"Ah! lah, you're one of us—oh! what a game! what a bees' nest," and all the time he went on selling caps and chucking them at the purchasers.
Perhaps one of the most extraordinary things I saw was a stream of young men who, one after another, came up to a stall, paid a penny and swallowed a glass of "nerve tonic"—a green liquid syphoned out of a large jar—warranted a safe cure for
"Inward weakness, slightest flurry or body oppressed."
Another man was pulling teeth and selling tooth powder. Some of the little urchins' teeth, after he had cleaned them as a demonstration, were much whiter than their faces or his. This was "the original Chas. Assenheim."
Mrs. Meyers, "not connected with any one else of the same name in the Lane" was selling eels at 2d., 3d. and 6d. and doing a brisk trade too.
But I should go on for hours if I were to tell everything seen in this remarkable lane during an hour and a half on a Sunday morning. Each stall-holder sells only one kind of article—caps or clocks or songs, braces, shawls, indecent literature, concertinas, gramophones, coats, pants, reach-me-downs, epergnes. The thoroughfare was crowded with people (I saw two Lascars in red fez caps) inspecting the goods displayed and attentively observed by numerous policemen. The alarm clocks were all going off, each gramophone was working a record (a different one!) and every tradesman shouting his wares—a perfect pandemonium.
December 31.
A Conversation
"There is that easily calculable element in your nature, dear boy," I said, "by which you forego the dignity of a free-willed human being and come under an inflexible natural law. I can anticipate your movements, intentions, and opinions long beforehand. For example, I know quite well that every Saturday morning will see you with The New Statesman under your arm; I know that the words 'Wagner' or 'Shaw' uttered slowly and deliberately in your ear will produce a perfectly definite reaction."
"I bet you can't predict what I am going to buy now,"