the end of August, and fixes its residence by the fireside of kitchens or cottages, where it multiplies its species, and is as merry at Christmas as other insects in the dog-days. Thus do the comforts of a warm hearth afford the cricket a safe refuge, not from death, but from temporary torpidity, though it can support this for a long time, when deprived by accident of artificial warmth.

“I came to a knowledge of this fact,” continues Mr. Gough, “by planting a colony of these insects in a kitchen, where a constant fire was kept through the summer, but which is discontinued from November till June, with the exception of a day once in six or eight weeks. The crickets were brought from a distance, and let go in this room, in the beginning of September, 1806; here they increased considerably in the course of two months, but were not heard or seen after the fire was removed. Their disappearance led me to conclude that the cold had killed them; but in this I was mistaken; for a brisk fire being kept up for a whole day in the winter, the warmth of it invited my colony from their hiding-place, but not before the evening; after which they continued to skip about and chirp the greater part of the following day, when they again disappeared—being compelled, by the returning cold, to take refuge in their former retreats. They left the chimney-corner on the 25th of May, 1807, after a fit of very hot weather, and revisited their winter residence on the 31st of August. Here they spent the summer merely, and at present (January, 1808) lie torpid in the crevices of the chimney, with the exception of those days on which they are recalled to a temporary existence by the comforts of the fire.”—(Reeve, Essay on the Torpidity of Animals, p. 84.)

M. Bery St. Vincent tells us that the Spaniards are so fond of crickets that they keep them in cages like singing-birds.—(Dict. Classique d’Hist. Nat. Art., Grillon. Rennie’s Insect Architecture, 4th edit. p. 242.)

Associated as is the chirping song of the cricket family of insects with the snug chimney-corner, or the sunshine of summer, it affords a pleasure which certainly does not arise from the intrinsic quality of its music. “Sounds,” says White, “do not always give us pleasure according to their sweetness and melody; nor do harsh sounds always displease. Thus, the shrilling of the field-cricket (Acheta campestris), though sharp and stridulous, yet marvellously delights some hearers, filling their minds with a train of summer ideas of everything that is rural, verdurous, and joyous.”—(Nat. Hist. of Selborne, ii. 73.)

“Sounds inharmonious in themselves, and harsh,

Yet heard in scenes where peace for ever reigns,

And only there, please highly for their sake.”

Cowper, Task, Book I.

This circumstance, no doubt, causes the Spaniards to keep them in cages, as we do singing-birds. White tells us that, if supplied with moistened leaves, they will sing as merrily and loud in a paper cage as in the fields; but he did not succeed in planting a colony of them in the terrace of his garden, though he bored holes for them in the turf to save them the labour of digging.

The hearth-cricket, again, though we hear it occasionally in the hedge-banks in summer, prefers the warmth of an oven or a good fire, and thence, residing as it were always in the torrid zone, is ever alert and merry—a good Christmas fire being to it what the heat of the dog-days is to others.

Though crickets are frequently heard by day, yet their natural time of motion is only in the night. As soon as darkness prevails the chirping increases, whilst the hearth-crickets come running forth, and are often to be seen in great numbers, from the size of a flea to that of their full stature.

Like the field-cricket, the hearth-crickets are sometimes kept for their music; and the learned Scaliger took so great a fancy to their song, that he was accustomed to keep them in a box in his study. It is reported that in some parts of Africa they are kept and fed in a kind of iron oven, and sold to the natives, who like their chirp, and think it is a good soporific.—(Mouffet, Theat. Insect. 136.)

Milton, too, chose for his contemplative pleasures a spot where crickets resorted:—

“Where glowing embers through the room

Teach light to counterfeit a gloom,

Far from all resort of mirth,

See the cricket on the hearth.”—Il Penseroso.

Rennie, in his Insect Miscellanies, says, “We have been as unsuccessful in transplanting the hearth-cricket as White was with the field-crickets. In two different houses we have repeatedly introduced crickets, but could not prevail on them to stay. One of our trials, indeed, was made in summer, with insects brought from a garden-wall, and it is probable they thought the kitchen fire-side too hot at that season.”—(p. 82.)

The so-called chirp of the cricket is a vulgar error. The instrument (for so it may be styled) upon which the male cricket plays (the female is mute) consists of strong nervures or rough strings in the wing-cases, by the friction of which against each other a sound is produced and communicated to the membranes stretched between them, in the same manner as the vibrations caused by the friction of the finger upon the tambourine are diffused over its surface. It is erroneously stated in a popular work, that “the organ is a membrane, which in contracting, by means of a muscle and tendon placed under the wings of the insect, folds down somewhat like a fan;” and this, being “always dry, yields by its motion a sharp piercing sound.”—(Bing, Anim. Biog. iv. 6th edit. Rennie’s Insect Miscellanies, p. 62.)

OUR STREET FOLK.

I.—STREET EXHIBITORS.

Punch.

The performer of Punch that I saw was a short, dark, pleasant-looking man, dressed in a very greasy and very shiny green shooting-jacket. This was fastened together by one button in front, all the other button-holes having been burst through. Protruding from his bosom, a corner of the pandean pipes was just visible, and as he told me the story of his adventures, he kept playing with the band of his very limp and very rusty old beaver hat. He had formerly been a gentleman’s servant, and was especially civil in his manners. He came to me with his hair tidily brushed for the occasion, but apologised for his appearance on entering the room. He was very communicative, and took great delight in talking like Punch, with his call in his mouth, while some young children were in the room, and who, hearing the well-known sound of Punch’s voice, looked all about for the figure. Not seeing the show, they fancied the man had the figure in his pocket, and that the sounds came from it. The change from Punch’s voice to the man’s natural tone was managed without an effort, and instantaneously. It had a very peculiar effect.

“I am the proprietor of a Punch’s show,” he said. “I goes about with it myself, and performs inside the frame behind the green baize. I have a pardner what plays the music—the pipes and drum; him as you see’d with me. I have been five-and-twenty year now at the business. I wish I’d never seen it, though it’s been a money-making business—indeed, the best of all the street hexhibitions I may say. I am fifty years old. I took to it for money gains—that was what I done it for. I formerly lived in service—was a footman in a gentleman’s family. When I first took to it, I could make two and three pounds a-day—I could so. You see, the way in which I took first to the business was this here—there was a party used to come and ‘cheer’ for us at my master’s house, and her son having a hexhibition of his own, and being in want of a pardner, axed me if so be I’d go out, which was a thing that I degraded at the time. He gave me information as to what the money-taking was, and it seemed to me that good, that it would pay me better nor service. I had twenty pounds a-year in my place, and my board and lodging, and two suits of clothes, but the young man told me as how I could make one pound a-day at the Punch-and-Judy business, after a little practice. I took a deal of persuasion, though, before I’d join him—it was beneath my dignity to fall from a footman to a showman. But, you see, the French gennelman as I lived with (he were a merchant in the city, and had fourteen clerks working for him) went back to his own country to reside, and left me with a written kerrackter; but that was no use to me: though I’d fine recommendations at the back of it, no one would look at it; so I was five months out of employment, knocking about—living first on my wages and then on my clothes, till all was gone but the few rags on my back. So I began to think that the Punch-and-Judy business was better than starving after all. Yes, I should think anything was better than that, though it’s a business that, after you’ve once took to, you never can get out of—people fancies you know too much, and won’t have nothing to say to you. If I got a situation at a tradesman’s, why the boys would be sure to recognise me behind the counter, and begin a shouting into the shop (they must shout, you know): ‘Oh, there’s Punch and Judy—there’s Punch a-sarving out the customers!’ Ah, it’s a great annoyance being a public kerrackter, I can assure you, sir; go where you will, it’s ‘Punchy, Punchy!’ As for the boys, they’ll never leave me alone till I die, I know; and I suppose in my old age I shall have to take to the parish broom. All our forefathers died in the workhouse. I don’t know a Punch’s showman that hasn’t. One of my pardners was buried by the workhouse; and even old Pike, the most noted showman as ever was, died in the workhouse—Pike and Porsini. Porsini was the first original street Punch, and Pike was his apprentice; their names is handed down to posterity among the noblemen and footmen of the land. They both died in the workhouse, and, in course, I shall do the same. Something else might turn up, to be sure. We can’t say what this luck of the world is. I’m obliged to strive very hard—very hard indeed, sir, now, to get a living; and then not to get it after all—at times, compelled to go short, often.

“Punch, you know, sir, is a dramatic performance in two hacts. It’s a play, you may say. I don’t think it can be called a tragedy hexactly; a drama is what we names it. There is tragic parts, and comic and sentimental parts, too. Some families where I performs will have it most sentimental—in the original style; them families is generally sentimental theirselves. Others is all for the comic, and then I has to kick up all the games I can. To the sentimental folk I am obliged to perform werry steady and werry slow, and leave out all comic words and business. They won’t have no ghost, no coffin, and no devil; and that’s what I call spiling the performance entirely. It’s the march of hintellect wot’s a doing all this—it is, sir. But I was a going to tell you about my first jining the business. Well, you see, after a good deal of persuading, and being drew to it, I may say, I consented to go out with the young man as I were a-speaking about. He was to give me twelve shillings a-week and my keep, for two years certain, till I could get my own show things together, and for that I was to carry the show, and go round and collect. Collecting, you know, sounds better than begging; the pronounciation’s better like. Sometimes the people says, when they sees us a coming round, ‘Oh, here they comes a-begging’—but it can’t be begging, you know, when you’re a hexerting yourselves. I couldn’t play the drum and pipes, so the young man used to do that himself, to call the people together before he got into the show. I used to stand outside, and patter to the figures. The first time that ever I went out with Punch was in the beginning of August, 1825. I did all I could to avoid being seen. My dignity was hurt at being hobligated to take to the streets for a living. At fust I fought shy, and used to feel queer somehow, you don’t know how like, whenever the people used to look at me. I remember werry well the first street as ever I performed in. It was off Gray’s Inn, one of them quiet, genteel streets, and when the mob began to gather round I felt all-overish, and I turned my head to the frame instead of the people. We hadn’t had no rehearsals aforehand, and I did the patter quite permiscuous. There was not much talk, to be sure, required then; and what little there was, consisted merely in calling out the names of the figures as they came up, and these my master prompted me with from inside the frame. But little as there was for me to do, I know I never could have done it, if it hadn’t been for the spirits—the false spirits, you see (a little drop of gin), as my master guv me in the morning. The first time as ever I made my appearance in public, I collected as much as eight shillings, and my master said, after the performance was over, ‘You’ll do!’ You see I was partly in livery, and looked a little bit decent like. After this was over, I kept on going out with my master for two years, as I had agreed, and at the end of that time I had saved enough to start a show of my own. I bought the show of old Porsini, the man as first brought Punch into the streets of England. To be sure, there was a woman over here with it before then. Her name was——I can’t think of it just now, but she never performed in the streets, so we consider Porsini as our real forefather. It isn’t much more nor seventy years since Porsini (he was a werry old man when he died, and blind) showed the hexhibition in the streets of London. I’ve heerd tell that old Porsini used to take very often as much as ten pounds a-day, and he used to sit down to his fowls and wine, and the very best of everything, like the first gennelman in the land; indeed, he made enough money at the business to be quite a tip-top gennelman, that he did. But he never took care of a halfpenny he got. He was that independent, that if he was wanted to perform, sir, he’d come at his time, not your’n. At last, he reduced himself to want, and died in St. Giles’s workhouse. Ah, poor fellow! he oughtn’t to have been allowed to die where he did, after amusing the public for so many years. Every one in London knowed him. Lords, dukes, princes, squires, and wagabonds—all used to stop to laugh at his performance, and a funny clever old fellow he was. He was past performing when I bought my show of him, and werry poor. He was living in the Coal-yard, Drury-lane, and had scarcely a bit of food to eat. He had spent all he had got in drink, and in treating friends,—aye, any one, no matter who. He didn’t study the world, nor himself neither. As fast as the money came it went, and when it was gone, why, he’d go to work and get more. His show was a very inferior one, though it were the fust—nothing at all like them about now—nothing near as good. If you only had four sticks then, it was quite enough to make plenty of money out of, so long as it was Punch. I gave him thirty-five shillings for the stand, figures and all. I bought it cheap, you see, for it was thrown on one side, and was of no use to any one but such as myself. There was twelve figures and the other happaratus, such as the gallows, ladder, horse, bell, and stuffed dog. The characters was Punch, Judy, Child, Beadle, Scaramouch, Nobody, Jack Ketch, the Grand Senoor, the Doctor, the Devil (there was no Ghost used then), Merry Andrew, and the Blind Man. These last two kerrackters are quite done with now. The heads of the kerrackters was all carved in wood, and dressed in the proper costume of the country. There was at that time, and is now, a real carver for the Punch business. He was dear, but werry good and hexcellent. His Punch’s head was the best as I ever seed. The nose and chin used to meet quite close together. A set of new figures, dressed and all, would come to about fifteen pounds. Each head costs five shillings for the bare carving alone, and every figure that we has takes at least a yard of cloth to dress him, besides ornaments and things that comes werry expensive. A good show at the present time will cost three pounds odd for the stand alone—that’s including baize, the frontispiece, the back scene, the cottage, and the letter cloth, or what is called the drop-scene at the theatres. In the old ancient style, the back scene used to pull up and change into a gaol scene, but that’s all altered now.

PUNCH’S SHOWMEN.

[From a Photograph.]

