CHAPTER V.HOW LONDON IS AMUSED.

THE REASON WHY

“I will show you the reason for it,” he said, quietly. Just then a bold Briton came in and the landlord directed the maid behind the bar to set down a bottle. The astonished customer was invited to help himself, after the American custom. Hewasan astonished Briton, but he managed to express his gratificationat the innovation. Seizing the bottle he poured out an ordinary dinner tumbler full, and, looking grieved because the glass was no larger, drank it off without a wink.

A BOLD BRITON TRYING THE AMERICAN CUSTOM.

I could easily see why the British landlord measures the liquor to the British public. Two such customers on the American plan would bankrupt a very opulent proprietor.

The quality of liquor used by the better classes is perhaps a trifle better than that consumed in America, at least so I have been informed by those who use liquors. A vast quantity of brandy is imported from France, and it is so cheap there that it doubtless approximates to purity. The whiskies drank are entirely Scotch and Irish, the English making none whatever. Wines are consumed in great quantities, and there is noquestion as to the purity of the cheaper grades, which is to say they are undoubtedly the pure juice of the grape. The duty on wines is so small that there is no inducement, as in America, for the manufacture of bogus varieties.

But the liquors consumed in London by the lower classes are probably the most execrable and vile that the ingenuity of the haters of mankind ever invented. The brandy they drink is liquid lightning—chain lightning—which goes crashing through the system, breaking down and destroying every pulsation towards anything good. The gin—well, their gin is the very acme, the absolute summit, of vileness. There is a quarrel in every gill of it, a wife-beating in every pint, and a murder in every quart. A smell of a glass of it nearly drove me to criminal recklessness.

A LONDON GIN DRINKING WOMAN.

And yet they all drink it, and especially the women. The most disgusting sight the world can produce is a London gin drinking woman standing at a bar, waiting feverishly for her “drain,” with unkempt hair, a small but intensely dirty shawl, with stockingless feet, and shoes down at the heel, with eyes rheumy and watery, that twinkle with gin light out from the obscurity of gin-swelled flesh, with a face on which the scorching fingers of a depraved appetite have set red lines, as ineffaceable as though they had been placed there by red-hot iron, every one of which is the unavailing protest of a long-outraged stomach.

THE GENERAL BOOZE.

There she stands, a blotch upon the face of nature and a satire upon womanhood. It is difficult to realize that thisbloated mass was once a fair young girl, and had a mother who loved her, and it is equally difficult to comprehend how any power, even that of Nature, could ever make use of it. But the elements are kindly to man. When they have done their work, sweet flowers may grow out of this putridity.

In America this sort of being exists, but it is herded somewhere out of sight. It does not stand at the bars in the best streets to offend the eyes of decent people. But it is everywhere here. It is in the Strand and on Piccadilly and Regent street.

The average Englishman of the lower, and even the middle classes, dearly loves to booze. Drunkenness is not the result either of conviviality or desperation as it is in other countries. It is the one thing longed for and set deliberately about.

THE POOR MAN IS SICK.

Rare John Leech, illustrated it in his picture inPunch, years ago. A man was lying very drunk at the foot of a lamp-post. A benevolent old lady of the Exeter Hall school seeing him, called a cabman. “The poor man is sick,” quoth the kindly dame, “why don’t you help him?” “Sick, is he,” replied cabby, “sick! don’t I vish I ’ad just ’arf of vot ails him?” The cabby spoke the honest sentiment of his heart. The Londoner of his class loves it for the effect it has upon him,and as he accomplishes his design with English gin, he carries with him a breath that suggests the tomb of a not very ancient king, a breath which has a density, a center, as one might say.

“THAT NIGGER IS MINE, AND WORTH FIFTEEN HUNDRED DOLLARS.”

THE KIND OF LIQUOR.

At twelve o’clock, Saturday night, he would fight a rattlesnake and give the snake the first bite. Were a venomous snake to bite such an Englishman the man would never know it, for alcohol is a sure cure for reptilian poison, but the poor snake would wriggle faintly away to some secluded spot and die sadly. This is why, I presume, I have seen no rattlesnakes in London; they cannot safely prosecute the business forwhich they were created. They are similarly worried, I believe, in West Virginia.

