and often in bow windows: you may find
several such shops still remaining: one at the top of the Haymarket: one
in Coventry Street: one in the Strand: there were no fronts of plate
glass brilliantly illuminated to exhibit the contents exposed for sale:
the old-fashioned shopkeeper prided himself on keeping within, and out
of sight, his best and choicest goods. A few candles lit up the shop in
the winter afternoons.

[Illustration: VIEW OF SCHOOL CONNECTED WITH BUNYAN'S MEETING HOUSE.]

To walk in the streets meant the encounter of roughness and rudeness
which would now be thought intolerable. There were no police to keep
order: if a man wanted order he might fight for it. Fights, indeed,
were common in the streets: the waggoners, the hackney coachmen, the
men with the wheelbarrows, the porters who carried things, were always
fighting in the streets: gentlemen were hustled by bullies, and often
had to fight them: most men carried a thick cudgel for self-protection.

The streets were far noisier in the last century than ever they had been
before. Chiefly, this was due to the enormous increase of wheeled
vehicles. Formerly everything came into the City or went out of it on
the backs of pack-horses and pack-asses. Now the roads were so much
improved that waggons could be used for everything, and the long lines
of pack-horses had disappeared from the main roads. In the country lanes
the pack-horse was still employed. Everybody was able to ride, and the
City apprentice, when he had a holiday, always spent it on horseback.
But for everyday the hackney coach was used. Smaller carts were also
coming into use. And for dragging about barrels of beer and heavy cases
a dray of iron, without wheels, was used. All these innovations meant
more noise and still more noise. Had Whittington, in the time of George
II., sat down on Highgate Hill (still a grassy slope), he would have
heard, loud above the sound of Bow Bells, the rumbling of the waggons on
Cheapside.

57. UNDER GEORGE THE SECOND.

PART III.

In walking through the City to-day, one may remark that there is very
little crying of things to sell. In certain streets, as Broad Street,
Whitecross Street, Whitechapel, or Middlesex Street, there is a kind of
open street, fair, or market; but the street cries such as Hogarth
depicted exist no longer. People used to sell a thousand things in the
streets which are now sold in shops. All the little things--thread,
string, pi