“We’ve got more upon the comic business now, and tries to do more with Toby than with the prison scene. The prison is what we calls the sentimental style. Formerly Toby was only a stuffed figure. It was Pike who first hit upon hintroducing a live dog, and a great hit it were—it made a grand alteration in the hexhibition, for now the performance is called Punch and Toby as well. There is one Punch about the streets at present that tries it on with three dogs, but that ain’t much of a go—too much of a good thing I calls it. Punch, as I said before, is a drama in two hacts. We don’t drop the scene at the end of the first—the drum and pipes strikes up instead. The first act we consider to end with Punch being taken to prison for the murder of his wife and child. The great difficulty in performing Punch consists in the speaking, which is done by a call, or whistle in the mouth, such as this here.” (He then produced the call from his waistcoat pocket. It was a small flat instrument, made of two curved pieces of metal about the size of a knee-buckle, bound together with black thread. Between these was a plate of some substance (apparently silk), which he said was a secret. The call, he told me, was tuned to a musical instrument, and took a considerable time to learn. He afterwards took from his pocket two of the small metallic plates unbound. He said the composition they were made of was also one of the “secrets of the purfession.” They were not tin, nor zinc, because “both of them metals were poisons in the mouth, and hinjurious to the constitution.”) “These calls,” he continued, “we often sell to gennelmen for a sovereign a-piece, and for that we give ’em a receipt how to use them. They ain’t whistles, but calls, or unknown tongues, as we sometimes names ’em, because with them in the mouth we can pronounce each word as plain as any parson. We have two or three kinds—one for out-of-doors, one for in-doors, one for speaking and for singing, and another for selling. I’ve sold many a one to gennelmen going along, so I generally keeps a hextra one with me. Porsini brought the calls into this country with him from Italy, and we who are now in the purfession have all learnt how to make and use them, either from him or those as he had taught ’em to. I larnt the use of mine from Porsini himself. My master whom I went out with at first would never teach me, and was werry partickler in keeping it all secret from me. Porsini taught me the call at the time I bought his show of him. I was six months in perfecting myself in the use of it. I kept practising away night and morning with it, until I got it quite perfect. It was no use trying at home, ’cause it sounds quite different in the hopen hair. Often when I’ve made ’em at home, I’m obliged to take the calls to pieces after trying ’em out in the streets, they’ve been made upon too weak a scale. When I was practising, I used to go into the parks, and fields, and out-of-the-way places, so as to get to know how to use it in the hopen hair. Now I’m reckoned one of the best speakers in the whole purfession. When I made my first appearance as a regular performer of Punch on my own account, I did feel uncommon narvous, to be sure: though I know’d the people couldn’t see me behind the baize, still I felt as if all the eyes of the country were upon me. It was as much as hever I could do to get the words out, and keep the figures from shaking. When I struck up the first song, my voice trembled so as I thought I never should be able to get to the hend of the first hact. I soon, however, got over that there, and at present I’d play before the whole bench of bishops as cool as a cowcumber. We always have a pardner now to play the drum and pipes, and collect the money. This, however, is only a recent dodge. In older times we used to go about with a trumpet—that was Porsini’s ancient style; but now that’s stopped. Only her majesty’s mails may blow trumpets in the streets at present. The fust person who went out with me was my wife. She used to stand outside, and keep the boys from peeping through the baize, whilst I was performing behind it; and she used to collect the money afterwards as well. I carried the show and trumpet, and she the box. She’s been dead these five years now. Take one week with another, all through the year, I should say I made then five pounds regular. I have taken as much as two pounds ten shillings in one day in the streets; and I used to think it a bad day’s business at that time if I took only one pound. You can see Punch has been good work—a money-making business—and beat all mechanics right out. If I could take as much as I did when I first began, what must my forefathers have done, when the business was five times as good as ever it were in my time? Why, I leaves you to judge what old Porsini and Pike must have made. Twenty years ago I have often and often got seven shillings and eight shillings for one hexhibition in the streets: two shillings and three shillings I used to think low to get at one collection; and many times I’d perform eight or ten times in a day. We didn’t care much about work then, for we could get money fast enough; but now I often show twenty times in the day, and get scarcely a bare living at it arter all. That shows the times, you know, sir—what things was and is now. Arter performing in the streets of a day we used to attend private parties in the hevening, and get sometimes as much as two pounds for the hexhibition. This used to be at the juvenile parties of the nobility; and the performance lasted about an hour and a half. For a short performance of half-an-hour at a gennelman’s house we never had less than one pound. A performance outside the house was two shillings and sixpence; but we often got as much as ten shillings for it. I have performed afore almost all the nobility. Lord —— was particular partial to us, and one of our greatest patronizers. At the time of the Police Bill I met him at Cheltenham on my travels, and he told me as he had saved Punch’s neck once more; and it’s through him principally that we are allowed to exhibit in the streets. Punch is exempt from the Police Act. If you read the hact throughout, you won’t find Punch mentioned in it. But all I’ve been telling you is about the business as it was. What it is, is a werry different consarn. A good day for us now seldom gets beyond five shillings, and that’s between myself and my pardner, who plays the drum and pipes. Often we are out all day, and get a mere nuffing. Many days we have been out and taken nuffing at all—that’s werry common when we dwells upon horders. By dwelling on horders, I means looking out for gennelmen what want us to play in front of their houses. When we strike up in the hopen street we take upon a haverage only threepence a show. In course we may do more, but that’s about the sum, take one street performance with another. Them kind of performances is what we calls ‘short showing.’ We gets the halfpence and hooks it. A ‘long pitch’ is the name we gives to performances that lasts about half-an-hour or more. Them long pitches we confine solely to street corners in public thoroughfares; and then we take about a shilling upon a haverage, and more if it’s to be got—we never turns away nuffing. ‘Boys, look up your fardens,’ says the outside man; ‘it ain’t half over yet, we’ll show it all through.’ The short shows we do only in private by-streets, and of them we can get through about twenty in the day; that’s as much as we can tackle—ten in the morning, and ten in the afternoon. Of the long pitches we can only do eight in the day. We start on our rounds at nine in the morning, and remain out till dark at night. We gets a snack at the publics on our road. The best hours for Punch are in the morning from nine till ten, because then the children are at home. Arter that, you know, they goes out with the maids for a walk. From twelve till three is good again, and then from six till nine; that’s because the children are mostly at home at them hours. We make much more by horders for performance houtside the gennelmen’s houses, than we do by performing in public in the hopen streets. Monday is the best day for street business; Friday is no day at all, because then the poor people has spent all their money. If we was to pitch on a Friday, we shouldn’t take a halfpenny in the streets, so we in general on that day goes round for horders. Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday is the best days for us with horders at gennelmen’s houses. We do much better in the spring than at any other time in the year, excepting holiday time, at Midsummer and Christmas. That’s what we call Punch’s season. We do most at hevening parties in the holiday time, and if there’s a pin to choose between them, I should say Christmas holidays was the best. For attending hevening parties now we generally get one pound and our refreshments—as much more as they like to give us. But the business gets slacker and slacker every season. Where I went to ten parties twenty years ago, I don’t go to two now. People isn’t getting tired of our performances, but stingier—that’s it. Everybody looks at their money now afore they parts with it, and gennelfolks haggles and cheapens us down to shillings and sixpences, as if they was guineas in the holden time. Our business is werry much like hackney-coach work; we do best in vet vether. It looks like rain this evening, and I’m uncommon glad on it, to be sure. You see, the vet keeps the children in-doors all day, and then they wants something to quiet ’em a bit; and the mothers and fathers, to pacify the dears, gives us a horder to perform. It mustn’t rain cats and dogs—that’s as bad as no rain at all. What we likes is a regular good, steady Scotch mist, for then we takes double what we takes on other days. In summer we does little or nothing; the children are out all day enjoying themselves in the parks. The best pitch of all in London is Leicester-square; there’s all sorts of classes, you see, passing there. Then comes Regent-street (the corner of Burlington-street is uncommon good, and there’s a good publican there besides). Bond-street ain’t no good now. Oxford-street, up by Old Cavendish-street, or Oxford-market, or Wells-street, are all favourite pitches for Punch. We don’t do much in the City. People has their heads all full of business there, and them as is greedy arter the money ain’t no friend of Punch’s. Tottenham-court-road, the New-road, and all the henvirons of London, is pretty good. Hampstead, tho’, ain’t no good; they’ve got too poor there. I’d sooner not go out at all than to Hampstead. Belgrave-square, and all about that part, is uncommon good; but where there’s many chapels Punch won’t do at all. I did once, though, strike up hopposition to a street preacher wot was a holding forth in the New-road and did uncommon well. All his flock, as he called ’em, left him, and come over to look at me. Punch and preaching is two different creeds—hopposition parties, I may say. We in generally walks from twelve to twenty mile every day, and carries the show, which weighs a good half-hundred, at the least. Arter great exertion, our woice werry often fails us; for speaking all day through the ‘call’ is werry trying, ’specially when we are chirruping up so as to bring the children to the vinders. The boys is the greatest nuisances we has to contend with. Wherever we goes we are sure of plenty of boys for a hindrance; but they’ve got no money, bother ’em! and they’ll follow us for miles, so that we’re often compelled to go miles to awoid ’em. Many parts is swarming with boys, such as Vitechapel. Spitalfields, that’s the worst place for boys I ever come a-near; they’re like flies in summer there, only much more thicker. I never shows my face within miles of them parts. Chelsea, again, has an uncommon lot of boys; and wherever we know the children swarm, there’s the spots we makes a point of awoiding. Why, the boys is such a hobstruction to our performance, that often we are obliged to drop the curtain for ’em. They’ll throw one another’s caps into the frame while I’m inside on it, and do what we will, we can’t keep ’em from poking their fingers through the baize and making holes to peep through. Then they will keep tapping the drum; but the worst of all is, the most of ’em ain’t got a farthing to bless themselves with, and they will shove into the best places. Soldiers, again, we don’t like, they’ve got no money—no, not even so much as pockets, sir. Nusses ain’t no good. Even if the mothers of the dear little children has given ’em a penny to spend, why the nusses takes it from ’em, and keeps it for ribbins. Sometimes we can coax a penny out of the children, but the nusses knows too much to be gammoned by us. Indeed, servants in generally don’t do the thing what’s right to us—some is good to us, but the most of ’em will have poundage out of what we gets. About sixpence out of every half-crown is what the footman takes from us. We in generally goes into the country in the summer time for two or three months. Watering-places is werry good in July and August. Punch mostly goes down to the sea-side with the quality. Brighton, though, ain’t no account; the Pavilion’s done up with, and therefore Punch has discontinued his visits. We don’t put up at the trampers’ houses on our travels, but in generally inns is where we stays; because we considers ourselves to be above the other showmen and mendicants. At one lodging-house as I stopped at once in Warwick, there was as many as fifty staying there what got their living by street performances—the greater part were Italian boys and girls. There are altogether as many as sixteen Punch-and-Judy frames in England. Eight of these is at work in London, and the other eight in the country; and to each of these frames there are two men. We are all acquainted with one another; are all sociable together, and know where each other is, and what they are a-doing on. When one comes home, another goes out; that’s the way we proceed through life. It wouldn’t do for two to go to the same place. If two of us happens to meet at one town, we jine, and shift pardners, and share the money. One goes one way, and one another, and we meet at night, and reckon up over a sociable pint or a glass. We shift pardners so as each may know how much the other has taken. It’s the common practice for the man what performs Punch to share with the one wot plays the drum and pipes—each has half wot is collected; but if the pardner can’t play the drum and pipes, and only carries the frame, and collects, then his share is but a third of what is taken till he learns how to perform himself. The street performers of London lives mostly in little rooms of their own; they has generally wives, and one or two children, who are brought up to the business. Some lives about the Westminster-road, and St. George’s East. A great many are in Lock’s-fields—they are all the old school that way. Then some, or rather the principal part of the showmen, are to be found about Lisson-grove. In this neighbourhood there is a house of call, where they all assembles in the evening. There are a very few in Brick-lane, Spitalfields, now; that is mostly deserted by showmen. The West-end is the great resort of all; for it’s there the money lays, and there the showmen abound. We all know one another, and can tell in what part of the country the others are. We have intelligence by letters from all parts. There’s a Punch I knows on now is either in the Isle of Man, or on his way to it.”

Punch Talk.

“‘Bona parlare’ means language; name of patter. ‘Yeute munjare’—no food. ‘Yeute lente’—no bed. ‘Yeute bivare’—no drink. I’ve ‘yeute munjare,’ and ‘yeute bivare,’ and, what’s worse, ‘yeute lente.’ This is better than the costers’ talk, because that ain’t no slang at all, and this is a broken Italian, and much higher than the costers’ lingo. We know what o’clock it is, besides.”

Scene with two Punchmen.

“‘How are you getting on?’ I might say to another Punchman. ‘Ultra cateva,’ he’d say. If I was doing a little, I’d say, ‘Bonar.’ Let us have a ‘shant a bivare’—pot o’ beer. If we has a good pitch we never tell one another, for business is business. If they know we’ve a ‘bonar’ pitch, they’ll oppose, which makes it bad.

“‘Co. and Co.’ is our term for partner, or ‘questa questa,’ as well. ‘Ultray cativa,’—no bona. ‘Slumareys’—figures, frame, scenes, properties. ‘Slum’—call, or unknown tongue. ‘Ultray cativa slum’—not a good call. ‘Tambora’—drum; that’s Italian. ‘Pipares’—pipes. ‘Questra homa a vardring the slum, scapar it, Orderly’—there’s someone a looking at the slum. Be off quickly. ‘Fielia’ is a child; ‘Homa’ is a man; ‘Dona,’ a female; ‘Charfering-homa’—talking-man, policeman. Policeman can’t interfere with us, we’re sanctioned. Punch is exempt out of the Police Act. Some’s very good men, and some on ’em are tyrants; but generally speaking they’re all werry kind to us, and allows us every privilege. That’s a flattery, you know, because you’d better not meddle with them. Civility always gains its esteem.”

The man here took a large clasp-knife out of his breeches pocket.

“This here knife is part of Punch’s tools or materials, of great utility, for it cannot be done without. The knife serves for a hammer, to draw nails and drive them in again, and is very handy on a country road to cut a beefsteak—not a mistake—Well, ye cannot cut a mistake, can ye?—and is a real poor man’s friend to a certainty.

“This here is the needle that completes our tools (takes out a needle from inside his waistcoat collar,) and is used to sew up our cativa stumps, that is, Punch’s breeches and Judy’s petticoats, and his master’s old clothes when they’re in holes. I likes to have everything tidy and respectable, not knowing where I’m going to perform to, for every day is a new day that we never see afore and never shall see again; we do not know the produce of this world, being luxurant (that’s moral), being humane, kind, and generous to all our society of life. We mends our cativa and slums when they gets teearey (if you was to show that to some of our line they’d be horrified; they can’t talk so affluent, you know, in all kinds of black slums). Under the hedgeares, and were no care varder us questa—‘questa’ is a shirt—pronunciation for questra homa.

“Once, too, when I was scarpering with my culling in the monkey, I went to mendare the cativa slums in a churchyard, and sat down under the tombs to stitch ’em up a bit, thinking no one would varder us there. But Mr. Crookshank took us off there as we was a sitting. I know I’m the same party, ’cos Joe seen the print you know and draw’d quite nat’ral, as now in print, with the slumares a laying about on all the tombstones round us.”

The Punchman at the Theatre.

“I used often when a youth to be very fond of plays and romances, and frequently went to theatres to learn knowledge, of which I think there is a deal of knowledge to be learnt from those places (that gives the theatres a touch—helps them on a bit). I was very partial and fond of seeing Romeau and Juliet; Otheller; and the Knights of St. John, and the Pretty Gal of Peerlesspool; Macbeth and the Three Dancing Witches. Don Goovarney pleased me best of all though. What took me uncommon were the funeral purcession of Juliet—it affects the heart, and brings us to our nat’ral feelings. I took my ghost from Romeau and Juliet; the ghost comes from the grave, and it’s beautiful. I used to like Kean, the principal performer. Oh, admirable! most admirable he were, and especially in Otheller, for then he was like my Jim Crow here, and was always a great friend and supporter of his old friend Punch. Otheller murders his wife, ye know, like Punch does. Otheller kills her, ’cause the green-eyed monster has got into his ’art, and he being so extremely fond on her; but Punch kills his’n by accident, though he did not intend to do it, for the Act of Parliament against husbands beating wives was not known in his time. A most excellent law that there, for it causes husbands and wives to be kind and natural one with the other, all through the society of life. Judy irritates her husband, Punch, for to strike the fatal blow, vich at the same time, vith no intention to commit it, not knowing at the same time, being rather out of his mind, vot he vas about. I hope this here will be a good example both to men and wives, always to be kind and obleeging to each other, and that will help them through the mainder with peace and happiness, and will rest in peace with all mankind (that’s moral). It must be well worded, ye know, that’s my beauty.”

Mr. Punch’s Refreshment.

“Always Mr. Punch, when he performs to any nobleman’s juvenile parties, he requires a little refreshment and sperrits before commencing, because the performance will go far superior. But where teetotallers is he plays very mournful, and they don’t have the best parts of the dramatical performance. Cos pump vater gives a person no heart to exhibit his performance, where if any sperrits is given to him he woold be sure to give the best of satisfaction. I likes where I goes to perform for the gennelman to ring the bell, and say to the butler to bring this here party up whatever he chooses. But Punch is always moderate; he likes one eye wetted, then the tother after; but he likes the best: not particular to brandy, for fear of his nose of fading, and afeerd of his losing the colour. All theatrical people, and even the great Edmund Kean, used to take a drop before commencing performance, and Punch must do the same, for it enlivens his sperrits, cheers his heart up, and enables him to give the best of satisfaction imaginable.”

The History of Punch.

“There are hoperas and romarnces. A romarnce is far different to a hopera, you know; for one is interesting, and the other is dull and void of apprehension. The romance is the interesting one, and of the two I likes it the best; but let every one speak as they find—that’s moral. Jack Sheppard, you know, is a romarnce, and a fine one; but Punch is a hopera—a huproar, we calls it, and the most pleasing and most interesting of all as was ever produced, Punch never was beat and never will, being the oldest performance for many hundred years, and now handed down to prosperity (there’s a fine moral in it, too).

“The history or origination of Punch—(never put yerself out of yer way for me, I’m one of the happiest men in existence, and gives no trouble)—is taken from Italy, and brought over to England by Porsini, and exhibited in the streets of London for the first time from sixty to seventy years ago; though he was not the first man who exhibited, for there was a female here before him, but not to perform at all in public—name unknown, but handed down to prosperity. She brought the figures and frame over with her, but never showed ’em—keeping it an unknown secret. Porsini came from Hitaly, and landed in England, and exhibited his performance in the streets of London, and realized an immense sum of money. Porsini always carried a rum-bottle in his pocket (’cause Punch is a rum fellow, ye see, and he’s very fond of rum), and drinked out of this unbeknown behind the baize afore he went into the frame, so that it should lay in his power to give the audience a most excellent performance. He was a man as gave the greatest satisfaction, and he was the first man that brought a street horgan into England from Hitaly. His name is handed down to prosperity among all classes of society in life.

“At first, the performance was quite different then to what it is now. It was all sentimental then, and very touching to the feelings, and full of good morals. The first part was only made up of the killing of his wife and babby, and the second with the execution of the hangman and killing of the devil—that was the original drama of Punch, handed down to prosperity for 800 years. The killing of the devil makes it one of the most moral plays as is, for it stops Satan’s career of life, and then we can all do as we likes afterwards.

“Porsini lived like the first nobleman in the land, and realized an immense deal of money during his lifetime; we all considered him to be our forefather. He was a very old man when he died. I’ve heard tell he used to take very often as much as 10l. a-day, and now it’s come down to little more than 10d.; and he used to sit down to his fowls and wine, and the very best of luxuriousness, like the first nobleman in the world, such as a bottle of wine, and cetera. At last he reduced himself to want, and died in the workhouse. Ah! poor fellow, he didn’t ought to have been let die where he did, but misfortunes will happen to all—that’s moral. Every one in London knowed him: lords, dukes, squires, princes, and wagabones, all used to stop and laugh at his pleasing and merry interesting performance; and a funny old fellow he was, and so fond of his snuff. His name is writ in the annuals of history, and handed down as long as grass grows and water runs—for when grass ceases to grow, ye know, and water ceases to run, this world will be no utility; that’s moral.