To drink this vile stuff successfully one would want his stomach glass-lined and backed up with fire-brick. I never would attempt it except as the man did in Kentucky. He walked into a bar, and distrusting the quality of the whisky, called up a negro and gave him a glass before drinking his own. The landlord, divining his purpose, knocked the glass out of the negro’s hand. “No you don’t!” said the Boniface, “that nigger is mine, and worth fifteen hundred dollars. Get an Irishman to try it on.”

And while I am about it I may say that alcoholization is not confined to the lower order by any means. Almost every body drinks something beside water. The tradesman who can afford it has claret at his table, and during the day his “drains” of brandy are very frequent. The gentry and nobility drink more costly wines and better brandy, but liquor is everywhere. Nothing is done without the accompanying drink; it is universal and in all places. The climate prevents the injury that would visit the same man in America, but it hurts. If the English could only live as temperately as the Americans they would be the greatest race of people on earth.

The exclusiveness of the English is manifest in their vices as in their virtues. Every bar is divided in the front by partitions, one for each class. Over the one designated as “the private bar,” you get precisely the same liquors as at the others, but you pay more for it, because laborers and the like are not admitted. One compartment exacts four pence, the next three pence, and the last and lowest two pence. But all are served out of the same wood.

But very few men are employed behind English bars, women filling those places. The London bar-maid is an institution to be studied. To begin with she must be pretty, for being pretty is a part of her qualifications. As her feet cannot be seen, owing to her standing behind the bar, sheisgenerally pretty. Then they are required to dress well, and all in one establishment dress their hair alike. In one place the maids part their hair on one side, in another on the other, and in a third in the middle. They are alike in each shop.

They are required to make themselves pleasant to customers, for each one is expected to influence an amount of trade to the house. They are exceedingly free and easy damsels, without being positively indelicate, and there isn’t a cabman in the city who is so much a master of chaff as they are. They will wink and leer at you in the most free way possible, they will talk to the very verge of indelicacy if they think it will please you, and if they form another judgment of your tastes they will be as sedate as priests. These bar-maids were all born a great while ago, and have improved all their time.

They are not only expected to be pretty, but they must have the power of extracting drinks for themselves from the young or old fellows who delight to chaff with them. If the young fellow who is enjoying the delight of her conversation is not sufficiently prompt, the warning eye of the landlord or landlady intimates that she has wasted enough time upon him, and she simply asks him, when he has ordered a drink for himself, if he won’t treat her, and he always does. Per consequence by eleven at night the gentle maids are in a condition highly satisfactory to the house, for their drunkenness represents so much money in his till. He who serves the British public with drink would utilize the very soul of an employe to make money, man or woman.

As a rule the wife of the landlord of a popular drinking place takes personal charge of the bar, and she is a thousand times more cruel and grasping than her husband. When a woman does unsex herself, she can give a man points in wickedness that he never dreamed of. These wives are as eager to have liquor paid for for themselves as bar-maids, and the sharp eye they keep upon the girls to see that they swallow enough to make the business profitable is something wonderful.

They are invariably dressed very richly, with elaborate coiffures, and sparkling with diamonds. As the British young man prefers blonde hair to any other, the landladies are mostly of that persuasion. If they were born brunettes there are arts by which they can be changed, and besides wigs are very cheap in this country.

THE EDIBLES ON THE BARS.

The British woman drinks as much as the British man, and possibly more. I am not speaking of the low, degradedwoman, but of the respectability. It is nothing singular to see women, respectable women, sitting in bars with their husbands and lovers, and the amount of stout and “brandy cold,” they make away with is something wonderful.

I was through the wonderful park at Richmond the other day. It was a holiday, and all London was out of the city in the parks. All the little roadside inns were filled with the populace, women and children being largely in the majority; and there was never a woman, no matter if she had a child at the breast, who did not have a monster pot of pewter filled either with porter or ale. And they gave it to their little children as freely as an American mother would milk.

The drinking house in London is, as a rule, especially for drinking. There are no free lunches, no nibbling bits, free on any bar. Nothing but liquids are sold. An American speculator conceived the brilliant idea of starting a bar with the addition of the American free lunch, with which to attract trade. It did attract altogether too much. In twenty minutes the lunch, which should have lasted all day, was gone, and the British public was indignant that it was not renewed. They pronounced the proprietor a swindle, and the speculation was a disastrous failure.

