£s.d.
The flesh (averaging 2 cwt., sold at 2½d. per lb.)200
The skin060
The hoofs002
The shoes and nails001½
The bones016
The fat0110
The tendons000
The tongue, &c. —— ?
The blood000
The intestines000
£297½

The French dead horse, then, is made a source of nearly 5s. higher receipt than the English. On my inquiring the reason of this difference, and why the blood, &c., were not made available, I was told that the demand by the Prussian blue manufacturers and the sugar refiners was so fully supplied, and over-supplied, from the great cattle slaughter-houses, that the private butchers, for the trifling sum to be gained, let the blood be wasted. One bullock slaughterer in Fox and Knot-yard, who kills 180 cattle in a week, receives only 1l. for the blood of the whole number, which is received in a well in the slaughter-house. The amount paid for blood a few years back was more than double its present rate. Under these circumstances, I was told, it would be useless trying to turn the wasted offal of a horse to any profitable purpose. There is, I am told, on an average, 1000 horses slaughtered every week in London, and this, at 2l. 10s. each animal, would make the value of the dead horses of the metropolis amount to 130,000l. per annum.

Were it not that I might be dwelling too long on the subject, I might point out how the offal of the skins was made to subserve other purposes from the Bermondsey tan-yards; and how the parings and scrapings went to the makers of glue and size, and the hair to the builders to mix with lime, &c., &c.

I may instance another thing in which the worth of what in many places is valueless refuse is exemplified, in the matter of “waste,” as waste paper is always called in the trade. Paper in all its glossiest freshness is but a reproduction of what had become in some measure “waste,” viz. the rags of the cotton or linen fabric after serving their original purpose. There is a body of men in London who occupy themselves entirely in collecting waste paper. It is no matter of what kind; a small prayer-book, a once perfumed and welcome love-note, lawyers’ or tailors’ bills, acts of parliament, and double sheets of the Times, form portions of the waste dealer’s stock. Tons upon tons are thus consumed yearly. Books of every description are ingredients of this waste, and in every language; modern poems or pamphlets and old romances (perfect or imperfect), Shakespeare, Molière, Bibles, music, histories, stories, magazines, tracts to convert the heathen or to prove how easily and how immensely our national and individual wealth might be enhanced, the prospectuses of a thousand companies, each certain to prove a mine of wealth, schemes to pay off the national debt, or recommendations to wipe it off, auctioneers’ catalogues and long-kept letters, children’s copy-books and last century ledgers, printed effusions which have progressed no further than the unfolded sheets, uncut works and books mouldy from age—all these things are found in the insatiate bag of the waste collector, who of late has been worried because he could not supply enough! “I don’t know how it is, sir,” said one waste collector, with whom I had some conversation on the subject of street-sold books, with which business he was also connected, “I can’t make it out, but paper gets scarcer or else I’m out of luck. Just at this time my family and me really couldn’t live on my waste if we had to depend entirely upon it.”

I am assured that in no place in the world is this traffic carried on to anything approaching the extent that it is in London. When I treat of the street-buyers I shall have some curious information to publish on the subject. I do but allude to it here as one strongly illustrative of “second-hand” appliances.

Of the Street-Sellers of Second-Hand Metal Articles.

I have in the preceding remarks specified the wares sold by the vendors of the second-hand articles of metal manufacture, or (as they are called in the streets) the “old metal” men. The several articles I have specified may never be all found at one time upon one stall, but they are all found on the respective stalls. “Aye, sir,” said one old man whom I conversed with, “and there’s more things every now and then comes to the stalls, and there used to be still more when I were young, but I can’t call them all to mind, for times is worse with me, and so my memory fails. But there used to be a good many bayonets, and iron tinder-boxes, and steels for striking lights; I can remember them.”

Some of the sellers have strong heavy barrows, which they wheel from street to street. As this requires a considerable exertion of strength, such part of the trade is carried on by strong men, generally of the costermongering class. The weight to be propelled is about 300 lbs. Of this class there are now a few, rarely more than half-a-dozen, who sell on commission in the way I have described concerning the swag-barrowmen.

These are the “old metal swags” of street classification, but their remuneration is less fixed than that of the other swag-barrowmen. It is sometimes a quarter, sometimes a third, and sometimes even a half of the amount taken. The men carrying on this traffic are the servants of the marine-store dealers, or vendors of old metal articles, who keep shops. If one of these people be “lumbered up,” that is, if he find his stock increase too rapidly, he furnishes a barrow, and sends a man into the streets with it, to sell what the shopkeeper may find to be excessive. Sometimes if the tradesman can gain only the merest trifle more than he could gain from the people who buy for the melting-pot, he is satisfied.

There is, or perhaps was, an opinion prevalent that the street “old metals” in this way of business got rid of stolen goods in such a manner as the readiest mode of sale, some of which were purposely rusted, and sold at almost any price, so that they brought but a profit to the “fence,” whose payment to the thief was little more than the price of old metal at the foundry. I understand, however, that this course is not now pursued, nor is it likely that it ever was pursued to any extent. The street-seller is directly under the eye of the police, and when there is a search for stolen goods, it is not very likely that they would be paraded, however battered or rusted for the purpose, before men who possessed descriptions of all goods stolen. Until the establishment of the present system of police, this might have been an occasional practice. One street-seller had even heard, and he “had it from the man what did it,” that a last-maker’s shop was some years back broken into in the expectation that money would be met with, but none was found; and as the thieves could not bring away such heavy lumbering things as lasts, they cursed their ill-luck, and brought away such tools as they could stow about their persons, and cover with their loose great coats. These were the large knives, fixed to swivels, and resembling a small scythe, used by the artizan to rough hew the block of beech-wood; and a variety of excellent rasps and files (for they must be of the best), necessary for the completion of the last. These very tools were, in ten days after the robbery, sold from a street-barrow.