“Pike, the second noted street performer of Punch, was Porsini’s apprentice, and he succeeded him after his career. He is handed down as a most clever exhibitor of Punch and showman—’cause he used to go about the country with waggons, too. He exhibited the performance for many years, and at last came to decay, and died in the workhouse. He was the first inventor of the live dog called Toby, and a great invention it was, being a great undertaking of a new and excellent addition to Punch’s performance—that’s well worded—we must place the words in a superior manner to please the public.

“Then if, as you see, all our forefathers went to decay and died in the workhouse, what prospect have we to look forward to before us at the present time but to share the same fate, unless we meet with sufficient encouragement in this life? But hoping it will not be so, knowing that there is a new generation and a new exhibition, we hope the public at large will help and assist, and help us to keep our head above water, so that we shall never float down the river Thames, to be picked up, carried in a shell, coroner’s inquest held, taken to the workhouse, popped into the pithole, and there’s an end to another poor old Punch—that’s moral.

“A footman is far superior to a showman, ’cause a showman is held to be of low degrade, and are thought as such, and so circumstantiated as to be looked upon as a mendicant; but still we are not, for collecting ain’t begging, it’s only selliciting; ’cause parsons, you know (I gives them a rub here), preaches a sermon and collects at the doors, so I puts myself on the same footing as they—that’s moral, and it’s optional, ye know. If I takes a hat round, they has a plate, and they gets sovereigns where we has only browns; but we are thankful for all, and always look for encouragement, and hopes kind support from all classes of society in life.

“Punch has two kind of performances—short shows and long ones, according to denare. Short shows are for cativa denare, and long pitches for the bona denare. At the short shows we gets the ha’pence and steps it—scafare, as we say; and at the long pitches ve keeps it up for half an hour, or an hour, maybe—not particular, if the browns tumble in well—for we never leave off while there’s a major solde (that’s a halfpenny), or even a quartereen (that’s a farden), to be made. The long pitches we fixes at the principal street-corners of London. We never turn away nothink.

“‘Boys, look up your fardens,’ says the outside man; ‘it ain’t half over yet, and we’ll show it all through.’

“Punch is like the income-tax gatherer, takes all we can get, and never turns away nothink—that is our moral. Punch is like the rest of the world, he has got bad morals, but very few of them. The showman inside the frame says, while he’s a working the figures, ‘Culley, how are you a getting on?’ ‘Very inferior indeed, I’m sorry to say, master. The company, though very respectable, seems to have no pence among ’em.’ ‘What quanta denare have you chafered?’ I say. ‘Soldi major quartereen;’ that means, three halfpence three fardens; ‘that is all I have accumulated amongst this most respectable and numerous company.’ ‘Never mind, master, the showman will go on; try the generosity of the public once again.’ ‘Well, I think it’s of very little utility to collect round again, for I’ve met with that poor encouragement.’ ‘Never mind, master, show away. I’ll go round again and chance my luck; the ladies and gentlemen have not seen sufficient, I think. Well, master, I’ve got tres major’—that is, three half-pence—‘more, and now it’s all over this time. Boys, go home and say your prayers,’ we says, and steps it. Such scenes of life we see! No person would hardly credit what we go through. We travel often yeute munjare (no food), and oftentimes we’re in fluence, according as luck runs.

“We now principally dwells on orders at noblemen’s houses. The sebubs of London pays us far better than the busy town of London. When we are dwelling on orders, we goes along the streets chirripping ‘Roo-tooerovey ooey-ooey-ooerovey;’ that means, Any more wanted? that’s the pronounciation of the call in the old Italian style. Toorovey-to-roo-to-roo-toroo-torooey; that we does when we are dwelling for orders mostly at noblemen’s houses. It brings the juvenials to the window, and causes the greatest of attractions to the children of noblemen’s families, both rich and poor: lords, dukes, earls, and squires, and gentlefolks.

“‘Call-hunting,’—that’s another term for dwelling on orders—pays better than pitching; but orders is wery casual, and pitching is a certainty. We’re sure of a brown or two in the streets, and noblemen’s work don’t come often. We must have it authentick, for we travels many days and don’t succeed in getting one; at other times we are more fluent; but when both combine together, it’s merely a living, after all’s said and done, by great exertion and hard perseverance and asidity, for the business gets slacker and slacker every year, and I expect at last it will come to the dogs—not Toby, because he is dead and gone. People isn’t getting tired with our performances; they’re more delighted than ever; but they’re stingier. Everybody looks twice at their money afore they parts with it.—That’s a rub at the mean ones, and they wants it uncommon bad.

“And then, sometimes the blinds is all drawed down, on account of the sun, and that cooks our goose; or, it’s too hot for people to stop and varder—that means, see. In the cold days, when we pitch, people stops a few minutes, drops their browns, and goes away about their business, to make room for more. The spring of the year is the best of the four seasons for us.

“A sailor and a lass half-seas over we like best of all. He will tip his mag. We always ensure a few pence, and sometimes a shilling, of them. We are fond of sweeps, too; they’re a sure brown, if they’ve got one, and they’ll give before many a gentleman. But what we can’t abide nohow is the shabby genteel—them altray cativa, and no mistake: for they’ll stand with their mouths wide open, like a nut-cracker, and is never satisfied, and is too grand even to laugh. It’s too much trouble to carry ha’pence, and they’ve never no change, or else they’d give us some; in fact, they’ve no money at all, they wants it all for, &c.”

Mr. Punch’s Figures.

“This is Punch; this his wife, Judy. They never was married, not for this eight hundred years—in the original drama. It is a drama in two acts, is Punch. There was a Miss Polly, and she was Punch’s mistress, and dressed in silks and satins. Judy catches Punch with her, and that there causes all the disturbance. Ah, it’s a beautiful history; there’s a deal of morals with it, and there’s a large volume wrote about it. It’s to be got now.

“This here is Judy, their only child. She’s three years old come to-morrow, and heir to all his estate, which is only a saucepan without a handle.

“Well, then I brings out the Beadle.

“Punch’s nose is the hornament to his face. It’s a great walue, and the hump on his back is never to be got rid on, being born with him, and never to be done without. Punch was silly and out of his mind—which is in the drama—and the cause of his throwing his child out of winder, vich he did. Judy went out and left him to nurse the child, and the child gets so terrible cross he gets out of patience, and tries to sing a song to it, and ends by chucking it into the street.

“Punch is cunning, and up to all kinds of antics, if he ain’t out of his mind. Artful like. My opinion of Punch is, he’s very incentric, with good and bad morals attached. Very good he was in regard to benevolence; because, you see, in the olden style there was a blind man, and he used to come and ax charity of him, and Punch used to pity him and give him a trifle, you know. This is in the olden style, from Porsini you know.

“The carving on his face is a great art, and there’s only one man as does it reg’lar. His nose and chin, by meeting together, we thinks the great beauty. Oh, he’s admirable!—He was very fond of hisself when he was alive. His name was Punchinello, and we calls him Punch. That’s partly for short and partly on account of the boys, for they calls it Punch in hell O. ‘Oh, there’s Punch in hell,’ they’d say, and gennelfolks don’t like to hear them words.

“Punch has very small legs and small arms. It’s quite out of portion, in course; but still it’s nature, for folks with big bellies generally has thin pins of their own.

“His dress has never been altered; the use of his high hat is to show his half-foolish head, and the other parts is after the best olden fashion.

“Judy, you see, is very ugly. She represents Punch; cos, you see, if the two comes together, it generally happens that they’re summat alike; and you see it’s because his wife were so ugly that he had a mistress. You see, a head like that there wouldn’t please most people.

“The mistress, Polly, dances with Punch, just like a lady in a drawing-room. There ain’t no grievance between him and Judy on account of Miss Polly, as she’s called. That’s the olden style of all, cos Judy don’t know nothing about it.

“Miss Polly was left out because it wasn’t exactly moral; opinions has changed: we ain’t better, I fancy. Such things goes on, but people don’t like to let it be seen now, that’s the difference.

“Judy’s dress, you see, is far different, bless you, than Miss Polly’s. Judy’s, you see, is bed-furniture stuff, and Polly’s all silk and satin. Yes, that’s the way of the world,—the wife comes off second-best.

“The baby’s like his father, he’s his pet all over and the pride of his heart; wouldn’t take all the world for it, you know, though he does throw him out of window. He’s got his father’s nose, and is his daddy all over, from the top of his head to the tip of his toe. He never was weaned.

“Punch, you know, is so red through drink. He’d look nothing if his nose were not deep scarlet. Punch used to drink hard one time, and so he does now if he can get it. His babby is red all the same, to correspond.

“This is the Beadle of the parish, which tries to quell all disturbances but finds it impossible to do it. The Beadle has got a very reddish nose. He is a very severe, harsh man, but Punch conquers him. Ye see, he’s dressed in the olden style—a brown coat, with gold lace and cock’d hat and all. He has to take Punch up for killing his wife and babby; but Punch beats the Beadle, for every time he comes up he knocks him down.

“This next one is the merry Clown, what tries his rig with Punch, up and down—that’s a rhyme, you see. This is the merry Clown, that tries his tricks all round. This here’s the new style, for we dwells more on the comical now. In the olden time we used to have a scaramouch with a chalk head. He used to torment Punch and dodge him about, till at last Punch used to give him a crack on the head and smash it all to pieces, and then cry out—‘Oh dear, Oh dear; I didn’t go to do it—it was an accident, done on purpose.’ But now we do with Clown and the sausages. Scaramouch never talked, only did the ballet business, dumb motions; but the Clown speaks theatrical, comic business and sentimental. Punch being silly and out of his mind, the Clown persuades Punch that he wants something to eat. The Clown gets into the public-house to try what he can steal. He pokes his head out of the window and says, ‘Here you are, here you are;’ and then he asks Punch to give him a helping hand, and so makes Punch steal the sausages. They’re the very best pork-wadding sausages, made six years ago and warranted fresh, and ’ll keep for ever.

“This here’s the poker, about which the Clown says, ‘Would you like something hot?’ Punch says ‘Yes,’ and then the Clown burns Punch’s nose, and sits down on it himself and burns his breeches. Oh, it’s a jolly lark when I shows it. Clown says to Punch, ‘Don’t make a noise, you’ll wake the landlord up.’ The landlord, you see, pretends to be asleep.

“Clown says, ‘You mustn’t hollar.’ ‘No,’ says Punch, ‘I wont;’ and still he hollars all the louder.

“This is Jim Crow: ye see he’s got a chain but he’s lost his watch. He let it fall on Fish-street Hill, the other day, and broke it all to pieces. He’s a nigger. He says, ‘Me like ebery body;’ not ‘every,’ but ‘ebery,’ cos that’s nigger. Instead of Jim Crow we used formerly to show the Grand Turk of Sinoa, called Shallaballah. Sinoa is nowhere, for he’s only a substance yer know. I can’t find Sinoa, although I’ve tried, and thinks it’s at the bottom of the sea where the black fish lays.

“Jim Crow sprung from Rice from America, he brought it over here. Then, ye see, being a novelty, all classes of society is pleased. Everybody liked to hear ‘Jim Crow’ sung, and so we had to do it. The people used to stand round, and I used to take some good money with it too, sir, on Hay-hill. Everybody’s funny now-a-days, and they like comic business. They won’t listen to anything sensible or sentimental, but they wants foolishness. The bigger fool gets the most money. Many people says, ‘What a fool, you must look!’ at that I put my head back. ‘Come on.’ ‘I shan’t. I shall stop a little longer.’

“This is the Ghost, that appears to Punch for destroying his wife and child. She’s the ghost of the two together, or else, by rights, there ought to be a little ghost as well, but we should have such a lot to carry about. But Punch, being surprised at the ghost, falls into exstericks—represented as such. Punch is really terrified, for he trembles like a haspen leaf, cos he never killed his wife. He’s got no eyes and no teeth, and can’t see out of his mouth; or cannot, rather. Them cant words ain’t grammatical. When Punch sees the Ghost he lays down and kicks the bucket, and represents he’s dead.

“The Ghost is very effective, when it comes up very solemn and mournful-like in Romeau and Juliet. I took it from that, yer know: there’s a ghost in that when she comes out of the grave. Punch sits down on his seat and sings his merry song of olden times, and don’t see the Ghost till he gets a tap on the cheek, and then he thinks it’s somebody else; instead of that, when he turns round, he’s most terrible alarmed, putting his arms up and out. The drum goes very shaky when the Ghost comes up. A little bit of ‘The Dead March in Saul,’ or ‘Home, sweet Home:’ anything like that, slow. We none on us likes to be hurried to the grave.

“I now takes up the Doctor. This is the Doctor that cures all sick maids and says, ‘Taste of my drugs before you die, you’ll say they are well made.’ The Doctor always wears a white ermine wig: rabbit skin wouldn’t do, we can’t go so common as that; it’s most costly, cos it was made for him.

“After the Ghost has appeared Punch falls down, and calls loudly for the Doctor, and offers 50,000l. for one; then the Doctor feels his pulse and says, ‘Very unfortunate misfortune! I have forgot my spectacles, cos I never had none. I can see all through it—the man’s not dead.’

“The Doctor gives Punch physic. That’s stick-lickerish wot he subscribes for him; but Punch don’t like it, though it’s a capital subscription for a cure for the head-ache. (I dare say, Mr. Mayhew, sir, you thinks me a very funny fellow.) Punch tries to pay the Doctor back with his own physic, but he misses him every time. Doctors don’t like to take their own stuff anyhow.

“This is the Publican as Punch steals the sausages from; he used to be the Grand Turk of Senoa, or Shallaballah, afore the fashion changed—for a new world always wants new things: the people are like babies, they must have a fresh toy ye know, and every day is a new day that we never seed before.—There’s a moral for you; it’ll make a beautiful book when you comes to have the morals explained. Ye see you might still fancy Punch was the Grand Turk, for he’s got his moustaches still; but they’re getting so fashionable that even the publicans wears ’em, so it don’t matter.

“This tall figure is the hangman and finisher of the law, as does the business in the twinkling of a bed-post. He’s like the income-tax gatherer, he takes all in and lets none out, for a guilty conscience needs no accusing. Punch being condemned to suffer by the laws of his country, makes a mistake for once in his life, and always did, and always will keep a-doing it. Therefore, by cunningness and artfulness, Punch persuades Jack Ketch to show him the way—which he very ‘willingly doeth’—to slip his head into the noose, when Punch takes the opportunity to pull the rope, after he has shown him the way, and is exempt for once more, and quite free.

“Now this is the coffin, and this is the pall. Punch is in a great way, after he’s hung the man, for assistance, when he calls his favourite friend Joey Grimaldi, the clown, to aid and assist him, because he’s afeard that he’ll be taken for the crime wot he’s committed. Then the body is placed in the coffin; but as the undertaker ain’t made it long enough, they have to double him up. The undertaker requests permission to git it altered. Ye see it’s a royal coffin, with gold, and silver, and copper nails; with no plates, and scarlet cloth, cos that’s royalty. The undertaker’s forgot the lid of the coffin, ye see: we don’t use lids, cos it makes them lighter to carry.

“This is the pall that covers him over, to keep the flies from biting him. We call it St. Paul’s. Don’t you see, palls and Paul’s is the same word, with a s to it: it’s comic. That ’ud make a beautiful play, that would. Then we take out the figures, as I am doing now, from the box, and they exaunt with a dance. ‘Here’s somebody a-coming, make haste!’ the Clown says, and then they exaunt, you know, or go off.

“This here is the Scaramouch that dances without a head, and yet has got a head that’ll reach from here to St. Paul’s; but it’s scarcely ever to be seen. Cos his father was my mother, don’t ye see. Punch says that it’s a beautiful figure. I’ve only made it lately. Instead of him we used to have a nobody. The figure is to be worked with four heads, that’s to say one coming out of each arm, one from the body, and one from the neck. (He touches each part as he speaks.) Scaramouch is old-fashioned newly revived. He comes up for a finish, yer know. This figure’s all for dancing, the same as the ghost is, and don’t say nothing. Punch being surprised to see such a thing, don’t know what to make on it. He bolts away, for ye see (whispering and putting up two hands first, and then using the other, as if working Scaramouch), I wants my two hands to work him. After Punch goes away the figure dances to amuse the public, then he exaunts, and Punch comes up again for to finish the remainder part of his performance. He sings as if he’d forgot all that’s gone before, and wishes only to amuse the public at large. That’s to show his silliness and simplicity. He sings comic or sentimental, such as ‘God save the Queen;’—that’s sentimental; or ‘Getting up stairs and playing on the fiddle;’ or ‘Dusty Bob;’ or ‘Rory O’More, with the chill off;’—them’s all comic, but ‘the Queen’s’ sentimental.