At some of the bars an attempt is made to take the curse off the liquor traffic by making some pretence of selling eatables. But the British public knows this is a sham, and resents it by never buying any comestibles at the counter. The British public scorns eating in such a place, and insists upon drinks. Indeed, the British public won’t eat at all as long as it can drink.

What they generally have in these places under glass covers, are curiously indigestible meat pies, sandwiches, cheese, cakes and buns. Sometimes at railway stations a hungry Briton buys and partakes of these things, but not often, and never without his glass of something to wash it down. This is the time I forgive him for drinking. It is necessary.

The sandwich is made either of ham or beef, and may be said to be the universal cold refreshment. It is about four inches long by two wide, and is a miracle of thinness. It isthe thinnest thing on earth. I have often purchased them, not to eat, but to admire this quality. How bread and meat can be cut so thin, especially bread, is one of the mysteries that never will be solved till I penetrate a public kitchen and see the operation. It is an art I suppose, and the professor of it gets, I presume, a very high salary. He ought to. The bread is stringy enough and the meat tough enough to be cut as thin as might be desired, but the puzzle is how any one can acquire the skill to cut it, that way. But they do it. The English sandwich is more an object of interest to me than the obelisk, and is just about as digestible. I would as soon undertake to eat the one as the other.

The meat pie is made of hashed beef, the fat being put in liberally, enclosed in a wrapper of dough, and all baked together, in some sort of way. I could procure and write out the process, but being a true American and loving the American people I will not. It is utterly indigestible. I ate one at elevenP.M.one night, and woke up in the morning feeling as though I had swallowed the plaster bust of the infant Samuel at prayer that stood on my mantel. The pie is a trifle worse than the sandwich. The cheese cake may be dismissed with the simple remark that it is a trifle worse than the meat pie. The bun is a stand-off as to the others. Altogether they make a frightful stomachic quartet. But the British public, who know nothing of our hash and other luxuries, are content with them, and I don’t know as I shall undertake to reform them in this particular. I pity them, but there are so many things to reform here that I shall not attempt any movement in that direction. Life is very short.

TOBACCO.

The Englishman takes his liquor straight, or neat, as they call it. Mixed drinks are entirely unknown. The sherry cobbler, the mint julep, the fragrant cock-tail, are never heard of in regular English bars, but the drouthy man who drinks, and they all do, takes either brandy or Scotch or Irish whisky, raw from a barrel, and swallows his portion and walks away satisfied. One woman in a famous drinking place was taught by an American to make cock-tails, and the fame of the mixture drew all the Americans to this particular place. The proprietor was sore displeased at this trade, and raised the price twopence above what was regular, to keep it away. It took too much of the girl’s time to compound the mixture.

Drinking does not have the effect upon an Englishman that it does upon an American. The Englishman is a more stolid and phlegmatic man anyhow, and the climate is less exciting. There is not the exhilaration in the atmosphere that there is in America, and the moist humidity that you exist in is very favorable to the consumption of alcoholic drinks. I had got so before I had been here a week, that I think I could have endured a glass of brandy and water. I did not do it, but I say I could have done it.

The prices of liquors average quite as high as in America, and tobacco and everything made of it, is much higher and the quality is vile. A decent cigar, or one counted decent here, costs twenty-five cents, it being of the grade that in New York sells for ten cents.

No tobacco is chewed except by sailors, and the Englishman, very properly, considers it a disgusting habit, only to be practiced by very low people. In consequence of the high price of tobacco, pipes and cigarettes are very generally used. The Englishman of the better class smokes his pipe upon the street, the same as an American does his cigar. He prefers a pipe to a cigar, possibly because it is better, and possibly because it is cheaper. Your Englishman loves dearly to get the value of his money, and he generally does it.

The lover of drink in America, especially our German fellow citizens, are emphatic in their denunciation of the liquor laws of the United States. They ought to live in England a little while to appreciate the privileges they have at home. Hartford, Connecticut, is, I believe, a paradise to those who live there. One old lady who was born and had always lived in Hartford, came to die—an impertinence of Nature, as all Hartford people firmly believe. People should die in other places, but not in Hartford. But this old lady had come to death, and her minister was consoling her.

