This morning, being Sunday, went to Petticoat Lane and enjoyed myself.
On turning the corner to go into Middlesex Street, as it it now called, the first thing I saw was a little girl—a Jewess—being tackled for selling Belgian buttonhole flags by two policemen who ultimately marched her off to the police station.
In the Lane, first of all, was a “Royal Ascot Jockey Scales” made of brass and upholstered in gaudy red velvet—a penny a time. A very fat man was being weighed and looked a little distressed on being given his ticket.
“Another stone,” he told the crowd mournfully.
“You’ll have to eat less pork,” someone volunteered and we all laughed.
Next door to the Scales was a man selling gyroscopes. “Something scientific, amusing as well as instructive, illustrating the principles of gravity and stability. What I show you is what I sell—price one shilling. Who?”
I stopped next at a stall containing nothing but caps—“any size, any colour, any pattern, a shilling apiece—now then!” This show was being run by two men—a Jew in a fur cap on one side of the stall and a very powerful-looking sort of Captain Cuttle on the other—a seafaring man, almost as broad as he was long, with a game leg and the voice of a skipper in a hurricane. Both these men were selling caps at a prodigious pace, and with the insouciance of tradesmen sure of their custom. The skipper would seize a cap, chuck it across to a timid prospective purchaser, and, if he dropped it, chuck him over another, crying, with a “yo-heave-ho” boisterousness, “Oh! what a game, what a bees’ nest.”
Upon the small head of another customer, he would squash down his largest sized cap saying at once—
“There, you look the finest gentleman—oh! ah! a little too large.”
At which we all laughed, the customer looked silly, but took no offence.
“Try this,” yells the skipper above the storm, and takes off his own cap. “Oh! ye needn’t be afraid—I washed my hair last—year.” (Laughter.)
Then to his partner, the Jew on the other side of the stall, “Oh! what a face you’ve got. Here! 6d. for anyone who can tell me what it is. Why not take it to the trenches and get it smashed in?”
The Jew wore spectacles and had a soft ingratiating voice and brown doe-like eyes—a Jew in every respect. “Oh!” says he, in the oleaginous Semitic way, and accurately taking up his cue (for all this was rehearsed patter), “my wife says ‘my face is my fortune.’ ”
“No wonder you’re so hard up and ’ave got to take in lodgers. What’s yer name?”
“John Jones,” in a demure wheedling voice.
“Hoo—that’s not your name in your own bloody country—I expect it’s Hullabullinsky.”
“Do you know what my name really is?”
“No.”
“It’s Assenheimopoplocatdwizlinsky Kovorod.” (Loud laughter.)
“I shall call you ‘ass’ for short.”
I was laughing loudly at these two clowns and the skipper observing as much, shouted out to me—
“Parlez-vous Français, M’sieur?”
“Oui, oui,” said I.
“Ah! lah, you’re one of us—oh! what a game! what a bees’ nest,” and all the time he went on selling caps and chucking them at the purchasers.
Perhaps one of the most extraordinary things I saw was a stream of young men who, one after another, came up to a stall, paid a penny and swallowed a glass of “nerve tonic”—a green liquid syphoned out of a large jar—warranted a safe cure for,
“Inward weakness, slightest flurry or body oppressed.”
Another man was pulling teeth and selling tooth powder. Some of the little urchins’ teeth, after he had cleaned them as a demonstration, were much whiter than their faces or his. This was “the original Chas. Assenheim.”
Mrs. Meyers, “not connected with anyone else of the same name in the Lane” was selling eels at 2d., 3d. and 6d. and doing a brisk trade too.
But I should go on for hours if I were to tell everything seen in this remarkable lane during an hour and a half on a Sunday morning. Each stall-holder sells