“This here is Satan,—we might say the devil, but that ain’t right, and gennelfolks don’t like such words. He is now commonly called ‘Spring-heeled Jack;’ or the ‘Roosian Bear,’—that’s since the war. Ye see he’s chained up for ever; for if yer reads, it says somewhere in the Scripture that he’s bound down for two thousand years. I used to read it myself once; and the figure shows ye that he’s chained up never to be let loose no more. He comes up at the last and shows himself to Punch, but it ain’t continued long, yer know, the figure being too frightful for people to see without being frightened; unless we are on comic business and showing him as Spring-heeled Jack, or the Roosian Bear; and then we keeps him up a long time. Punch kills him, puts him on the top of his stick, and cries, ‘Hooray! the devil’s dead, and we can all do as we like! Good-by, farewell, and it’s all over!’ But the curtain don’t come down, cos we haven’t got none.

“This here’s the bell. Stop a minute, I forgot: this is Punch’s comic music, commonly called a peanner sixty,—not peanner forty, cos Punch wants something out of the common way,—and it plays fifty tunes all at once. This is the bell which he uses to rattle in the publican’s ears when he’s asleep, and wakes his children all up after the nuss as put ’em to bed. All this is to show his foolishness and simplicity; for it’s one of his foolish tricks and frolics for to amuse himself: but he’s a chap as won’t stand much nonsense from other people, because his morals are true, just, right, and sound; although he does kill his wife and baby, knock down the Beadle, Jack Ketch, and the Grand Signor, and puts an end to the very devil himself.”

Description of Frame and Proscenium.

“‘Ladies and gents,’ the man says outside the show, afore striking up, ‘I’m now going to exhibit a preformance worthy of your notice, and far superior to anythink you hever had a hopportunity of witnessing of before.’ (I am a doing it now, sir, as if I was addressing a company of ladies and gentlemen, he added, by way of parenthesis.) ‘This is the original preformance of Punch, ladies and gents; and it will always gain esteem. I am going to hintroduce a preformance worthy of your notice, which is the dramatical preformance of the original and old-established preformance of Punch, experienced many year. I merely call your attention, ladies and gents, to the novel attraction which I’m now about to hintroduce to you.

“‘I only merely place this happyratus up to inform you what I am about to preform to you. The preformance will continue for upwards of one hour—provising as we meets with sufficient encouragement. (That’s business, ye know, master; just to give ’em to understand that we wants a little assistance afore we begins.) It will surpass anythink you’ve had the hopportunity of witnessing of before in all the hannuals of history. I hope, ladies and gents, I am not talking too grammatical for some of you.’

“That there is the address, sir,” he continued, “what I always gives to the audience outside before I begins to preform—just to let the respectable company know that I am a working for to get my living by honest industry.

“‘Those ladies and gents,’ he then went on, as if addressing an imaginary crowd, ‘what are a-standing round, a-looking at the preformance, will, I hope, be as willing to give as they is to see. There’s many a lady and gent now at the present moment standing around me, perhaps, whose hearts might be good though not in their power.’ (This is Punch’s patter, yer know, outside; and when you has to say all that yourself, you wants the affluency of a methodist parson to do the talk, I can tell ye.) ‘Now boys, look up yer ha’pence! Who’s got a farden or a ha’penny? and I’ll be the first brown towards it. I ain’t particular if it’s a half-crown. Now, my lads, feel in your pockets and see if you’ve got an odd copper. Here’s one, and who’ll be the next to make it even? We means to show it all through, provising we meets with sufficient encouragement.’ (I always sticks to them words, ‘sufficient encouragement.’) ‘You’ll have the pleasure of seeing Spring-heeled Jack, or the Roosian Bear, and the comical scene with Joey the clown, and the fryingpan of sassages!’ (That’s a kind of gaggery.)

“I’ll now just explain to you, sir, the different parts of the frame. This here’s the letter-cloth, which shows you all what we performs. Sometimes we has wrote on it—

THE DOMINION OF FANCY,
or,
Punch’s Opera:

that fills up a letter-cloth; and Punch is a fancy for every person, you know, whoever may fancy it. I stands inside here on this footboard; and if there’s any one up at the winders in the street, I puts my foot longways, so as to keep my nob out of sight. This here is the stage front, or proceedings (proscenium), and is painted over with flags and banners, or any different things. Sometimes there’s George and the Dragging, and the Rile Queen’s Arms, (we can have them up when we like, cos we are sanctioned, and I’ve played afore the rile princes). But anything for freshness. People’s tired of looking at the Rile Arms, and wants something new to cause attraction, and so on.

“This here’s the playboard, where sits Punch. The scenes behind are representing a garding scene, and the side-scenes is a house and a cottage—they’re for the exaunts, you know, just for convenience. The back scene draws up, and shows the prison, with the winders all cut out, and the bars showing, the same as there is to a gaol; though I never was in one in my life, and I’ll take good care I never shall be.

“Our speaking instrument is an unknown secret, cos it’s an ‘unknown tongue,’ that’s known to none except those in our own purfession. It’s a hinstrument like this which I has in my hand, and it’s tuned to music. We has two or three kinds, one for out-doors, one for in-doors, one for speaking, one for singing, and one that’s good for nothing, except selling on the cheap. They ain’t whistles, but ‘calls,’ or ‘unknown tongues;’ and with them in the mouth we can pronounce each word as plain as a parson, and with as much affluency.

“The great difficulty in preforming Punch consists in speaking with this call in the mouth—cos it’s produced from the lungs: it’s all done from there, and is a great strain, and requires sucktion—and that’s brandy-and-water, or summat to moisten the whistle with.

“We’re bound not to drink water by our purfession, when we can get anything stronger. It weakens the nerves, but we always like to keep in the bounds of propriety, respectability, and decency. I drinks my beer with my call in my mouth, and never takes it out, cos it exposes it, and the boys (hang ’em!) is so inquisitive. They runs after us, and looks up in our face to see how we speaks; but we drives ’em away with civility.

“Punch is a dramatical performance, sir, in two acts, patronised by the nobility and gentry at large. We don’t drop the scene at the end of the first act, the drum and pipes strikes up instead. The first act we consider to end with Punch being took to prison for the murder of his wife and baby. You can pick out a good many Punch preformers, without getting one so well versed as I am in it; they in general makes such a muffing concern of it. A drama, or dramatical preformance, we calls it, of the original preformance of Punch. It ain’t a tragedy; it’s both comic and sentimental, in which way we think proper to preform it. There’s comic parts, as with the Clown and Jim Crow, and cetera—that’s including a deal more, yer know.

“It’s a pretty play Punch is, when preformed well, and one of the greatest novelties in the world; and most ancient; handed down, too, for many hundred years.

“The prison scene and the baby is what we calls the sentimental touches. Some folks where I preforms will have it most sentimental, in the original style. Them families is generally sentimental theirselves. To these sentimental folks I’m obliged to preform werry steady and werry slow; they won’t have no ghost, no coffin, and no devil; and that’s what I call spiling the preformance entirely. Ha, ha!” he added, with a deep sigh, “it’s the march of intellect that’s a doing all this: it is, sir.

“Other folks is all for the comic, specially the street people; and then we has to dwell on the bell scene, and the nursing the baby, and the frying-pan, and the sassages, and Jim Crow.

“A few years ago Toby was all the go. Formerly the dog was only a stuffed figure, and it was Mr. Pike what first hit upon introducing a live animal; and a great hit it war. It made a surprising alteration in the exhibition, for till lately the preformance was called Punch and Toby as well. We used to go about the streets with three dogs, and that was admirable, and it did uncommon well as a new novelty at first, but we can’t get three dogs to do it now. The mother of them dogs, ye see, was a singer, and had two pups what was singers too. Toby was wanted to sing and smoke a pipe as well, shake hands as well as seize Punch by the nose. When Toby was quiet, ye see, sir, it was the timidation of Punch’s stick, for directly he put it down he flew at him, knowing at the same time that Punch was not his master.

“Punch commences with a song. He does roo-too-rooey, and sings the ‘Lass of Gowrie’ down below, and then he comes up, saying, ‘Ooy-ey; Oh, yes, I’m a coming. How do you do, ladies and gents?’—ladies always first; and then he bows many times. ‘I’m so happy to see you,’ he says; ‘Your most obedient, most humble, and dutiful servant, Mr. Punch.’ (Ye see I can talk as affluent as can be with the call in my mouth.) ‘Ooy-ey, I wishes you all well and happy.’ Then Punch says to the drum-and-pipes man, as he puts his hand out, ‘How do you do, master?—play up; play up a hornpipe: I’m a most hexcellent dancer;’ and then Punch dances. Then ye see him a-dancing the hornpipe; and after that Punch says to the pipes, ‘Master, I shall call my wife up, and have a dance;’ so he sings out, ‘Judy, Judy! my pratty creetur! come up stairs, my darling! I want to speak to you’—and he knocks on the play-board.—‘Judy! Here she comes, bless her little heart!’

Enter Judy.

Punch. What a sweet creature! what a handsome nose and chin! (He pats her on the face very gently.)

Judy. (Slapping him.) Keep quiet, do!

Punch. Don’t be cross, my dear, but give me a kiss.

Judy. Oh, to be sure, my love. [They kiss.

Punch. Bless your sweet lips! (Hugging her.) This is melting moments. I’m very fond of my wife; we must have a dance.

Judy. Agreed. [They both dance.

Punch. Get out of the way! you don’t dance well enough for me. (He hits her on the nose.) Go and fetch the baby, and mind and take care of it, and not hurt it. [Judy exaunts.

Judy. (Returning back with baby.) Take care of the baby, while I go and cook the dumplings.

Punch. (Striking Judy with his right hand.) Get out of the way! I’ll take care of the baby. [Judy exaunts.

Punch (sits down and sings to the baby)—

“Hush-a-by, baby, upon the tree-top,

When the wind blows the cradle will rock;

When the bough breaks the cradle will fall,

Down comes the baby and cradle and all.”

[Baby cries.

Punch. (Shaking it.) What a cross boy! (He lays it down on the play-board, and rolls it backwards and forwards, to rock it to sleep, and sings again.)

“Oh, slumber, my darling, thy sire is a knight,

Thy mother’s a lady so lovely and bright;

The hills and the dales, and the tow’rs which you see,

They all shall belong, my dear creature, to thee.”

(Punch continues rocking the child. It still cries, and he takes it up in his arms, saying, What a cross child! I can’t a-bear cross children. Then he vehemently shakes it, and knocks its head up against the side of the proceedings several times, representing to kill it, and he then throws it out of the winder.)

Enter Judy.

Judy. Where’s the baby?

Punch. (In a lemoncholy tone.) I have had a misfortune; the child was so terrible cross, I throwed it out of the winder. (Lemontation of Judy for the loss of her dear child. She goes into asterisks, and then excites and fetches a cudgel, and commences beating Punch over the head.)

Punch. Don’t be cross, my dear: I didn’t go to do it.

Judy. I’ll pay yer for throwing the child out of the winder. (She keeps on giving him knocks of the head, but Punch snatches the stick away, and commences an attack upon his wife, and beats her severely.)

Judy. I’ll go to the constable, and have you locked up.

Punch. Go to the devil. I don’t care where you go. Get out of the way! (Judy exaunts, and Punch then sings, “Cherry ripe,” or “Cheer, boys, cheer.” All before is sentimental, now this here’s comic. Punch goes through his roo-too-to-rooey, and then the Beadle comes up.)

Beadle. Hi! hallo, my boy!

Punch. Hello, my boy. (He gives him a wipe over the head with his stick, which knocks him down, but he gets up again.)

Beadle. Do you know, sir, that I’ve a special order in my pocket to take you up?

Punch. And I’ve a special order to knock you down. (He knocks him down with simplicity, but not with brutality, for the juvenial branches don’t like to see severity practised.)

Beadle. (Coming up again.) D’ye know, my boy, that I’ve an order to take you up?

Punch. And I’ve an order I tell ye to knock you down. (He sticks him. Punch is a tyrant to the Beadle, ye know, and if he was took up he wouldn’t go through his rambles, so in course he isn’t.)

Beadle. I’ve a warrant for you, my boy.

Punch. (Striking him.) And that’s a warrant for you, my boy. (The Beadle’s a determined man, ye know, and resolved to go to the ends of justice as far as possible in his power by special authority, so a quarrel enshoos between them.)

Beadle. You are a blackguard.

Punch. So are you.

(The Beadle hits Punch on the nose, and takes the law in his own hands. Punch takes it up momentary; strikes the Beadle, and a fight enshoos. The Beadle, faint and exhausted, gets up once more; then he strikes Punch over the nose, which is returned pro and con.)

Beadle. That’s a good ’un.

Punch. That’s a better.

Beadle. That’s a topper. (He hits him jolly hard.)

Punch. (With his cudgel.) That’s a wopper. (He knocks him out of his senses, and the Beadle exaunts.)

Enter Merry Clown.

Punch sings “Getting up Stairs,” in quick time, while the Clown is coming up. Clown dances round Punch in all directions, and Punch with his cudgel is determined to catch him if possible.

Clown. No bono, allez tooti sweet, Mounseer. Look out sharp! Make haste! catch ’em alive! Here we are! how are you? good morning! don’t you wish you may get it? Ah! coward, strike a white man! (Clown keeps bobbing up and down, and Punch trying to hit all the time till Punch is exhausted nearly.)

(The Clown, ye see, sir, is the best friend to Punch, he carries him through all his tricks, and he’s a great favorite of Punch’s. He’s too cunning for him though, and knows too much for him, so they both shake hands and make it up.)

Clown. Now it’s all fair; ain’t it, Punch?

Punch. Yes.

Clown. Now I can begin again.

(You see, sir, the Clown gets over Punch altogether by his artful ways, and then he begins the same tricks over again; that is, if we wants a long performance; if not, we cuts it off at the other pint. But I’m telling you the real original style, sir.)

Clown. Good! you can’t catch me.

(Punch gives him one whack of the head, and Clown exaunts, or goes off.)

Enter Jim Crow.

Jim sings “Buffalo Gals,” while coming up, and on entering Punch hits him a whack of the nose backhanded, and almost breaks it.

Jim. What for you do that? Me nigger! me like de white man. Him did break my nose.

Punch. Humbly beg your pardon, I did not go to help it.

(For as it had been done, you know, it wasn’t likely he could help it after he’d done it—he couldn’t take it away from him again, could he?)

Jim. Me beg you de pardon. (For ye see, sir, he thinks he’s offended Punch.) Nebber mind, Punch, come and sit down, and we’ll hab a song.

Jim Crow prepares to sing.

Punch. Bravo, Jimmy! sing away, my boy—give us a stunner while you’re at it.

Jim sings.

“I’m a roarer on the fiddle,

Down in the ole Virginny;

And I plays it scientific,

Like Master Paganinni.”

Punch. (Tapping him on the head.) Bravo! well done, Jimmy! give us another bit of a song.

Jim. Yes, me will. [Sings again.

“Oh, lubly Rosa, Sambo come;

Don’t you hear the banjo?

Tum, tum, tum!”

Jim hits Punch with his head over the nose, as if butting at him, while he repeats tum-tum-tum. Punch offended, beats him with the stick, and sings—

“Lubly Rosa, Sambo come;

Don’t you hear the banjo?

Tum, tum, tum!”

Jim. (Rising.) Oh mi! what for you strike a nigger? (Holding up his leg.) Me will poke your eye out. Ready—shoot—bang—fire. (Shoves his leg into Punch’s eye.)

Punch. He’s poked my eye out! I’ll look out for him for the future.

Jim Crow excites, or exaunts. Exaunt we calls it in our purfession, sir,—that’s going away, you know. He’s done his part, you know, and ain’t to appear again.

Judy has died through Punch’s ill usage after going for the Beadle, for if she’d done so before she could’nt ha’ fetched the constable, you know,—certainly not. The beholders only believe her to be dead though, for she comes to life again afterwards, because, if she was dead, it would do away with Punch’s wife altogether—for Punch is doatingly fond of her, though it’s only his fun after all’s said and done.

The Ghost, you see, is only a repersentation, as a timidation to soften his bad morals, so that he shouldn’t do the like again. The Ghost, to be sure, shows that she’s really dead for a time, but it’s not in the imitation; for if it was, Judy’s ghost (the figure) would be made like her.

The babby’s lost altogether. It’s killed. It is supposed to be destroyed entirely, but taken care of for the next time when called upon to preform—as if it were in the next world, you know,—that’s moral.