“I trust, Mrs. Thompson,” he said, professionally, “that you are prepared to die?”

“I am,” was her answer; “I owe no pew rent.”

“And are you content with the change?”

“Well, on the whole, yes. Heaven is no doubt a very nice place, but I shall greatly miss my Hartford privileges.”

There is no especial moral to this story, except that if our German population were compelled to endure English law they would greatly miss their American privileges. While you can get all the drink you want during the day, you must either have it at home or go without it after twelve o’clock at night.

In London no liquor can be procured after twelve o’clock at night. Every bar, big or little, is closed, and this law is not evaded, for the risk is too great. A man’s license would be taken from him immediately, and without remedy.

Persons are not licensed to sell liquor in England—it is the premises that are licensed. The Board having it in charge license one public house in a district, basing it upon the supposed necessity, and these premises hold this license till deprived of it by violation of law. If you desire to sell liquor you cannot go and rent a room and open your bar; you are compelled to buy the lease of a place which carries the license with it. Consequently a licensed place is a valuable piece of property. One at the corner of St. Martin’s street and Orange, a dingy building in a dingy neighborhood, was bought by an American to be used as an American bar, and he paid twenty-five thousand dollars bonus for the lease. The annual rental of the place is fifteen hundred dollars, and the lease for which he paid the bonus has forty-five years to run. For any other business the bonus would have been next to nothing in that neighborhood.

EARLY CLOSING.

Sunday is an especially drouthy day in London. All the bars are closed till one o’clockP.M., and are then open but an hour. Then they are closed till six, and are permitted to keep open from that hour till eleven. And let it be remembered that law in England is law. You cannot laugh at it as you do in America. There is no evasion of this law attempted. The publics are required to be closed and they are closed. There are no side-doors, as in New York—there is no selling on the sly—they are closed. The only exception is at the railroad stations. The refreshment bars there are permitted to be kept open as long as trains arrive or depart, for the British Government recognizes the necessity of an Englishman having his grogtill the prescribed hour for his getting into his bed. The thirsty soul who pants for beer after twelve goes to Charing Cross station, and buys a ticket to the first station out, which is “tuppence ha’penny,” or five cents. Then he walks into the bar, and being a “traveler,” can buy, drink and pay for all the stimulants he desires, till the last train has arrived or departed for the night. His ticket he puts into his pocket, to be used when he desires.

The night trade in liquor is something enormous. A landlord in the Haymarket, whose lease is about expiring, is now paying one thousand dollars a year rent, and the proprietors have notified him that his renewal will cost him just five times that sum. He told me that he should not renew, but that he would gladly if he were allowed to keep open till half-past twelve, a half hour after the regular time. That half hour each day would more than make the difference in rent.

A walk along Piccadilly after twelve explains this difference. The street, from end to end, is crowded with prostitutes, and drunken rakes who think they are having a good time, but they are not. They walk up and down, chaffing with these poor unfortunates. They take them into the publics, and pay for their drinks, all of which the landlord not only approves of but encourages. And the English prostitute can drink as heartily and just as long as any man alive. She has just as drouthy a system, and it takes just as much to fill it. And there they sit, and chaff, and booze, till the clock strikes twelve and the place is closed. The landlord turns off the gas and puts up his shutters, cursing the law that compels him to close just as his harvest begins.

As there are literally tens of thousands of these women walking the street, and as ninety per cent of them are drunk at ten, with a carrying capacity of continuing to drink every minute as long as anybody will pay for it, and as there is an equal number of men prowling the streets whose highest idea of amusement is to pay for it, the importance of an extra half hour after midnight may be appreciated.

But it is of no use. Law is law in England, and whether the citizen likes it or not, he is compelled to obey it in letter and spirit. Were a public house to be open a minute after the hour, a policeman would walk in and close it for him, and thenext day the nearest magistrate would revoke his license, and he could never get one again. No proprietor would rent him a place, for the license is too valuable to be risked by a violator of law.

There are a few bars in London that make a specialty of American drinks, which are very curious. The names they palm off as American are very funny to an American, because they are never heard of over there. None of my readers ever go into bars, except for curiosity, but just imagine this list of drinks:

“Copper-cooler,” “Pick-me-up,” “Our Swizzle,” “Maiden’s Blush,” “Bosom-caresser,” “Corpse-reviver,” “Flash-of-Lightning,” and so on.

