with them, and who must levy a pretty heavy contribution on the public
to defray their expenses. They perform entire overtures and long
concerted pieces, being furnished with spiral barrels, and might
probably produce a tolerable effect at the distance of a mile or
so--at least we never heard one yet without incontinently wishing it a
mile off. By a piece of particular ill-fortune, we came one day upon
one undergoing the ceremony of tuning, on a piece of waste-ground at
the back of Coldbath Prison. The deplorable wail of those tortured
pipes and reeds, and the short savage grunt of the bass mystery,
haunted us, a perpetual day-and-night-mare, for a month. We could not
help noticing, however, that the jauntily-dressed fellow, whose
fingers were covered with showy rings, and ears hung with long drops,
who performed the operation, managed it with consummate skill, and
with an ear for that sort of music most marvellously discriminating.

6. Blind bird-organists. Though most blind persons either naturally
possess or soon acquire an ear for music, there are yet numbers who,
from the want of it or from some other cause, never make any
proficiency as performers on an instrument. Blindness, too, is often
accompanied with some other disability, which disqualifies its victims
for learning such trades as they might otherwise be taught. Hence
many, rather than remain in the workhouse, take to grinding music in
the streets. Here we are struck with one remarkable fact: the
Irishman, the Frenchman, the Italian, or the Savoyard, at least so
soon as he is a man, and able to lug it about, is provided with an
instrument with which he can make a noise in the world, and prefer his
clamorous claim for a recompense; while the poor blind Englishman has
nothing but a diminutive box of dilapidated whistles, which you may
pass fifty times without hearing it, let him grind as hard as he will.
It is generally nothing more than an old worn-out bird-organ, in all