Enter Ghost. Punch sings meanwhile ‘Home, sweet Home.’ (This is original.) The Ghost repersents the ghost of Judy, because he’s killed his wife, don’t you see, the Ghost making her appearance; but Punch don’t know it at the moment. Still he sits down tired, and sings in the corner of the frame the song of “Home, sweet Home,” while the Sperrit appears to him.

Punch turns round, sees the Ghost, and is most terribly timidated. He begins to shiver and shake in great fear, bringing his guilty conscience to his mind of what he’s been guilty of doing, and at last he falls down in a fit of frenzy. Kicking, screeching, hollering, and shouting “Fifty thousand pounds for a doctor!” Then he turns on his side, and draws hisself double with the screwmatics in his gills. [Ghost excites.

Enter Doctor.

Punch is represented to be dead. This is the dying speech of Punch.

Doctor. Dear me! bless my heart! here have I been running as fast as ever I could walk, and very near tumbled over a straw. I heard somebody call most lustily for a doctor. Dear me (looking at Punch in all directions, and examining his body), this is my pertickler friend Mr. Punch; poor man! how pale he looks! I’ll feel his pulse (counts his pulse)—1, 2, 14, 9, 11. Hi! Punch, Punch, are you dead? are you dead? are you dead?

Punch. (Hitting him with his right hand over the nose, and knocking him back.) Yes.

Doctor. (Rubbing his nose with his hand.) I never heard a dead man speak before. Punch, you are not dead!

Punch. Oh, yes I am.

Doctor. How long have you been dead?

Punch. About six weeks.

Doctor. Oh, you’re not dead, you’re only poorly; I must fetch you a little reviving medicine, such as some stick-lickrish and balsam, and extract of shillalagh.

Punch. (Rising.) Make haste—(he gives the Doctor a wipe on the nose)—make haste and fetch it. [Doctor exaunts.

Punch. The Doctor going to get me some physic! I’m very fond of brandy-and-water, and rum-punch. I want my physic; the Doctor never brought me no physic at all. I wasn’t ill; it was only my fun. (Doctor reappears with the physic-stick, and he whacks Punch over the head no harder than he is able, and cries—)“There’s physic! physic! physic! physic! physic! pills! balsaam! stick-lickerish!”

Punch. (Rising and rubbing his head against the wing.) Yes; it is stick-lickrish.

(Ah! it’s a pretty play, sir, when it’s showed well—that it is—it’s delightful to read the morals; I am wery fond of reading the morals, I am.)

Punch. (Taking the stick from the Doctor.) Now, I’ll give you physic! physic! physic! (He strikes at the Doctor, but misses him every time.) The Doctor don’t like his own stuff.

Punch. (Presenting his stick, gun-fashion, at Doctor’s head.) I’ll shoot ye—one, two, three.

Doctor. (Closing with Punch.) Come to gaol along with me.

(He saves his own life by closing with Punch. He’s a desperate character is Punch, though he means no harm, ye know.) A struggle enshoos, and the Doctor calls for help, Punch being too powerful for him.

Doctor. Come to gaol! You shall repent for all your past misdeeds. Help! assistance! help, in the Queen’s name!

(He’s acting as a constable, the Doctor is, though he’s no business to do it; but he’s acting in self-defence. He didn’t know Punch, but he’d heard of his transactions, and when he came to examine him, he found it was the man. The Doctor is a very sedate kind of a person, and wishes to do good to all classes of the community at large, especially with his physic, which he gives gratis for nothink at all. The physic is called ‘Head-e-cologne, or a sure cure for the head-ache.’)

Re-enter Beadle. (Punch and the Doctor still struggling together.)

Beadle. (Closing with them.) Hi, hi! this is him; behold the head of a traitor! Come along! come to gaol!

Punch. (A-kicking.) I will not go.

Beadle. (Shouting.) More help! more help! more help! help! help! Come along to gaol! come along! come along! More help! more help!

(Oh! it’s a good lark just here, sir, but tremendous hard work, for there’s so many figures to work—and all struggling, too,—and you have to work them all at once. This is comic, this is.)

Beadle. More help! be quick! be quick!

Re-enter Jim Crow.

Jim Crow. Come de long! come de long! come de long! me nigger, and you beata me.

[Exaunts all, Punch still singing out, “I’ll not go.”

END OF FIRST ACT.

Change of Scene for Second Act.

Scene draws up, and discovers the exterior of a prison, with Punch peeping through the bars, and singing a merry song of the merry bells of England, all of the olden time. (That’s an olden song, you know; it’s old ancient, and it’s a moral,—a moral song, you know, to show that Punch is repenting, but pleased, and yet don’t care nothink at all about it, for he’s frolicsome, and on the height of his frolic and amusement to all the juveniles, old and young, rich and poor. We must put all classes together.)

Enter Hangman Jack Ketch, or Mr. Graball.

(That’s Jack Ketch’s name, you know; he takes all, when they gets in his clutches. We mustn’t blame him for he must do his duty, for the sheriffs is so close to him.)

[Preparation commences for the execution of Punch. Punch is still looking through the bars of Newgate.

The last scene as I had was Temple-bar Scene; it was a prison once, ye know; that’s the old ancient, ye know, but I never let the others see it, cos it shouldn’t become too public. But I think Newgate is better, in the new edition, though the prison is suspended, it being rather too terrific for the beholder. It was the old ancient style; the sentence is passed upon him, but by whom not known; he’s not tried by one person, cos nobody can’t.

Jack Ketch. Now, Mr. Punch, you are going to be executed by the British and Foreign laws of this and other countries, and you are to be hung up by the neck until you are dead—dead—dead.

Punch. What, am I to die three times?

Jack. No, no; you’re only to die once.

Punch. How is that? you said I was to be hung up by the neck till I was dead—dead—dead? You can’t die three times.

Jack. Oh, no; only once.

Punch. Why, you said dead—dead—dead.

Jack. Yes; and when you are dead—dead—dead—you will be quite dead.

Punch. Oh! I never knowed that before.

Jack. Now, prepare yourself for execution.

Punch. What for?

Jack. For killing your wife, throwing your poor dear little innocent baby out of the window, and striking the Beadle unmercifully over the head with a mop-stick. Come on.

[Exaunt Hangman behind Scene, and re-enter, leading Punch slowly forth to the foot of the gallows. Punch comes most willingly, having no sense.

Jack. Now, my boy, here is the corfin, here is the gibbet, and here is the pall.

Punch. There’s the corfee-shop, there’s giblets, and there’s St. Paul’s.

Jack. Get out, young foolish! Now then, place your head in here.

Punch. What, up here?

Jack. No; a little lower down.

(There’s quick business in this, you know; this is comic—a little comic business, this is.)

Punch. (Dodging the noose.) What, here?

Jack. No, no; in there (showing the noose again).

Punch. This way?

Jack. No, a little more this way; in there.

[Punch falls down, and pretends he’s dead.

Jack. Get up, you’re not dead.

Punch. Oh, yes I am.

Jack. But I say, no.

Punch. Please, sir, (bowing to the hangman)—(Here he’s an hypocrite; he wants to exempt himself,)—do show me the way, for I never was hung before, and I don’t know the way. Please, sir, to show me the way, and I’ll feel extremely obliged to you, and return you my most sincere thanks.

(Now, that’s well worded, sir; it’s well put together; that’s my beauty, that is; I am obliged to study my language, and not have any thing vulgar whatsoever. All in simplicity, so that the young children may not be taught anything wrong. There arn’t nothing to be learnt from it, because of its simplicity.)

Jack. Very well; as you’re so kind and condescending, I will certainly oblige you by showing you the way. Here, my boy! now, place your head in here, like this (hangman putting his head in noose); this is the right and the proper way; now, you see the rope is placed under my chin; I’ll take my head out, and I will place yours in (that’s a rhyme) and when your head is in the rope, you must turn round to the ladies and gentlemen, and say—Good-by; fare you well.

(Very slowly then—a stop between each of the words; for that’s not driving the people out of the world in quick haste without giving ’em time for repentance. That’s another moral, yer see. Oh, I like all the morals to it.)

Punch (quickly pulling the rope). Good-by; fare you well. (Hangs the hangman.) (What a hypocrite he is again, yer see, for directly he’s done it he says: ‘Now, I’m free again for frolic and fun;’ calls Joey, the clown, his old friend, because they’re both full of tricks and antics: ‘Joey, here’s a man hung hisself;’—that’s his hypocrisy again, yer see, for he tries to get exempt after he’s done it hisself.)

Enter Clown, in quick haste, bobbing up against the gallows.

Clown. Dear me, I’ve run against a milk-post! Why, dear Mr. Punch, you’ve hung a man! do take him down! How came you to do it?

Punch. He got wet through, and I hung him up to dry.

Clown. Dear me! why you’ve hung him up till he’s dried quite dead!

Punch. Poor fellow! then he won’t catch cold with the wet. Let’s put him in this snuff-box. [Pointing to coffin.

[Joey takes the figure down and gives it to Punch to hold, so as the body do not run away, and then proceeds to remove the gallows. In doing so he by accident hits Punch on the nose.

Punch. Mind what you are about! (for Punch is game, yer know, right through to the back-bone.)

Clown. Make haste, Punch, here’s somebody a-coming! (They hustle his legs and feet in; but they can’t get his head in, the undertaker not having made the coffin large enough.)

Punch. We’d better double him up, place the pall on, and take the man to the brave,—not the grave, but the brave: cos he’s been a brave man in his time may be.—Sings the song of ‘Bobbing around,’ while with the coffin he bobs Joey on the head, and exaunt.

Re-enter Punch.

Punch. That was a jolly lark, wasn’t it? Sings,—

“I’d be a butterfly, born in a bower,

Making apple-dumplings without any flour.”

All this wit must have been born in me, or nearly so; but I got a good lot of it from Porsini and Pike—and gleanings, you know. [Punch disappears and re-enters with bell.

Punch. This is my pianner-sixty: it plays fifty tunes all at one time.

[Goes to the landlord of the public-house painted on the side-scene, or cottage, represented as a tavern or hotel. The children of the publican are all a-bed. Punch plays up a tune and solicits for money.

Landlord wakes up in a passion through the terrible noise; pokes his head out of window and tells him to go away.

(There’s a little window, and a little door to this side-scene.) If they was to play it all through, as you’re a writing, it ’ud open Drury-lane Theatre.

Punch. Go away? Yes, play away! Oh, you means, O’er the hills and far away. (He misunderstands him, wilfully, the hypocrite.) [Punch keeps on ringing his bell violently. Publican, in a violent passion, opens the door, and pushes him away, saying, “Be off with you!”]

Punch. I will not. (Hits him over the head with the bell.) You’re no judge of music. (Plays away.)

Publican exaunts to fetch cudgel to pay him out. Punch no sooner sees cudgel than he exaunts, taking his musical instrument with him. It’s far superior to anything of the kind you did ever see, except ‘seldom.’ You know it’s silver, and that’s what we says ‘seldom;’ silver, you know, is ‘seldom,’ because it’s seldom you sees it.

Publican comes out of his house with his cudgel to catch old Punch on the grand hop. Must have a little comic.

Punch returns again with his bell, while publican is hiding secretly for to catch him. Publican pretends, as he stands in a corner, to be fast asleep, but keeps his eyes wide awake all the while, and says, ‘If he comes up here, I’ll be one upon his tibby.’

Punch comes out from behind the opposite side, and rings his bell violently. Publican makes a blow at him with his cudgel, and misses, saying, “How dare you intrude upon my premises with that nasty, noisy bell?”

Punch, while publican is watching at this side-scene, appears over at the other, with a hartful dodge, and again rings his bell loudly, and again the publican misses him; and while publican is watching at this side-scene, Punch re-enters, and draws up to him very slowly, and restes his pianner-sixty on the board, while he slowly advances to him, and gives him a whack on the head with his fist. Punch then disappears, leaving his bell behind, and the landlord in pursession of his music.

Landlord (collaring the bell). Smuggings! pursession is nine points of the law! So this bell is mine, (guarding over it with a stick). Smuggings! this is mine, and when he comes up to take this bell away, I shall have him. Smuggings! it’s mine.

Punch re-enters very slowly behind the publican as he is watching the bell, and snatching up the bell, cries out, ‘That’s mine,’ and exaunts with it.

Publican. Dear me! never mind; I look after him; I shall catch him some day or other. (Hits his nose up against the post as he is going away.) (That’s comic.) Oh, my nose! never mind, I’ll have him again some time. [Excite Publican.

Clown re-enters with Punch.

Clown. Oh, Punch, how are you?

Punch. I’m very glad to see you. Oh, Joey, my friend, how do you do?

Clown. Here, Punch, are you a mind for a lark? (Peeping in at the cottage window, represented as a public-house.) Are you hungry, Punch? would you like something to eat?

Punch. Yes.

Clown. What would you like?

Punch. Not peculiar.

(Not particular, he means, you know; that’s a slip word.)

Clown. I’ll go up into the landlord, and see if he’s got anything to eat. (Exaunt into cottage, and poking his head of the window.) Here, Punch; here’s the landlord fast asleep in the kitchen cellar; here’s a lot of sausages hanging up here.

(Joey’s a-thieving; don’t you see, he’s a robbing the landlord now?)

Would you like some for supper, eh, Punch?

Punch. Yes, to be sure.

Clown. Don’t make a noise; you’ll wake the landlord.

Punch (whispering as loud as he can bawl through the window). Hand ’em out here. (Punch pulls them out of the window.)

Clown. What are we to fry them in? I’ll go and see if I can find a fryingpan.

[Exaunt from window, and re-appears with fryingpan, which he hands out of window for Punch to cook sausages in, and then disappears for a moment; after which he returns, and says, with his head out of window, ‘Would you like something hot, Punch?’

Punch. Yes, to be sure.

(Punch is up to everything. He’s a helping him to rob the publican. One’s as much in the mud as the other is in the mire.)

Clown. (Thrusting red-hot poker out of window.) Here, lay hold—Here’s a lark—Make haste—Here’s the landlord a coming. (Rubs Punch with it over the nose.)

Punch. Oh my nose!—that is a hot ’un. [Takes poker.

Clown. (Re-enters, and calls in at window.) Landlord, here’s a fellow stole your sausages and fryingpan. (Wakes up Landlord and exaunts.)

Landlord. (Appears at window.) Here’s somebody been in my house and axually stole my sausages, fryingpan, and red-hot poker!

(Clown exaunts when he has blamed it all to Punch. Joey stole ’em, and Punch took ’em, and the receiver is always worse than the thief, for if they was never no receivers there wouldn’t never be no thieves.)

Landlord. Seizing the sausages in Punch’s hand, says, How did you get these here?

Punch. Joey stole ’em, and I took ’em.

Landlord. Then you’re both jolly thieves, and I must have my property. A scuffle ensues. Punch hollars out, Joey! Joey! Here’s the landlord a stealing the sausages!

(So you see Punch wants to make the landlord a thief so as to exempt himself. He’s a hypocrite there again, you see again—all through the piece he’s the master-piece. Oh a most clever man is Punch, and such an hypocrite.)

(Punch, seizing the fryingpan, which has been on the play-board, knocks it on the publican’s head; when, there being a false bottom to it, the head goes through it, and the sausages gets about the Publican’s neck, and Punch pulls at the pan and the sausages with veheminence, till the landlord is exhausted, and exaunts with his own property back again; so there is no harm done, only merely for the lark to return to those people what belongs to ’em—What you take away from a person always give to them again.)

Re-enter Clown.

Clown. Well, Mr. Punch, I shall wish you a pleasant good morning.

Punch. [Hits him with his cudgel.] Good morning to you, Joey.

Exaunt Joey.

Punch sits down by the side of the poker, and Scaramouch appears without a head.

Punch looks, and beholds, and he’s frightened, and exaunts with the poker.

Scaramouch does a comic dance, with his long neck shooting up and down with the actions of his body, after which he exaunts.

Punch re-enters again with the poker, and places it beside of him, and takes his cudgel in his hand for protection, while he is singing the National Anthem of “God save the Queen and all the Royal Family.”

Satan then appears as a dream (and it is all a dream after all), and dressed up as the Roossian Bear (leave Politics alone as much as you can, for Punch belongs to nobody).

Punch has a dreadful struggle with Satan, who seizes the red-hot poker and wants to take Punch away, for all his past misdeeds, and frolic and fun, to the bottomless pit.

By struggling with Satan, Punch overpowers him, and he drops the poker, and Punch kills him with his cudgel, and shouts “Bravo! Hooray! Satan is dead,” he cries (we must have a good conclusion): “we can now all do as we like!”—(That’s the moral, you see.) “Good-by, Ladies and Gentlemen: this is the whole of the original performance of Mr. Punch: and I remain still your most obedient and most humble servant to command. Good-by, good-by, good-by. God bless you all. I return you my most sincere thanks for your patronage and support, and I hope you’ll come out handsome with your gold and silver.”

