"Another stone," he told the crowd mournfully.
"You'll have to eat less pork," some one volunteered and we all laughed.
Next door to the Scales was a man selling gyroscopes. "Something scientific, amusing as well as instructive, illustrating the principles of gravity and stability. What I show you is what I sell—price one shilling. Who?"
I stopped next at a stall containing nothing but caps,—"any size, any colour, any pattern, a shilling apiece—now then!" This show was being run by two men—a Jew in a fur cap on one side of the stall and a very powerful-looking sort of Captain Cuttle on the other—a seafaring man, almost as broad as he was long, with a game leg and the voice of a skipper in a hurricane. Both these men were selling caps at a prodigious pace, and with the insouciance of tradesmen sure of their custom. The skipper would seize a cap, chuck it across to a timid prospective purchaser, and, if he dropped it, chuck him over another, crying, with a "yo-heave-ho" boisterousness, "Oh! what a game, what a bees' nest."
Upon the small head of another customer, he would squash down his largest sized cap saying at once,—
"There, you look the finest gentleman—oh! ah! a little too large."
At which we all laughed, the customer looked silly, but took no offence.
"Try this," yells the skipper above the storm, and takes off his own cap. "Oh! ye needn't be afraid—I washed my hair last—year." (Laughter.)
Then to his partner, the Jew on the other side of the stall, "Oh! what a face you've got. Here! 6d. for any one who can tell me what it is. Why not take it to the trenches and get it smashed in?"
The Jew wore spectacles and had a soft ingratiating voice and brown doe-like eyes—a Jew in every respect. "Oh!" says he, in the oleaginous Semitic way, and accurately taking up his cue (for all this was rehearsed patter), "my wife says 'my face is my fortune.'"