s until this hour before making her large
purchases. For now excellent joints and rabbits and other trifles are
put up for auction. The laureates are wonderful fellows, many of them, I
imagine, decayed music-hall men. A good man in this line makes a very
decent thing out of it. The usual remuneration is about eight or ten
shillings for the night and whatever beer they want. And if you are
shouting for nearly six hours in the heavy-laden air of Salmon Lane, you
want plenty of beer and you earn all you get. They have a spontaneous
wit about them that only the Cockney possesses. Try to take a rise out
of one of them, and you will be sadly plucked. Theirs is Falstaffian
humour--large and clustering: no fine strokes, but huge, rich-coloured
sweeps. It is useless to attempt subtleties in the roar of a Saturday
night. What you have to aim at is the obvious--but with a twist;
something that will go home at once; something that can be yelled or, if
the spirit moves you, sung. It is, in a word, the humour of the Crowd.

At about eleven o'clock, the laureate, duly refreshed, will mount on the
outside counter, where he can easily reach the rows of joints. Around
him gathers the crowd of housewives, ready for the auction. He takes the
first--a hefty leg of mutton.

"Nah then!" he cries challengingly, "nah then! Just stop shooting yer
marth at the _OO_lans for a bit, and look at this 'ere bit o' meat.
_Meat_ was what I said," with a withering glance at the rival
establishment across the Lane, where another laureate is addressing
another crowd. "Meat, mother, meat. If yer don't want Meat, then it
ain't no use comin' 'ere. If yer wants a cut orf an animal what come
from Orstralia or Noo Zealand, then it ain't no use comin' 'ere. Over
the road's where they got them. They got joints over there what come
from the Anty-Podeys, and they ain't paid their boat-passage yet. No, my
gels, this what I got 'ere is Meat. None of your carvings orf a cow what
looks like a fiddlecase on trestles. You--sir--just cast yer eye over
that. Carry that 'ome to the missus, and she'll let yer stay out till a
quarter to ten, and yeh'll never find a button orf yer weskit long as
yeh live. That's the sort o' meat to turn the kiddies into sojers and
sailors. Nah then--what say to six-and-a-arf?"

He fondles the joint much as one would a babe in long clothes, dandling
it, patting it, stroking it, exhibiting it, while the price comes
steadily down from six-and-a-h