There is one Punch in France, but far different to the English Punch; they exhibiting their figures in a different way by performing them with sticks, the same as Scaramouch is done. They has a performing Punch sitivated at the Boulevards, in Paris, where he has a certain piece of ground allotted for him, with seats attached, being his own freehold property; the passers-by, if they wish to see the performance, they take their seat with the juveniles, sits down, and he performs to them for what they think proper to give him. I never was over in France, but I’ve heard talk of him a deal from foreigners who has given us inflammation about it, vich they was so kind to do. They shows the difference between English and French you know.

The Fantoccini Man.

Every one who has resided for any time in London must have noticed in the streets a large roomy show upon wheels, about four times as capacious as those used for the performance of Punch and Judy.

The proprietor of one of these perambulating exhibitions was a person of some 56 years of age, with a sprightly half-military manner; but he is seldom seen by the public, on account of his habit of passing the greater part of the day concealed within his theatre, for the purpose of managing the figures. When he paid me a visit, his peculiar erect bearing struck me as he entered. He walked without bending his knees, stamped with his heels, and often rubbed his hands together as if washing them with an invisible soap. He wore his hair with the curls arranged in a Brutus, à la George the Fourth, and his chin was forced up into the air by a high black stock, as though he wished to increase his stature. He wore a frock coat buttoned at waist, and open on his expanded chest, so as to show off the entire length of his shirt-front.

I could not help asking him, if he had ever served in the army. He, however, objected to gratify my curiosity on that point, though it was impossible from his reply not to infer that he had been in her majesty’s service.

There was a mystery about his origin and parentage, which he desired should remain undisturbed. His relations were all of them so respectable, he said, that he did not wish to disgrace them by any revelations he might make; thus implying that he considered his present occupation a downfall in life.

“I followed it as my propensity,” he proceeded, “and though I have run through three fortunes, I follow it still. I never knew the value of money, and when I have it in my pocket I cannot keep it there. I have spent forty-five pounds in three days.”

He seemed to be not a little fond of exhibiting his dolls, and considered himself to be the only person living who knew anything of the art. He said orders were sent to him from all parts of the country to make the figures, and indeed some of them were so intricate, that he alone had the secret of their construction.

He hardly seemed to like the Marionettes, and evidently looked upon them as an interference with “the real original character” of the exhibition. The only explanation he could give of the difference between the Marionettes and the Fantoccini was, that the one had a French title, and referred to dolls in modern costume, whilst the other was an Italian word, and applied to dolls in fancy dresses.

He gave me the following interesting statement:—

“The Fantoccini,” he said, “is the proper title of the exhibition of dancing dolls, though it has lately been changed to that of the ‘Marionettes,’ owing to the exhibition under that name at the Adelaide Gallery.

“That exhibition at the Adelaide Gallery was very good in its way, but it was nothing to be compared to the exhibition that was once given at the Argyll Rooms in Regent-street, (that’s the old place that was burned down). It was called ‘Le petit Théâtre Matthieu,’ and in my opinion it was the best one that ever come into London, because they was well managed. They did little pieces—heavy and light. They did Shakespeare’s tragedies and farces, and singing as well; indeed, it was the real stage, only with dolls for actors and parties to speak for ’em and work their arms and legs behind the scenes. I’ve known one of these parties take three parts—look at that for clever work—first he did an old man, then an old woman, and afterwards the young man. I assisted at that performance, and I should say it was full twenty years ago, to the best of my recollection. After the Marionettes removed to the Western Institution, Leicester-square, I assisted at them also. It was a passable exhibition, but nothing out of the way. The figures were only modelled, not carved, as they ought to be. I was only engaged to exhibit one figure, a sailor of my own making. It was a capital one, and stood as high as a table. They wanted it for the piece called the ‘Manager in Distress,’ where one of the performers is a sailor. Mine would dance a hornpipe, and whip its hat off in a minute; when I had finished performing it, I took good care to whip it into a bag, so that they should not see how I arranged the strings, for they was very backwards in their knowledge. When we worked the figures it was very difficult, because you had to be up so high—like on the top of the ceiling, and to keep looking down all the time to manage the strings. There was a platform arranged, with a place to rest against.

“The first to introduce the Fantoccini into London—that is, into London streets, mind you, going about—was Gray, a Scotchman. He was a very clever fellow,—very good, and there was nothing but what was good that belonged to it—scenery, dresses, theatre and all. He had a frame then, no longer than the Punch frame now, only he had a labouring man to carry it for him, and he took with him a box no larger than a haberdasher’s box, which contained the figures, for they were not more than nine inches high. Now my figures are two feet high, though they don’t look it; but my theatre is ten feet high by six foot wide, and the opening is four feet high. This Gray was engaged at all the theatres, to exhibit his figures at the masquerades. Nothing went down but Mr. Gray, and he put poor Punch up altogether. When he performed at the theatres, he used to do it as a wind-up to the entertainment, after the dancing was over, and they would clear the stage on purpose for him, and then let down a scene with an opening in it, the size of his theatre. On these occasions his figures were longer, about two feet, and very perfect. There was juggling, and slack and tight rope-dancing, and Punches, and everything, and the performance was never less than one hour, and then it was done as quick as lightning, every morning, and no feat longer than two or three minutes. It didn’t do to have silly persons there.

“This Gray performed at Vauxhall when Bish, the lottery-man in Cornhill, had it, and he went down wonderful. He also performed before George the Fourth. I’ve heard say that he got ten pounds a-week when he performed at Vauxhall, for they snatched him out of the streets, and wouldn’t let him play there. It’s impossible to say what he made in the streets, for he was a Scotchman and uncommon close. If he took a hatfull, he’d say, ‘I’ve only got a few;’ but he did so well he could sport his diamond rings on his fingers,—first rate—splendid.

“Gray was the first to exhibit gratis in the streets of London, but he was not the first to work fantoccini figures. They had always been exhibited at theatres before that. Old Porsini knowed nothing about them—it was out of his business all together, for he was Punch and nothing more. Gray killed Porsini and his Punch; regular shut him up. A man of the name of Flocton from Birmingham was, to the best of my knowledge, the first that ever had a fantoccini exhibition in England; but he was only for theatres.

“At this time I had been playing in the orchestra with some travelling comedians, and Mr. Seawood, the master, used among other things to exhibit the dancing figures. He had a proscenium fitted up so that he could open a twenty-foot theatre, almost large enough for living persons. He had the splendidest figures ever introduced into this country. He was an artist as well, splendid scene and transparent painter; indeed, he’s worked for some of the first noblemen in Cheltenham, doing up their drawing-rooms. His figures worked their eyes and mouths by mechanism; according to what they had to say, they looked and moved their eyes and mouths according; and females, if they was singing, heaved their bosoms like Christians, the same as life. He had a Turk who did the tight-rope without anybody being seen. He always performed different pieces, and had a regular wardrobe with him—beautiful dresses—and he’d dress ’em up to their parts, and then paint their faces up with distemper, which dries in an hour. Somebody came and told me that Gray was in London, performing in the streets, and that’s what brought me out. I had helped Mr. Seawood to manage the figures, and I knew something about them. They told me Gray had a frame, and I said, ‘Well, it’s a bit of genius, and is a fortune.’ The only figures they told me he had—and it was true—was a sailor, and a Turk, and a clown, and what we calls a Polander, that’s a man that tosses the pole. I left Seawood directly, and I went to my father and got some money, and began instantly making my frame and figures. Mine was about sixteen inches high, and I had five of ’em. I began very strong. My fifth figure was a juggler. I was the second that ever came out in the streets of London. It was at the time that George the Fourth went to Scotland, and Gray went after him to try his luck, following the royal family. As the king went out of London I came in. I first of all put up at Peckham, just to lay to a bit and look about me. I’ll tell you the reason. I had no one to play, and I couldn’t manage the figures and do the music as well, consequently I had to seek after some one to do the pandean pipes. I didn’t like to make my first appearance in London without music. At last I met a party that used to play the pipes at Vauxhall. I met him one day, and he says, ‘What are you up to now?’ so I told him I had the fantoccini figures. He was a beautiful pipe player, and I’ve never heard any one like him before or since. He wouldn’t believe I had the figures, they was such a novelty. I told him where I was staying, and he and his partner came over to see me, and I performed the figures, and then we went on shares. He had worked for Gray, and he knew all his houses where he used to perform, and I knew nothing about these things. When Gray came back he found me performing before one of his houses in Harley-street, where he always had five shillings.

“They was a tremendous success—wonderful. If we had a call at a house our general price was two-and-sixpence, and the performance was, for a good one, twenty minutes. Then there was the crowd for the collection, but they was principally halfpence, and we didn’t care about them much, though we have taken four shillings. We never pitched only to houses, only stopping when we had an order, and we hadn’t occasion to walk far, for as soon as the tune was heard, up would come the servants to tell us to come. I’ve had three at me at once. I’ve known myself to be in Devonshire-place, when I was performing there, to be there for three hours and upwards, going from house to house. I could tell you how much we took a-day. It was, after taking expenses, from four to five pounds a-day. Besides, there was a labourer to whom we paid a guinea a-week to carry a frame, and he had his keep into the bargain. Where Punch took a shilling we’ve taken a pound.

“I recollect going down with the show to Brighton, and they actually announced our arrival in the papers, saying, that among other public amusements they had the Fantoccini figures from London. That’s a fact. That was in the paper. We did well in Brighton. We have, I can assure you, taken eighteen shillings and sixpence in half an hour, corner-pitching, as we call it; that is, at the corner of a street where there is a lot of people passing. We had such success, that the magistrates sent the head-constable round with us, to clear away the mob. If we performed before any gentleman’s place, there was this constable to keep the place clear. A nasty busy fellow he was, too. All the time we was at Brighton we made twenty pounds a-week clear, for we then took only shillings and sixpences, and there was no fourpenny pieces or threepenny bits in them times. We had gentlemen come up many a time and offer to buy the whole concern, clear. What an idea, wasn’t it? But we didn’t want to sell it, they couldn’t have given us our price.

“The crowd was always a great annoyance to us. They’d follow us for miles, and the moment we pitched up they’d come and gather about, and almost choke us. What was their ha’pence to us when we was taking our half-crowns? Actually, in London, we walked three and four miles to get rid of the mob; but, bless you! we couldn’t get rid of them, for they was like flies after honey.

“We used to do a great business with evening parties. At Christmas we have had to go three and four times in the same evening to different parties. We never had less than a guinea, and I have had as much as five pounds, but the usual price was two pounds ten shillings, and all refreshments found you. I had the honour of performing before the Queen when she was Princess Victoria. It was at Gloucester-house, Park-lane, and we was engaged by the royal household. A nice berth I had of it, for it was in May, and they put us on the landing of the drawing-room, where the folding-doors opened, and there was some place close by where hot air was admitted to warm the apartments; and what with the heat of the weather and this ’ere ventilation, with the heat coming up the grating-places, and my anxiety performing before a princess, I was near baked, and the perspiration quite run off me; for I was packed up above, standing up and hidden, to manage the figures. There was the maids of honour coming down the stairs like so many nuns, dressed all in white, and the princess was standing on a sofa, with the Duke of Kent behind her. She was apparently very much amused, like others who had seen them. I can’t recollect what we was paid, but it was very handsome and so forth.

“I’ve also performed before the Baroness Rothschild’s, next the Duke of Wellington’s, and likewise the Baron himself, in Grosvenor-place, and Sir Watkyn W. Wynne, and half the nobility in England. We’ve been in the very first of drawing-rooms.

“I shall never forget being at Sir Watkyn Wynne’s, for we was very handsomely treated, and had the best of everything. It was in St. James’s-square, and the best of mansions. It was a juvenile-party night, and there was a juggler, and a Punch and Judy, and our Fantoccini. One of the footmen comes up, and says he, ‘Would any of you men like a jelly?’ I told him I didn’t care for none, but the Punch-and-Judy man says—‘My missus is very partial to them.’ So the footman asks—‘How will you carry it home?’ I suggested he should put it in his hat, and the foolish fellow, half silly with horns of ale, actually did, and wrapped it up in his pocket-handkerchief. There was a large tumbler full. By and by he cries—‘Lord, how I sweat!’ and there was the stuff running down his hair like so much size. We did laugh, I can assure you.

“Fantoccini has fallen off now. It’s quite different to what it was. I don’t think the people’s tired of it, but it ain’t such a novelty. I could stop up a whole street if I liked, so that nothing could get along, and that shows the people ain’t tired of it. I think it’s the people that gave the half-crowns are tired of it, but those with the ha’pence are as fond of it as ever. As times go, the performance is worth two pounds a-week to me; and if it wasn’t, I couldn’t afford to stop with it, for I’m very clever on the violin, and I could earn more than thirty shillings a-week playing in bands. We still attend evening parties, only it isn’t to princesses, but gentry. We depend more upon evening parties. It isn’t street work, only if we didn’t go round they’d think I was dead. We go to more than thirty parties a-year. We always play according to price, whether it’s fifteen shillings, or ten shillings, or a guinea. We don’t get many five-guinea orders now. The last one was six months ago, to go twenty-eight miles into Kent, to a gentleman’s house. When we go to parties, we take with us a handsome, portable, fold-up frame. The front is beautiful, and by a first-rate artist. The gentleman who done it is at the head of the carriage department at a railway, and there’s the royal arms all in gold, and it stands above ten feet high, and has wings and all, so that the music and everything is invisible. It shuts up like a portfolio. The figures are first-rate ones, and every one dressed according to the country, whatever it may be, she is supposed to represent. They are in the best of material, with satin and lace, and all that’s good.

“When we perform in the streets, we generally go through this programme. We begins with a female hornpipe dancer; then there is a set of quadrilles by some marionette figures, four females and no gentleman. If we did the men we should want assistance, for four is as much as I can hold at once. It would require two men, and the street won’t pay for it. After this we introduces a representation of Mr. Grimaldi the clown, who does tumbling and posturing, and a comic dance, and so forth, such as trying to catch a butterfly. Then comes the enchanted Turk. He comes on in the costume of a Turk, and he throws off his right and left arm, and then his legs, and they each change into different figures, the arms and legs into two boys and girls, a clergyman the head, and an old lady the body. That figure was my own invention, and I could if I like turn him into a dozen; indeed, I’ve got one at home, which turns into a parson in the pulpit, and a clerk under him, and a lot of little charity children, with a form to sit down upon. They are all carved figures, every one of them, and my own make. The next performance is the old lady, and her arms drop off and turn into two figures, and the body becomes a complete balloon and car in a minute, and not a flat thing, but round—and the figures get into the car and up they go. Then there’s the tight-rope dancer, and next the Indian juggler—Ramo Samee, a representation—who chucks the balls about under his feet and under his arms, and catches them on the back of his head, the same as Ramo Samee did. Then there’s the sailor’s hornpipe—Italian Scaramouch (he’s the old style). This one has a long neck, and it shoots up to the top of the theatre. This is the original trick, and a very good one. Then comes the Polander, who balances a pole and two chairs, and stands on his head and jumps over his pole; he dresses like a Spaniard, and in the old style. It takes a quarter of an hour to do that figure well, and make him do all his tricks. Then comes the Skeletons. They’re regular first class, of course. This one also was my invention, and I was the first to make them, and I’m the only one that can make them. They are made of a particular kind of wood. I’m a first-rate carver, and can make my three guineas any day for a skull; indeed, I’ve sold many to dentists to put in their window. It’s very difficult to carve this figure, and takes a deal of time. It takes full two months to make these skeletons. I’ve been offered ten pounds ten shillings for a pair, if I’d make ’em correct according to the human frame. Those I make for exhibiting in the streets, I charge two pounds each for. They’re good, and all the joints is correct, and you may put ’em into what attitudes you like, and they walk like a human being. These figures in my show come up through a trap-door, and perform attitudes, and shiver and lie down, and do imitations of the pictures. It’s a tragic sort of concern, and many ladies won’t have ’em at evening parties, because it frightens the children. Then there’s Judy Callaghan, and that ’livens up after the skeletons. Then six figures jump out of her pockets, and she knocks them about. It’s a sort of comic business. Then the next is a countryman who can’t get his donkey to go, and it kicks at him and throws him off, and all manner of comic antics, after Billy Button’s style. Then I do the skeleton that falls to pieces, and then becomes whole again. Then there’s another out-of-the-way comic figure that falls to pieces similar to the skeleton. He catches hold of his head and chucks it from one hand to the other. We call him the Nondescript. We wind up with a scene in Tom and Jerry. The curtain winds up, and there’s a watchman prowling the streets, and some of those larking gentlemen comes on and pitch into him. He looks round and he can’t see anybody. Presently another comes in and gives him another knock, and then there’s a scuffle, and off they go over the watch-box, and down comes the scene. That makes the juveniles laugh, and finishes up the whole performance merry like.