And these names are actually believed by Englishmen to be genuinely American, and in common use in the States.

Ice is about the scarcest thing in England, and cannot be had at the majority of bars. At some of the very best it will be furnished, if very forcibly asked for, but then in too small quantities to be satisfactory to an American, who is accustomed to taking his drinks ice cold. The frozen reminiscence of Winter is rather expensive here, and, besides that, the Englishman very rightly considers it unhealthy. The water is drank in its natural temperature, and it is really wonderful how soon one becomes accustomed to it.

The prices of strong beverages run about the same as in the United States. Brandy is three pence, six cents of our Bird of Freedom money, and when the amount is considered, your three pence buys about the same as twelve and one-half cents in New York. Malt liquors are about the same. The glass is a trifle smaller, and the regular price at the small publics is two pence, an equivalent, quantity considered, of five cents.

The quality of malt liquors is a long way below the American article, and America, singular as it may seem, drinks better English ale than the Englishman does. The ale made here for home consumption is vile stuff, while that made for export is infinitely better. The Englishman eats what he cannot sell.

To get at these facts concerning drinking has cost me an inconceivable amount of wear and tear of feeling, which sacrifice I trust my readers will appreciate.

TOpass from rum to amusement is a very easy and natural transition, for unfortunately the people who drink are, as a rule, those who need and will have amusement. Having done with liquor forever, I am glad to get to a subject not quite so disagreeable.

London supports forty theaters proper; that is, forty theaters devoted entirely to dramatic or operatic representations, and several hundred places of amusement of all kinds, which may be classed as variety shows.

The regular theaters are a long way beyond those in America. I dislike to acknowledge this, but candor and fairness compels it. I cannot tell a lie, even for national pride. My hatchet is bright—it has never been used much. The London theaters will not compare with those of any of the large American cities in point of size, or convenience of access. They are generally situated in out of the way places, and the halls and entrances are as shabby as anything can be, but when you are once in nothing can be more delightful. There is a softness in the appointments, a perfection in the furnishing, a good taste generally that America has not. We are splendid, but it must be confessed, rather garish and loud.

The character of the performances excels the style of the theaters. Their pieces are put upon the stage with an attention to detail, and with a strength of cast which we at home never see, even in the best.

THE LONDON THEATERS.

I witnessed a piece at the St. James, the time of which was the First Charles. In a drawing-room scene musical instruments

ST. THOMAS HOSPITAL AND HOUSES OF PARLIAMENT.

were necessary. In America it would have been nothing singular had a Chickering piano been used, and a parlor set in reps. Imagine the delight of seeing a drawing-room furnished with furniture of the period, with an old harpsichord, such as the ladies of the time used, with the ancient zittern, and the gorgeous harp, with the chairs and couches precisely as they were in the country house of the time. The costumes were not mere guess work—they were designed and constructed by a professional costumer, who made studies from pictures, and put upon the stage men and women of King Charles’ day. This was a delight, in and of itself, that paid one for his time and expenditure, even if he cared nothing for the play.

And then the acting. If there is any one thing in the way of amusements that is utterly and fiendishly detestable, it is the acting of the usual child. The mother or father who trains the ten year old phenomenon to play children’s parts, takes it as far away from childhood as he can possibly, and the child does not play a child at all. He does, or tries to do,Hamlet, in children’s clothes. But nothing of the sort is permitted in London. The child plays the child, and does it as it should be done. It was a comfort to see two children on the floor in one scene, playing at the game of “See-saw, Margery Daw,” and doing it exactly as children would do in real life, instead of mouthing the lines like an old-style actor in “Macbeth.”

And all the way down there was the same perfection in the acting as in the setting of the piece. There was not one star and twenty “sticks,” as is the rule over the water, but the servant who merely said, “My lord, the carriage waits,” did that bit just as well as the hero or heroine of the piece.

The Englishman is a very thorough sort of a man, and wants what he has done well, according to his notion of what well is.

The places of amusement, other than the regular theaters, are of as great variety as they are vast in number. The prevailing attraction is, of course, the regular variety theater, which does not differ materially from its brother in America. It is singular that the stock attraction at the variety theater isthe negro minstrel act. Minstrelsy originated in America forty years ago, but it has as firm a hold upon England as it has upon America, and a trifle firmer. No programme is complete without it, and no part of the performances are so heartily enjoyed.

