At the foot of y Wyddfa the white.

I ran after the boy and asked him what tune he was whistling.

'What tune?' he said, 'blowed if I know.'

'Where did you hear it?' I asked.

'Well, there used to be a gal, a kind of a beggar gal, as lived not
far from 'ere for a little while, but she's gone away now, and she
used to sing that tune. I allas remember tunes, but I never could
make out anything of the words.'

D'Arcy laughed at my eccentricity in running after the boy to learn
where he had got a tune. But I did not tell him why.

After we had passed some way down Ratcliffe Highway, D'Arcy said,
'Here we are then,' and pointed to a shop, or rather two shops, on
the opposite side of the street. One window was filled with caged
birds; the other with specimens of beautiful Oriental pottery and
grotesque curiosities in the shape of Chinese and Japanese statues
and carvings.

My brain still rang with the air I had heard the river-boy whistling,
but I felt that I must talk about something.

'It is here that you buy your wonderful curiosities and porcelain!' I
said.

'Partly; but there is not a curiosity shop in London that I have not
ransacked in my time.'

The shop we now entered reminded me of that Raxton Fair which was so
much associated with Winnie. Its chief attraction was the advent of
Wombwell's menagerie. From the first moment that the couriers of that
august establishment came to paste their enormous placards on the
walls, down to the sad morning when the caravans left the
market-place, Winnie and I and Rhona Boswell had talked 'Wombwell.'
It was not merely that the large pictures of the wild animals in
action, the more than brassy sound of the cracked brass band,
delighted our eyes and ears. Our olfactories also were charmed. The
mousy scent of the animals mixed with the scent of sawdust, which to
adults was so objectionable, was characterised by us as delicious.
All these Wombwell delights came back to me as we entered Jamrach's,
and for a time the picture of Winifred prevented my seeing the famous
shop. When this passed I saw that the walls of the large room were
covered from top to bottom with cages, some of them full of wonderful
or beautiful birds, and others full of evil-faced, screeching
monkeys.

While D'Arcy was amusing himself with a blue-faced rib-nosed baboon,
I asked Mr. Jamrach, an extremely intelligent man, about the singing
girl and the Welsh air. But he could tell me nothing, an