“I’ve forgot one figure now. I know’d there was another, and that’s the Scotchman who dances the Highland fling. He’s before the watchman. He’s in the regular national costume, everything correct, and everything, and the music plays according to the performance. It’s a beautiful figure when well handled, and the dresses cost something, I can tell you; all the joints are counter-sunk—them figures that shows above the knee. There’s no joints to be seen, all works hidden like, something like Madame Vestris in Don Juan. All my figures have got shoes and stockings on. They have, indeed. If it wasn’t my work, they’d cost a deal of money. One of them is more expensive than all those in Punch and Judy put together. Talk of Punch knocking the Fantoccini down! Mine’s all show; Punch is nothing, and cheap as dirt.

“I’ve also forgot the flower-girl that comes in and dances with a garland. That’s a very pretty figure in a fairy’s dress, in a nice white skirt with naked carved arms, nice modelled, and the legs just the same; and the trunks come above the knee, the same as them ballet girls. She shows all the opera attitudes.

“The performance, to go through the whole of it, takes an hour and a half; and then you mustn’t stand looking at it, but as soon as one thing goes off the music changes and another comes on. That ain’t one third, nor a quarter of what I can do.

“When I’m performing I’m standing behind, looking down upon the stage. All the figures is hanging round on hooks, with all their strings ready for use. It makes your arms ache to work them, and especially across the loins. All the strength you have you must do, and chuck it out too; for those four figures which I uses at evening parties, which dance the polka, weighs six pounds, and that’s to be kept dangling for twenty minutes together. They are two feet high, and their skirts take three quarters of a yard, and are covered with spangles, which gives ’em great weight.

“There are only two of us going about now with Fantoccini shows. Several have tried it, but they had to knock under very soon. They soon lost their money and time. In the first place, they must be musicians to make the figures keep time in the dances; and, again, they must be carvers, for it won’t pay to put the figures out to be done. I had ten pounds the other day only to carve six figures, and the wood only come to three shillings; that’ll give you some idea of what the carving costs.

“Formerly I used to make the round of the watering-places, but I’ve got quite enough to do in London now, and travelling’s very expensive, for the eating and drinking is so very expensive. Now, at Ramsgate I’ve had to pay half-a-guinea for a bed, and that to a man in my position is more than I like. I always pays the man who goes along with me to play the music, because I don’t go out every day, only when it suits me. He gets as good as his twenty-three shillings a-week, according to how business is, and that’s on an average as good as four shillings a-day. If I’m very lucky I makes it better for him, for a man can’t be expected to go and blow his life away into pandean pipes unless he’s well paid for it.”

Guy Fawkeses.

Until within the last ten or twelve years, the exhibition of guys in the public thoroughfares every 5th of November, was a privilege enjoyed exclusively by boys of from 10 to 15 years of age, and the money arising therefrom was supposed to be invested at night in a small pyrotechnic display of squibs, crackers, and catherine-wheels.

At schools, and at many young gentlemen’s houses, for at least a week before the 5th arrived, the bonfires were prepared and guys built up.

At night one might see rockets ascending in the air from many of the suburbs of London, and the little back-gardens in such places as the Hampstead-road and Kennington, and, after dusk, suddenly illuminated with the blaze of the tar-barrel, and one might hear in the streets even banging of crackers mingled with the laughter and shouts of boys enjoying the sport.

In those days the street guys were of a very humble character, the grandest of them generally consisting of old clothes stuffed up with straw, and carried in state upon a kitchen-chair. The arrival of the guy before a window was announced by a juvenile chorus of “Please to remember the 5th of November.” So diminutive, too, were some of these guys, that I have even seen dolls carried about as the representatives of the late Mr. Fawkes. In fact, none of these effigies were hardly ever made of larger proportions than Tom Thumb, or than would admit of being carried through the garden-gates of any suburban villa.

Of late years, however, the character of Guy Fawkes-day has entirely changed. It seems now to partake rather of the nature of a London May-day. The figures have grown to be of gigantic stature, and whilst clowns, musicians, and dancers have got to accompany them in their travels through the streets, the traitor Fawkes seems to have been almost laid aside, and the festive occasion taken advantage of for the expression of any political feeling, the guy being made to represent any celebrity of the day who has for the moment offended against the opinions of the people. The kitchen-chair has been changed to the costermongers’ donkey-truck, or even vans drawn by pairs of horses. The bonfires and fireworks are seldom indulged in; the money given to the exhibitors being shared among the projectors at night, the same as if the day’s work had been occupied with acrobating or nigger singing.

GUY FAWKES.

The first guy of any celebrity that made its appearance in the London streets was about the year 1844, when an enormous figure was paraded about on horseback. This had a tall extinguisher-hat, with a broad red brim, and a pointed vandyked collar, that hung down over a smock frock, which was stuffed out with straw to the dimensions of a water-butt. The figure was attended by a body of some half-dozen costermongers, mounting many coloured cockades, and armed with formidable bludgeons. The novelty of the exhibition ensured its success, and the “coppers” poured in in such quantities that on the following year gigantic guys were to be found in every quarter of the metropolis.

But the gigantic movement did not attain its zenith till the “No Popery” cry was raised, upon the division of England into papal bishoprics. Then it was no longer Fawkes, but Cardinal Wiseman and the Pope of Rome who were paraded as guys through the London thoroughfares.

The figures were built up of enormous proportions, the red hat of the cardinal having a brim as large as a loo-table, and his scarlet cape being as long as a tent. Guy Fawkes seated upon a barrel marked “Gunpowder” usually accompanied His Holiness and the Cardinal, but his diminutive size showed that Guy now played but a secondary part in the exhibition, although the lantern and the matches were tied as usual to his radishy and gouty fingers. According to the newspapers, one of these shows was paraded on the Royal Exchange, the merchants approving of the exhibition to such an extent that sixpences, shillings, and half-crowns were showered in to the hats of the lucky costers who had made the speculation. So excited was the public mind, that at night, after business was over, processions were formed by tradespeople and respectable mechanics, who, with bands of music playing, and banners flying, on which were inscribed anti-papal mottoes and devices, marched through the streets with flaming torches, and after parading their monster Popes and Cardinals until about nine o’clock at night, eventually adjourned to some open space—like Peckham-rye or Blackheath—where the guy was burned amid the most boisterous applauses.

Cardinal Wiseman and the Pope reappeared for several years in succession, till at length the Russian war breaking out, the Guy-Fawkes constructors had a fresh model to work upon. The Emperor of Russia accordingly “came out” in the streets, in all forms and shapes; sometimes as the veritable Nicholas, in jack-boots and leather breeches, with his unmistakable moustache; and often as Old Nick, with a pair of horns and a lengthy appendage in the form of a tail, with an arrow-headed termination; and not unfrequently he was represented as a huge bear crouching beneath some rude symbol of the English and French alliance.

On the 5th of November (1856) the guys were more of a political than a religious character. The unfortunate Pope of Rome had in some instances been changed for Bomba, though the Czar, His Holiness, and his British representative the Cardinal, were not altogether neglected. The want of any political agitation was the cause why the guys were of so uninteresting a character.

I must not, however, forget to mention a singular innovation that was then made in the recognised fashion of guy building—one of the groups of figures exhibited being (strange to say) of a complimentary nature. It consisted of Miss Nightingale, standing between an English Grenadier and a French foot-soldier, while at her feet lay the guy between two barrels marked “Gunpowder,” and so equivocally attired that he might be taken for either the Emperor of Russia or the Pope of Rome.

At Billingsgate, a guy was promenaded round the market as early as five o’clock in the morning, by a party of charity-boys, who appeared by their looks to have been sitting up all night. It is well known to the boys in the neighbourhood of the great fish-market, that the guy which is first in the field reaps the richest harvest of halfpence from the salesmen; and indeed, till within the last three or four years, one fish-factor was in the habit of giving the bearers of the first effigy he saw a half-crown piece. Hence there were usually two or three different guy parties in attendance soon after four o’clock, awaiting his coming into the market.

For manufacturing a cheap guy, such as that seen at Billingsgate, a pair of old trousers and Wellington boots form the most expensive item. The shoulders of the guys are generally decorated with a paper cape, adorned with different coloured rosettes and gilt stars. A fourpenny mask makes the face, and a proper cocked hat, embellished in the same style as the cape, surrounds the rag head.

The general characteristics of all guys consists in a limpness and roundness of limb, which give the form a puddingy appearance. All the extremities have a kind of paralytic feebleness, so that the head leans on one side like that of a dead bird, and the feet have an unnatural propensity for placing themselves in every position but the right one; sometimes turning their toes in, as if their legs had been put on the wrong way, or keeping their toes turned out, as if they had been “struck so” while taking their first dancing-lesson. Their fingers radiate like a bunch of carrots, and the arms are as shapeless and bowed as the monster sausage in a cook-shop window. The face is always composed of a mask painted in the state of the most florid health, and singularly disagreeing with the frightful debility of the body. Through the holes for the eyes bits of rag and straw generally protrude, as though birds had built in the sockets. A pipe is mostly forced into the mouth, where it remains with the bowl downwards; and in the hands it is customary to tie a lantern and matches. Whilst the guy is carried along, you can hear the straw in his interior rustling and crackling, like moving a workhouse mattrass. As a general rule, it may be added, that guys have a helpless, drunken look.

When, however, the monster Guy Fawkeses came into fashion, considerably greater expense was gone to in “getting up” the figures. Then the feet were always fastened in their proper position, and although the arrangement of the hands was never perfectly mastered, yet the fingers were brought a little more closely together, and approached the digital dexterity of the dummies at the cheap clothes marts.

For carrying the guys about, chairs, wheelbarrows, trucks, carts, and vans are employed. Chairs and wheelbarrows are patronised by the juvenile population, but the other vehicles belong to the gigantic speculations.

On the Surrey side a guy was exhibited in 1856 whose straw body was encased in a coachman’s old great coat, covered with different colours, as various as the waistcoat patterns on a tailor’s show-book. He was wheeled about on a truck by three or four young men, whose hoarse voices, when shouting “Please to remember the Guy,” showed their regular occupation to be street-selling, for they had the same husky sound as the “Eight a-groat fresh herrens,” in the Saturday night street-markets.

In the neighbourhood of Walworth, men dressed up as guys were dragged about on trucks. One of them was seated upon a barrel marked “Gunpowder,” his face being painted green, and ornamented with an immense false nose of a bright scarlet colour. I could not understand what this guy was meant to represent, for he wore a sugarloaf hat with an ostrich feather in it, and had on a soldier’s red coat, decorated with paper rosettes as big as cabbages. His legs, too, were covered with his own corduroy trowsers, but adorned with paper streamers and bows. In front of him marched a couple of men carrying broomsticks, and musicians playing upon a tambourine and a penny tin whistle.

The most remarkable of the stuffed figures of 1856 was one dressed in a sheet, intended to represent the Rev. Mr. Spurgeon in a surplice! It was carried about on a wooden stage by boys, and took very well with the mob, for no sooner did the lads cry out,—

“Remember, remember,

The fifth of November,

Old Spurgeon’s treason and plot!”

than a shout of laughter burst from the crowd, and the halfpence began to pour in. Without this alteration in the November rhyme, nobody would have been able to have traced the slightest resemblance between the guy and the reverend gentleman whose effigy it was stated to be.

Further, it should be added, that the guy exhibitors have of late introduced a new system, of composing special rhymes for the occasion, which are delivered after the well-known “Remember, remember.” Those with the figures of the Pope, for instance, sing,—

“A penn’orth of cheese to feed the pope,

A twopenny loaf to choke him,

A pint of beer to wash it down,

And a good large fagot to smoke him!”

I heard a party of costermongers, who had the image of His Imperial Majesty the Emperor of all the Russias wabbling on their truck, sing in chorus this home-manufactured verse,—

“Poke an ingun in his eye—

A squib shove up his nose, sirs;

Then roast him till he’s done quite brown,

And Nick to old Nick goes, sirs.”

With the larger guys little is usually said or done beyond exhibiting them. In the crowded thoroughfares, the proprietors mostly occupy themselves only with collecting the money, and never let the procession stop for a moment. On coming to the squares, however, a different course is pursued, for then they stop before every window where a head is visible and sing the usual “Remember, remember,” winding up with a vociferous hurrah! as they hold out their hats for the halfpence.

At the West-end, one of the largest guys of 1856 was drawn by a horse in a cart. This could not have been less than fourteen feet high. Its face, which was as big as a shield, was so flat and good-humoured in expression that I at once recognised it as a pantomime mask, or one used to hang outside some masquerade costumier’s shop door. The coat was of the Charles the Second’s cut, and composed of a lightish coloured paper, ornamented with a profusion of Dutch metal. There was a sash across the right shoulder, and the legs were almost as long as the funnel to a penny steamer, and ended in brown paper cavalier boots. As the costermongers led it along, it shook like a load of straw. If it had not been for the bull’s-eye lantern and lath matches, nobody would have recognised in the dandy figure the effigy of the wretched Fawkes.

By far the handsomest turn-out of the day, at this time, was a group of three figures, which promenaded Whitechapel and Bethnal-green. They stood erect in a van drawn by a blind horse, and accompanied by a “band” of one performer on the drum and pandean pipes. Four clowns in full costume made faces while they jumped about among the spectators, and collected donations. All the guys were about ten feet high. The centre one, intended for Fawkes himself, was attired in a flowing cloak of crimson glazed calico, and his black hat was a broad-brimmed sugarloaf, the pointed crown of which was like a model of Langham-place church steeple, and it had a profusion of black hair streaming about the face. The figures on either side of this were intended for Lords Suffolk and Monteagle, in the act of arresting the traitor, and accordingly appeared to be gently tapping Mr. Fawkes on either shoulder. The bodies of their lordships were encased in gold scale-armour, and their legs in silver ditto, whilst their heads were covered with three-cornered cocked hats, surmounted by white feathers. In the front of the van were two white banners, with the following inscriptions in letters of gold:—

“Apprehension of Guy Fawkes on the 5th of November, in the year 1605.”

And,—

“The Discovery of the Gunpowder Plot on the 5th of November, 1605.”

At the back of the van flaunted two flags of all nations. In addition to the four clowns, there were several other attendants; one in particular had the appearance of half a man and half a beast, his body being clad in a green frock-coat, whilst his legs and feet were shaggy, and made to imitate a bear’s.

The most remarkable part of this exhibition was the expression upon the countenances of the figures. They were ordinary masks, and consequently greatly out of proportion for the height of the figures. There was a strong family resemblance between the traitor and his arrestors; neither did Fawkes’s countenance exhibit any look of rage, astonishment, or disappointment at finding his designs frustrated. Nor did their lordships appear to be angry, disgusted, or thunderstruck at the conspirator’s bold attempt.

In the neighbourhood of Bond-street the guys partook of a political character, as if to please the various Members of Parliament who might be strolling to their Clubs. In one barrow was the effigy of the Emperor of the French, holding in his hands, instead of the lantern and matches, a copy of the Times newspaper, torn in half. I was informed that another figure I saw was intended to represent the form of Bomba.

In the neighbourhood of Lambeth Palace the guys were of an ecclesiastical kind, and such as it was imagined would be likely to flatter the Archbishop of Canterbury into giving at least a half-crown. One of these was drawn by two donkeys, and accompanied by drums and pipes. It represented Cardinal Wiseman in the company of four members of “the Holy Inquisition.” The Cardinal was dressed in the usual scarlet costume, while the Inquisitors were robed in black with green veils over their faces. In front of the cart was a bottle, labelled “Holy Water,” which was continually turned round, so that the people might discover that on the other side was printed “Whisky.”

The practice of burning guys, and lighting bonfires, and letting off fireworks, is now generally discontinued, and particularly as regards the public exhibitions at Blackheath and Peckham Rye. The greatest display of fireworks, we are inclined to believe, took place in the public streets of the metropolis, for up to twelve o’clock at night, one might occasionally hear reports of penny cannons, and the jerky explosions of crackers.

Guy Fawkes (Man).

“I’m in the crock’ry line, going about with a basket and changing jugs, and glass, and things, for clothes and that; but for the last eight years I have, every Fifth of November, gone out with a guy. It’s a good job for the time, for what little we lay out on the guy we don’t miss, and the money comes in all of a lump at the last. While it lasts there’s money to be made by it. I used always to take the guy about for two days; but this last year I took him about for three.

