fife, in hopes to get a circle of auditors. Nobody, however, seemed to
take any notice. Very often a whole band of musicians will strike up,--
passing a hat round after playing a tune or two. On board the ferry,
until the coldest weather began, there were always some wretched
musicians, with an old fiddle, an old clarinet, and an old verdigrised
brass bugle, performing during the passage, and, as the boat neared the
shore, sending round one of their number to gather contributions in the
hollow of the brass bugle. They were a very shabby set, and must have
made a very scanty living at best. Sometimes it was a boy with an
accordion, and his sister, a smart little girl, with a timbrel,--which,
being so shattered that she could not play on it, she used only to
collect halfpence in. Ballad-singers, or rather chanters or croakers,
are often to be met with in the streets, but hand-organ players are not
more frequent than in our cities.

I still observe little girls and other children barelegged and barefooted
on the wet sidewalks. There certainly never was anything so dismal as
the November weather has been; never any real sunshine; almost always a
mist; sometimes a dense fog, like slightly rarefied wool, pervading the
atmosphere.

An epitaph on a person buried on a hillside in Cheshire, together with
some others, supposed to have died of the plague, and therefore not
admitted into the churchyards:--

"Think it not strange our bones ly here,
Thine may ly thou knowst not where."
Elizabeth Hampson.

These graves were near the remains of two rude stone crosses, the purpose