gard you as a lunatic, and treat you accordingly. Anyhow he would not do it unless you were to make it well worth his while to comply with your request. Most of the time-honoured London cries have disappeared never to return; but in their places we have noises most unmusical, most melancholy. In summer time we have the cater-wailing of "Ornaments for your fire-screen!" and worse still, the woful wail of Irishmen tearfully exclaiming, "Oranges!-Orangees!" than which a more execrable noise never fell upon the human tympanum. The ballad-singers have all but vanished, but we are little the better for their departure, as in their room come hordes of so-called "musicians," whose blatant row is equally fatal to business and enjoyment. The man who could derive satisfaction from the grinding of an organ or the performances of a street band, must know as much of music as a cow knows of making a curtsey, and would probably derive pleasure from the passing of his wet fingers over a pane of glass, the rolling of a wheel upon a dry axle, or the turning of a door upon a rusty hinge. Our fathers were free from the fell persecution of street music, but we are happily exempt from what must have been a bitter annoyance to them, the swinging to and fro of the sign-boards in front of the shops, a clamour which used to be regarded as an omen of ill weather,— "But when the swinging signs your ears offend How dreadful must that noise of swinging signs have been on stormy nights in mid-winter, more particularly in cases where the shopkeeper had neglected to keep the sign well oiled. It turns one's teeth of an edge to think of it. But "th’ inaudible and noiseless foot of Time," as William happily phrases it, has kicked both the sign-boards of tradesmen and the snoring-boxes of watchmen into the waters of Lethe, and there is little now left to disturb the dreams of slumbering Cocknies, unless it be the mad career of the fire-engines tearing along the street at a furious pace, the white horses galloping for their dear lives, and the firemen in their brazen helmets shouting to the passengers to clear the way,-a turbulent, uproarious spectacle, yet not without a dash of the picturesque. But if we are rather more peaceful than our sires by night, we are in no better case, but rather in much worse, by day, the traffic in the streets being now much greater and far more sonorous than in their time. To say no more about stone pavement or street music, it is really shocking to think how much noise there is that might be prevented. Why will the London boys keep everlastingly whistling? There is no city in the world where the boys in the street whistle so loudly and so badly as London. I wish they wouldn't. If they only knew what annoyance they caused me, I am sure they wouldn't. They are everlastingly at it, though it is not one boy in a hundred who has either an ear or a lip for whistling. And the worst of it is that they all have a run upon the same tune, so that for weeks together one hears nothing else but a barbarous outrage upon the one air, the song of the Gens d'armes in Genevieve de Brabant, or the "Marsellaise," or the "Conspirators' Chorus," or that thrice-accursed timepiece, "My Grandfather's Clock," as the case may be. Again I say—and let it be conclusive of the matter-I wish they wouldn't. People who deal in the liquor that passes for "milk" should learn how to pronounce the word if they won't sell the thing; and the vendors of cat's-meat, who now shout out something that makes human beings shudder, however it may please the cats, should be made to mend their speech, and not emulate the midnight utterances of the animals to whose appetites they administer. In gentlemen's houses, conducted as they should be, and in west-end clubs of the first class, the servants tread noiselessly as though they were walking upon velvet and do your beliests most peacefully, but in private houses of inferior "ton," and in the generality of taverns and coffee-houses, the servants knock about the china and glass as though they were skittles, and appear to think that work is inseparable from row. Nor is it domestics only who offend against the peace which should prevail in good society. What can be more unbecoming than the strife of tongues at a dinner-table as though each guest were seeking to talk down the other. Table-talk should run in a bright, smooth, silvery current, not in a foaming, boisterous tide. Then again there are people who, whether in public or private, appear to regard their noses as trumpets, and play upon them accordingly. This is intolerable. How dares any man to pull out his pocket-handkerchief like a banner, and use it with such uproar that I start affrighted from my seat, and fancy that Prince Bismarck has landed with an invading army, and is summoning me to surrender? How dares any man, I repeat, thus to terrify and torture me? I was reading a day or two ago in the British Museum. You might have heard a feather drop, so profound was the silence, when suddenly the man next me played a solo upon his nose, which rang through the dome for all the world like the flourish of a bugle. "Sir," said I to the performer,* "you appear to be a military man. Is that the Assembly?' or is it the Retreat?' What are we to do?" "Thunder and turf, sir," quoth he, "I suppose a man may blow his nose without asking your permission." "Of a certainty," I replied, but no one has a right to make his nose an instrument of torture to his fellow-creatures." He seemed to be of a different opinion, so there the conversation dropped, for I hate to argue with any man. Only I thought to myself how very wise those Spanish innkeepers were who in the olden time used to make "ruido" an item in their bills, charging their guests for the noise they made. Revolving the matter in the innermost recesses of my so-called "mind," and bringing to the consideration of it all the thought and research at my command (not much, to be sure), I have arrived at the conclusion that mothers are answerable for not a little of the unnecessary noises which so fatally disturb the repose and impair the dignity of human life. Long before a child reaches that mysterious age when it begins to "take notice," it is supplied with artificial and altogether superfluous appliances for kicking up a row. It has first a rattle, then a squeaking trumpet, then a drum, as though to teach it from the earliest dawn of life that the end and aim of human existence is the making a noise in the world. "I have seen a monkey," says Dean Swift, "overthrow all the dishes and plates in a kitchen merely for the pleasure of seeing them tumble, and hearing the clatter they made in their fall." That is all well enough for a monkey; but, surely, man born of woman—or however otherwise descended -should know better. I protest that if I were с a mother I would as soon think of giving my baby a loaded revolver as a coral and bells. When the streets are all paved with wood; when no other than anthracite coal, consuming its own smoke, is burnt in the grates; when nose-trumpets are forbidden by law, when whistling boys are birched, when the Thames is embanked with silent highways from Chelsea to Millwall and from Battersea to Greenwich, and when mothers perceive the wisdom of inculcating in their offspring the grand lesson of making as little noise as they possibly can in the course of their earthly career, then, and not till then, will the London Row disappear, and London become a pleasant place to live in. |