ence
and not for his sounds. In spite of his discordant gurglings and
squealings, he is welcomed by the nursery-maids and their infant
tribes of little sturdy rogues in petticoats, who flock eagerly round
him, and purchase the luxury of a half-penny grind, which they perform
_con amore_, seated on the top of his machine. If, when your front
garden is thus invaded, you insist upon his decamping without a fee,
he shews his estimate of the peace and quietness you desiderate by his
unwillingness to retire, which, however, he at length consents to do,
though not without a muttered remonstrance, delivered with the air of
an injured man. He generally contrives to house himself as night draws
on in some dingy taproom, appertaining to the lowest class of
Tom-and-Jerry shops, where, for a few coppers and 'a few beer,' he
will ring all the changes on his instrument twenty times over, until
he and his admiring auditors are ejected at midnight by the
police-fearing landlord.

4. The handcart-organists are a race of a very different and more
enterprising character, and of much more lofty and varied pretensions.
They generally travel in firms of two, three, or even four partners,
drawing the cart by turns. Their equipage consists of an organ of very
complicated construction, containing, besides a deal of very
marvellous machinery within its entrails, a collection of bells,
drums, triangles, gongs, and cymbals, in addition to the usual
quantity of pipes and metal-reeds that go to make up the travelling
organ. The music they play is of a species which it is not very easy
to describe, as it is not once in a hundred times that a stranger can
detect the melody through the clash and clangor of the gross amount of
brass, steel, and bell-metal put in vibration by the machinery. This,
however, is of very little consequence, as it is not the music in
particular which forms the principal attraction: if it serve to call a
crowd together, that is sufficient for their purpose; and it is for
this reason, we imagine, that the effect of the whole is contrived to
resemble, as it very closely does, the hum and jangle of Greenwich
Fair when heard of an Easter Monday from the summit of the Observatory
Hill. No, the main attraction is essentially dramatic. In front of the
great chest of heterogeneous sounds there is a stage about five or six
feet in width, four in height, and perhaps eighteen inches or two feet
in depth. Upon this are a variety of figures