STREET AMUSEMENTS.
He first met three grotesque musicians who had gathered around them an audience of admiring house-maids, dilatory market-people, and unkempt children. But the hat for contributions was passed so soon after he joined himself to the music-loving company that he at once left for another performance where the call for money might not be so pressing. A fiddler with three performing dogs, that were bedecked with hats and ruffles, quite exceeded in dramatic interest the former exhibition. But the fiddler, too, had immediate need of money, and Tommy remembered Master Lewis’s caution about the purse, and passed on to a public place that seemed quite alive with groups of people gathered around curious sights and entertainments.
The pastimes here took a scientific turn. Chief among these street showmen rose the tall head of a middle-aged gentleman—“the professor”—who administered the “galvanic grip.”
“Has fast has yer cured, gentlemen, pass right along, pass right along, and give others a chance. ’Ave you han hache or a pain? I say, ’ave you han hache or a pain? Cure ye right hup, right hup hin a minute. I’ll tell you what, it is astonishing, gentlemen, what cures science will perform.”
STREET AMUSEMENTS.
At this point some one not schooled in the mysteries of science received a very liberal dose of the “magnetic grip,” and doubled his body with an “O!” that seemed to be shot out of him, when the crowd laughed and moved on.
You pay your five or ten pence and are presented with the handles forming the terminations of the electric wire: you grasp these as tight as you can, one in either hand, while the galvanist grinds away at the machine.