But their minstrelsy would drive an American negro crazy. It is sufficient for a London audience to have a performer black his face and hands, and put on a long-tailed coat, and striped trowsers, and sing negro songs. The rich, mellow accent of the American African, the rollicking humor, the funny grotesqueness, all that is wanting. At any music hall you shall hear the songs popular in America sung by a cockney with all the cockney peculiarities of speech, even to the misplacing of the h’s.

The leg business is even more common and more indecent than in America, and variety performance is more highly flavored generally. Magic and athletic performances are greatly in favor, albeit fine vocalism and instrumental performance of a very high character must be interspersed.

These variety performances are attended by all classes. The respectable mechanic and his family, the professional man and his family, the thief, pickpocket, and prostitute, are all mingled in one common mass, the only division being the prices in different parts of the house. And here, as everywhere, drinking goes on incessantly and forever. Waiters move about through the audience, taking orders for beverages, and men and women drink and guzzle, and men smoke during the entire performance. No matter what else stops, the flow of beer never does. It is very like Time in this particular, constantly moving.

The life of a variety actor is a very busy one after eight at night. If he has any popularity at all he has engagements at three and even four theaters. He sings one song and responds to threeencores, then throwing himself into a cab he is driven to another and to another, the time of his appearance at each being fixed to a minute.

AN ENGLISH IDEA OF A GOOD TIME.

Singular as it may seem, the wretches who sing the most idiotic songs, of the “champagne Charley” kind, compositions so utterly and entirely stupid that one wonders that any audiencewould endure them for a minute, are the most popular. They sing them in extravagant evening costumes, in the most doleful and melancholy way, and call themselves “comiques.” One of them, probably the nearest approach to an idiot of any man on the English stage, makes from two hundred to three hundred dollars a week, and is in demand all the time.

INTERIOR OF A VARIETY HALL.

But they have a good time at these theaters. To hear a woman sing a slang song dressed—or rather undressed—is not calculated to inflict much wear and tear upon the mind, and as all the performances are of the alleged humorous order there is abundant room for chaff and talk of like cheerfulnature, which is further aided and promoted by the consumption of beer. The parties seem to enjoy it, and I presume they do.

The low Londoner has very brutal tastes. His greatest delight is a prize fight; a dog fight comes next in his estimation; a rat pit is satisfactory in default of anything more bloody; a cock-fight will answer as an appetizer; and a horse race is pleasing, though that shades up into something too near respectability for him.

A dog fight in London is a sight that is worth seeing just once, if studies ofinhuman nature are what you want. The arena is always behind a “sporting public,” on whose tables in the parlor you shall always find the flash and sporting papers of the metropolis, and the walls of which are decorated with engravings of prize fights, portraits of famous dogs, and highly colored lithographs of noted horse encounters.

Gathered around the arena will be a hundred or more of “the fancy,” who were to me anything but fancy. They are the broad-jawed, soap-locked, sturdy brutes, of the Bill Sykes type, beer-bloated and gin-inflamed, who subsist by practices which, if not absolutely criminal, come as close to it as possible.

The dogs are of the English bull variety, those plucky, tenacious brutes who will die rather than yield, or even make any manifestation of pain.

At the signal the brute dogs are let loose upon each other, the human dogs about expressing the keenest possible delight at any especial and exceedingly bloody performance. The highest pleasure is attained, and the wildest enthusiasm is evoked, when one dog gets the shoulder or jaw of the other in his iron jaws, and holds it there, while the other literally eats him up. Then wagers are laid as to which will hold out the longest, and every movement is watched with the keenest solicitude, and when the bloody drama ends in the death of one or both, and the wagers are settled, the conversation flows naturally into a dog channel, and the victories and defeats of past years are discussed, much as soldiers discuss their achievements.

PUNCH AND JUDY.

Dogs of this breed, of approved courage and strength, are of great value, and large sums of money are hazarded upon their performances. The aristocratic dog fanciers can have aprivate match made for them at any time for from one to five pounds.

Of course there are any quantity of aquariums and menageries, and institutions of a supposed usefully scientific nature, which are largely attended, but the variety theater, or music hall, as it is called, is the stock amusement of the Londoner. He can drink to better advantage in them than anywhere else, and that, after all, is the principal business of his life.