“I was nineteen year old when I first went out with a guy. It was seeing others about with ’em, and being out of work at the time, and having nothing to sell, I and another chap we knocked up one between us, and we found it go on pretty well, so we kept on at it. The first one I took out was a very first-rater, for we’d got it up as well as we could to draw people’s attention. I said, ‘It ain’t no good doing as the others do, we must have a tip-topper.’ It represented Guy Fawkes in black velvet. It was about nine feet high, and he was standing upright, with matches in one hand and lantern in the other. I show’d this one round Clerkenwell and Islington. It was the first big ’un as was ever brought out. There had been paper ones as big, but ne’er a one dressed up in the style mine was. I had a donkey and cart, and we placed it against some cross-rails and some bits of wood to keep him steady. He stood firm because he had two poles up his legs, and being lashed round the body holding him firm to the posts—like a rock. We done better the first time we went out than we do lately. The guy must have cost a sovereign. He had a trunk-hose and white legs, which we made out of a pair of white drawers, for fleshings and yellow boots, which I bought in Petticoat-lane. We took over 3l. with him, which was pretty fair, and just put us on again, for November is a bad time for most street trades, and getting a few shillings all at once makes it all right till Christmas.

“A pal of mine, of the name of Smith, was the first as ever brought out a big one. His wasn’t a regular dressed-up one, but only with a paper apron to hang down the front and bows, and such-like. He put it on a chair, and had four boys to carry it on their shoulders. He was the first, too, as introduced clowns to dance about. I see him do well, and that’s why I took mine in hand.

“The year they was chalking ‘No Popery’ all about the walls I had one, dressed up in a long black garment, with a red cross on his bosom. I’m sure I don’t know what it meant, but they told me it would be popular. I had only one figure, with nine bows, and that tidiwated all about him. As we went along everybody shouted out ‘No Popery!’ Everybody did. He had a large brimmed hat with a low crown in, and a wax mask. I always had wax ones. I’ve got one at home now I’ve had for five year. It cost two-and-sixpence. It’s a very good-looking face but rather sly, with a great horse-hair beard. Most of the boys make their’n devils, and as ugly as they can, but that wouldn’t do for Christians like as I represent mine to be.

“One year I had Nicholas and his adviser. That was the Emperor of Russia in big top-boots and white breeches, and a green coat on. I gave him a good bit of mustachios—a little extra. He had a Russian helmet hat on, with a pair of eagles on the top. It was one I bought. I bought it cheap, for I only gave a shilling for it. I was offered five or six for it afterwards, but I found it answer my purpose to keep. I had it dressed up this year. The other figure was the devil. I made him of green tinsel paper cut out like scale armour, and pasted on to his legs to make it stick tight. He had a devil’s mask on, and I made him a pair of horns out of his head. Over them was a banner. I was told what to do to make the banner, for I had the letters writ out first, and then I cut ’em out of tinsel paper and stuck them on to glazed calico. On this banner was these words:—

‘What shall I do next?’

‘Why, blow your brains out!’

That took immensely, for the people said ‘That is wery well.’ It was the time the war was on. I dare say I took between 3l. and 4l. that time. There was three of us rowed in with it, so we got a few shillings a-piece.

“The best one I ever had was the trial of Guy Fawkes. There was four figures, and they was drawn about in a horse and cart. There was Guy Fawkes, and two soldiers had hold of him, and there was the king sitting in a chair in front. The king was in a scarlet velvet cloak, sitting in an old arm-chair, papered over to make it look decent. There was green and blue paper hanging over the arms to hide the ragged parts of it. The king’s cloak cost sevenpence a-yard, and there was seven of these yards. He had a gilt paper crown and a long black wig made out of some rope. His trunks was black and crimson, and he had blue stockings and red boots. I made him up out of my own head, and not from pictures. It was just as I thought would be the best way to get it up, out of my own head. I’ve seed the picture of Guy Fawkes, because I’ve got a book of it at home. I never was no scholar, not in the least. The soldiers had a breastplate of white steel paper, and baggy knee-breeches, and top boots. They had a big pipe each, with a top cut out of tin. Their helmets was the same as in the pictures, of steel paper, and a kind of a dish-cover shape, with a peak in front and behind. Guy was dressed the same kind as he was this year, with a black velvet dress and red cloak, and red boots turning over at top, with lace sewed on. I never made any of my figures frightful. I get ’em as near as I can to the life like.

“I reckon that show was the best as I ever had about. I done very well with it. They said it was a very good sight, and well got up. I dare say it cost me, with one thing and another, pretty nigh 4l. to get up. There was two of us to shove, me and my brother. I know I had a sovereign to myself when it was over, besides a little bit of merry-making.

“This year I had the apprehension of Guy Fawkes by Lord Suffolk and Monteagle. I’ve followed up the hist’ry as close as I can. Next year I shall have him being burnt, with a lot of faggits and things about him. This year the figures cost about 3l. getting up. Fawkes was dressed in his old costume of black velvet and red boots. I bought some black velvet breeches in Petticoat-lane, and I gave 1s. 9d. for the two pair. They was old theatrical breeches. Their lordships was dressed in gold scale-armour like, of cut-out paper pasted on, and their legs imitated steel. They had three-corner cock’d hats, with white feathers in. I always buy fierce-looking masks with frowns, but one of them this year was a smiling—Lord Monteagle, I think. I took the figures as near as I can form from a picture I saw of Guy Fawkes being apprehended. I placed them figures in a horse and cart, and piled them up on apple-chests to the level of the cart, so they showed all, their feet and all. I bind the chests with a piece of table-cover cloth. The first day we went out we took 2l. 7s., and the second we took 1l. 17s., and the last day we took 2l. 1s. We did so well the third day because we went into the country, about Tottenham and Edmonton. They never witnessed such a thing down them parts. The drummer what I had with me was a blind man, and well known down there. They call him Friday, because he goes there every Friday, so what they usually gave him we had. Our horse was blind, so we was obliged to have one to lead him in front and another to lead the blind drummer behind. We paid the drummer 16s. for the three days. We paid for two days 10s., and the third one most of it came in, and we all went shares. It was a pony more than a horse. I think we got about a 1l. a-piece clear, when we was done on the Friday night. It took me six weeks getting up in my leisure time. There was the Russian bear in front. He wore a monkey dress, the same as in the pantomimes, and that did just as well for a bear. I painted his face as near as I could get it, to make it look frightful.

“When I’m building up a guy we first gits some bags and things, and cut ’em out to the shape of the legs and things, and then sew it up. We sew the body and arms and all round together in one. We puts two poles down for the legs and then a cross-piece at the belly and another cross-piece at the shoulder, and that holds ’em firm. We fill the legs with sawdust, and stuff it down with our hands to make it tight. It takes two sacks of sawdust for three figures, but I generally have it give to me, for I know a young feller as works at the wood-chopping. We stand ’em up in the room against the wall, whilst we are dressing them. We have lots of chaps come to see us working at the guys. Some will sit there for many hours looking at us. We stuff the body with shavings and paper and any sort of rubbish. I sew whatever is wanted myself, and in fact my fingers is sore now with the thimble, for I don’t know how to use a thimble, and I feel awkward with it. I design everything and cut out all the clothes and the painting and all. They allow me 5s. for the building. This last group took me six weeks,—not constant, you know, but only lazy time of a night. I lost one or two days over it, that’s all.

“I think there was more Guy Fawkeses out this year than ever was out before. There was one had Guy Fawkes and Punch and a Clown in a cart, and another was Miss Nightingale and two soldiers. It was meant to be complimentary to that lady, but for myself I think it insulting to bring out a lady like that as a guy, when she’s done good to all.

“They always reckon me to be about the first hand in London at building a guy. I never see none like them, nor no one else I don’t think. It took us two quire of gold paper and one quire of silver paper to do the armour and the banner and other things. The gold paper is 6d. a-sheet, and the silver is 1d. a sheet. It wouldn’t look so noble if we didn’t use the gold paper.

“This year we had three clowns with us, and we paid them 3s. a-day each. I was dressed up as a clown, too. We had to dance about, and joke, and say what we thought would be funny to the people. I had a child in my arms made of a doll stuffed with shavings, and made to represent a little boy. It was just to make a laugh. Every one I went up to I told the doll to ask their uncle or their aunt for a copper. I had another move, too, of calling for ‘Bill Bowers’ in the crowd, and if I got into any row, or anything, I used to call to him to protect me. We had no time to say much, for we kept on moving, and it loses time to talk.

“We took the guy round Goswell-road and Pentonville the first day, and on the second we was round Bethnal-green way, among the weavers. We went that way for safety the second day, for the police won’t interrupt you there. The private houses give the most. They very seldom give more than a penny. I don’t suppose we got more than 3s. or 4s. in silver all the three days.

“Sometimes we have rough work with the Irish going about with guys. The ‘No Popery’ year there was several rows. I was up at Islington-gate, there, in the Lower-road, and there’s loads of Irish live up there, and a rough lot they are. They came out with sticks and bricks, and cut after us. We bolted with the guy. If our guy hadn’t been very firm, it would have been jolted to bits. We always nailed straps round the feet, and support it on rails at the waist, and lashed to the sides. We bolted from this Irish mob over Islington-green, and down John-street into Clerkenwell. My mate got a nick with a stone just on the head. It just give him a slight hurt, and drawed the blood from him. We jumped up in the donkey-cart and drove off.

“There was one guy was pulled out of the cart this year, down by Old Gravel lane, in the Ratcliff-highway. They pulled Miss Nightingale out of the cart and ran away with her, and regular destroyed the two soldiers that was on each side of her. Sometimes the cabmen lash at the guys with their whips. We never say anything to them, for fear we might get stopped by the police for making a row. You stand a chance of having a feather knocked off, or such-like, as is attached to them.

“There’s a lot of boys goes about on the 5th with sticks, and make a regular business of knocking guys to pieces. They’re called guy-smashers. They don’t come to us, we’re too strong for that, but they only manage the little ones, as they can take advantage of. They do this some of them to take the money the boys have collected. I have had regular prigs following my show, to pick the pockets of those looking on, but as sure as I see them I start them off by putting a policeman on to them.

“When we’re showing, I don’t take no trouble to invent new rhymes, but stick to the old poetry. There’s some do new songs. I usually sing out,—

‘Gentlefolks, pray

Remember this day;

’Tis with kind notice we bring

The figure of sly

And villanous Guy,

Who wanted to murder the king.

By powder and store,

He bitterly swore,

As he skulk’d in the walls to repair,

The parliament, too,

By him and his crew,

Should all be blowed up in the air.

But James, very wise,

Did the Papists surprise,

As they plotted the cruelty great;

He know’d their intent,

So Suffolk he sent

To save both kingdom and state.

Guy Fawkes he was found

With a lantern underground,

And soon was the traitor bound fast:

And they swore he should die,

So they hung him up high,

And burnt him to ashes at last.

So we, once a-year,

Come round without fear,

To keep up remembrance of this day;

While assistance from you

May bring a review

Of Guy Fawkes a-blazing away.

So hollo, boys! hollo, boys!

Shout and huzza;

So hollo, boys! hollo, boys!

Keep up this day!

So hollo, boys! hollo, boys!

And make the bells ring!

Down with the Pope, and God save the Queen!’

“It used to be King, but we say Queen now, and though it don’t rhyme, it’s more correct.

“It’s very seldom that the police say anything to us, so long as we don’t stop too long in the gangway not to create any mob. They join in the fun and laugh like the rest. Wherever we go there is a great crowd from morning to night.

“We have dinner on Guy Fawkes’ days between one and two. We go to any place where it’s convenient for us to stop at, generally at some public-house. We go inside, and leave some of the lads to look after the guy outside. We always keep near the window, where we can look out into the street, and we keep ourselves ready to pop out in a minute if anybody should attack the guy. We generally go into some by-way, where there ain’t much traffic. We never was interrupted much whilst we was at dinner, only by boys chucking stones and flinging things at it; and they run off as soon as we come out.

“There’s one party that goes out with a guy that sells it afterwards. They stop in London for the first two days, and then they work their way into the country as far as Sheerness, and then they sells the guy to form part of the procession on Lord-mayor’s day. It’s the watermen and ferrymen mostly buy it, and they carry it about in a kind of merriment among themselves, and at night they burn it and let off fireworks. They don’t make no charge for coming to see it burnt, but it’s open to the air and free to the public.

“None of the good guys taken about on the 5th are burnt at night, unless some gentlemen buy them. I used to sell mine at one time to the Albert Saloon. Sometimes they’d give me 15s. for it, and sometimes less, according to what kind of a one I had. Three years, I think, I sold it to them. They used to burn it at first in the gardens at the back, but after they found the gardens fill very well without it, so they wouldn’t have any more.

“I always take the sawdust and shavings out of my guys, and save the clothes for another year. The clothes are left in my possession to be taken care of. I make a kind of private bonfire in our yard with the sawdust and shavings, and the neighbours come there and have a kind of a spree, and shove one another into the fire, and kick it about the yard, and one thing and another.

“When I am building the guy, I begin about six weeks before 5th of November comes, and then we subscribe a shilling or two each and buy such things as we wants. Then, when we wants more, I goes to my pals, who live close by, and we subscribe another shilling or sixpence each, according to how we gets on in the day. Nearly all those that take out guys are mostly street traders.

“The heaviest expense for any guy I’ve built was 4l. for one of four figures.”

Guy Fawkes (Boy).

“I always go out with a Guy Fawkes every year. I’m seventeen years old, and I’ve been out with a guy ever since I can remember, except last year; I didn’t then, because I was in Middlesex Hospital with an abscess, brought on by the rheumatic fever. I was in the hospital a month. My father was an undertaker; he’s been dead four months: mother carries on the trade. He didn’t like my going out with guys, but I always would. He didn’t like it at all, he used to say it was a disgrace. Mother didn’t much fancy my doing it this year. When I was a very little un, I was carried about for a guy. I couldn’t a been more than seven years old when I first begun. They put paper-hangings round my legs—they got it from Baldwin’s, in the Tottenham Court-road; sometimes they bought, and sometimes got it give ’em; but they give a rare lot for a penny or twopence. After that they put me on a apron made of the same sort of paper—showy, you know—then they put a lot of tinsel bows, and at the corners they cut a sort of tail like there is to farriers’ aprons, and it look stunnin’; then they put on my chest a tinsel heart and rosettes; they was green and red, because it shows off. All up my arms I had bows and things to make a show-off. Then I put on a black mask with a little red on the cheek, to make me look like a devil: it had horns, too. Always pick out a devil’s mask with horns: it looks fine, and frightens the people a’most. The boy that dressed me was a very clever chap, and made a guy to rights. Why, he made me a little guy about a foot high, to carry in my lap—it was piecings of quilting like, a sort of patch-work all sewn together,—and then he filled it with saw-dust, and made a head of shavings. He picked the shavings small, and then sewed ’em up in a little bag; and then he painted a face, and it looked wery well; and he made it a little tinsel bob-tail coat, and a tinsel cap with two feathers on the top. It was made to sit in a chair; and there was a piece of string tied to each of the legs and the arms, and a string come behind; and I used to pull it, and the legs and arms jumped up. I was put in a chair, and two old broom-handles was put through the rails, and then a boy got in front, and another behind, and carried me off round Holborn way in the streets and squares. Every now and then they put me down before a window; then one of ’em used to say the speech, and I used all the time to keep pulling the string of my little guy, and it amused the children at the winders. After they’d said the speech we all shouted hurrah! and then some of them went and knocked at the door and asked ‘Please to remember the guy;’ and the little children brought us ha’pence and pence; and sometimes the ladies and gentlemen chucked us some money out of the winder. At last they carried me into Russell-square. They put me down before a gentleman’s house and begun saying the speech: while they was saying it, up comes a lot o’ boys with sticks in their hands. One of our chaps knowed what they was after, and took the little guy out of my hand, and went on saying the speech. I kept all on sitting still. After a bit one of these ’ere boys says, ‘Oh, it’s a dead guy; let’s have a lark with it!’ and then one of ’em gives me a punch in the eye with his fist, and then snatched the mask off my face, and when he’d pulled it off he says, ‘Oh, Bill, it’s a live un!’ We was afraid we should get the worst of it, so we run away round the square. The biggest one of our lot carried the chair. After we’d run a little way they caught us again, and says, ‘Now then, give us all your money;’ with that, some ladies and gentlemen that see it all came up to ’em and says, ‘If you don’t go we’ll lock you up;’ and so they let us go away. And so we went to another place where they sold masks; and we bought another. Then they asked me to be guy again, but I wouldn’t, for I’d got a black-eye through it already. So they got another to finish out the day. When we got home at night we shared 2s. a-piece. There was five of us altogether; but I think they chisselled me. I know they got a deal more than that, for they’d had a good many sixpences and shillings. People usen’t to think much of a shilling that time a-day, because there wasn’t any but little guys about then; but I don’t know but what the people now encourage little guys most, because they say that the chaps with the big ones ought to go to work.