The street amusements are beyond any possibility of enumeration or description. You will not walk a dozen blocks without seeing the very absurd and very brutal Punch and Judy, which has delighted England for centuries, and seems to be immortal. One would naturally suppose that when a boy had laughed at two wooden figures manipulated by a man inside of a box, knocking each other on the head, with squeaks and idiotic dialogue, every day up to his twenty-first year, would naturally pass it by ever afterward, but it is not so. I have seen venerable men, who were doubtless bank presidents or clergymen, or something of the eminently respectable kind, stop in front of a Punch and Judy show, and laugh as heartily at the ancient performance as they did when they were boys in roundabouts. And they would stand out the performance, and at its conclusion give the performer their two pence, and go away as if they had been amused.

There never has been any change in Punch and Judy from the time it was brought to England from Italy. The fun is now, as then, in Punch knocking Judy on the head with his stick, and the shrieks of Judy with an expression on her face of enjoyment. That is all there is of it, and all there ever has been. And singular as it may seem, it is the first amusement of an English boy, and it delights him till he dies. He enjoyed it at eight, and just the same at eighty. No doubt he has a vague idea that he will find a Punch and Judy show in heaven when he reaches it.

But Punch and Judy shows are not all the amusements of the great city. Garden hose not being common, owing to the fewness of gardens and the limited use of water, the hand organ flourishes in all its native ferocity, the grinders being, as over the water, Italian noblemen with their wives. Andthey are just as dirty and grimy here as there. The mixed brass and string banditti perambulate the streets making the day and early night hideous, and in the side streets where the policeman is infrequent the street juggler plies his vocation.

THE MAGIC PURSE.

MUSICAL NUISANCES.

One, for instance, has a common purse with four shillings. He places the four shillings in the purse, the country yokel sees them placed therein, and he chinks the purse. So far as the countrymen’s eyes and ears go there can be no doubt as to the fact of the four shillings being in the purse. Then the fakir offers to sell the purse to the countryman for sixpence, which,were the shillings actually inside, would certainly be a bargain. The countryman pays the sixpence, and straightway opens the purse, but he does not find the sixpence therein. It is as empty as his head. He finds that he has paid sixpence for a purse dear at a penny, and he retires amid the jeers of the populace.

As the clever juggler only finds a few victims each day, and as from each he makes only ten cents, I don’t see how he expects to ever retire from business and live upon his hard earned capital. The skill, knowledge of human nature, and hard work necessary to the successful prosecution of this little swindle would make him rich, with half the wear and tear. But such men would rather work a day to swindle somebody out of sixpence than to earn a dollar by honest work in a quarter of the time. That is why I shall never go into the business of juggling with four shillings and a penny purse. It is disreputable, and then it doesn’t pay.

Couples of negro minstrels are a common sight on the streets, one armed with a banjo, and another with a concertina, that he plays with an atrocious disregard of time and tune, which under a despotism would consign him to a block. They roam from house to house and play, as they call it. The helpless family, worried to the very verge of madness, throw them sixpence, and they move on. They stand and play till they get their sixpence. The race is not as it was in Jem Bagg’s day. He played the clarionet. “Ven the man tosses me a sixpence,” was his remark, and says ‘Now, my good man, move hon,’ I gently says to him, says I, ‘I never moves hon for a sixpence. I knows the vally of peace and quietness too much for that, and then, hif ’e doesn’t throw me another sixpence, I tips him my corkscrew hovertoor, and that halways fetches ’im.’ ”

In this degenerate day either the street musicians have forgotten their “corkscrew overtoors,” or they are satisfied with less money. A sixpence moves them on now certainly, but woe be to you if you are short the sixpence.

Next door to me lives a deaf man who is a bachelor. It is his delight to have the musicians come to this house. He sits in the doorway, and they play and play, and he assumes anecstatic expression, and they wonder why he doesn’t order them to “move on,” but he doesn’t. It amuses him, and they play, till, lost in amazement at his powerful endurance, they put up their instruments sadly and move on of their own accord. I get very little amusement out of him now. The majority of the fiends have found him out.

THE MAN WHO WAS MUSIC PROOF.

ONEof the stock sights in London which every foreigner as well as every man, woman and child from the country who goes to London, does with great regularity, is Madame Tussaud’s Museum. It is known the world over and is as regular a thing to see as the Tower.

A great many years ago, some time since the flood, a Swiss woman named Tussaud, who had studied art in Paris, took the brilliant notion into her wise head that money was better than fame, and instead of spoiling marble she commenced doing some very good things in wax. She brought her figures to London and opened a museum, which she added to and enlarged as men and women became of sufficient interest to attract attention, until she got pretty much everybody of whom the world ever heard.

She died many years ago, but the collection was continued by her family, three generations of which have waxed rich and gone to join those whom they put so well in wax in life.

This wonderful museum, which actually deserves all the attention it gets, is filled with really excellent figures of the entire line of English Kings, dressed in the costumes of the period in which they lived, including arms, although court dresses generally adorn them. As the Tussaud family were, and are, artists, these figures are not the limp, misshapen, grinning effigies usually exhibited, but are in size, stature, color and general grouping, perfect.

I cannot say that the effigies of King Edward and Richard, and those other ancient marauders, are correct, for I neversaw them in life. They died many years ago. But all you have to do is what Dicken’s Marchioness did with the orange peel wine: “Make believe very hard,” and they will do. The faces were modeled from portraits, and their dresses were made from actual costumes preserved in the curious repositories of which London is full. The visitor gets some notion of what the subjects were like, and that ought to be and is satisfactory.

MADAME TUSSAUD.

AMERICAN WORTHIES.

You see, standing or sitting, marvelous likenesses of all the great soldiers and statesmen of England, but heavens! how our poor Americans have been abused! Washington is about as like our Washington as he is like an Ohio River coal-boatcaptain. Ex-President Grant has good cause for action for libel, for such a face as they have put upon him could not have been on a third corporal of the poorest company in the very worst North Carolina regiment, and President Hayes and Garfield have been similarly treated. That of Franklin is a tolerable likeness of the maker of infernal maxims, but there was a malicious design evident on the part of the artists to dwarf the Americans, as I fancy there was to enlarge and exaggerate the Englishmen.

The groups are something wonderful. The Lying-in-State of the Czar, a recent addition, is a miracle of naturalness and awful beauty, as is the death of Pope Pius; and they are so natural that one cannot help feeling that he is in the presence of actual death, and not a counterfeit presentment.

WAX FIGURES OF AMERICANS.

The Museum contains, among other curiosities that are of interest, the identical coach used by Napoleon at the battle of Waterloo, with a vast number of other relics of the great Corsican.From the number of Napoleonic relics I fancy that the Madame was at heart a French woman, though she was making her money from the English.

Great halls are filled with correct statuary in wax of the world’s great, or notorious men, all of which have to be “done,” as a matter of course.

But the great point, and one which no visitor ever fails to visit is the “Chamber of Horrors.” You pay a sixpence extra—there is always sixpence extra in England—and you are introduced to the most cheerful assemblage of monsters that the world has ever produced.

If there ever was a murder committed of an especially atrocious description, one done under peculiarly horrifying and terrible circumstances, here is a wax figure of the murderer, and, if possible, of the victim.

There is the original guillotine which made the acquaintance of so many necks during the various French revolutions. There is the identical scaffold which was devised by a man condemned to be hung, and on which he suffered, with forty-eight others afterward, before it was retired, and there are ropes and delightful articles of that nature with which criminals have suffered, and in such numbers that we come to the conclusion that the principal business of the English and French is to kill somebody and get hung for it.

The two criminals in which I took the liveliest interest were Messrs. Burke and Hare, of Edinburgh, Scotland. These gentlemen had a contract with the medical university of Edinburgh, to furnish the students with corpses for dissection, which they did by resurrecting them from various church-yards.

Mr. Burke, who was evidently the leader in the enterprise, remarked one night to Mr. Hare,—that is, I presume he did:

“Why go out this dark and rainy night and dig in the damp earth for corpses? Digging corpses is all wrong. If the friends of the deceased should ever discover that a corpse had been abstracted it would occasion the most profound feeling. We should have more respect for the survivors than to raise their dead, and then, in the interest of science, we should give the students fresher bodies for dissection. I am inflexibly opposed to digging any more.”

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