, and are excellent
performers. The best of them frequent Broadway, Wall and Broad streets,
and the up-town neighborhoods. At night they haunt the localities of the
hotels. They constitute one of the pleasantest features of the street,
for their music is good and well worth listening to. They generally reap
a harvest of pennies and fractional currency. They form the aristocratic
portion of the street minstrel class, and are the envy of their less
fortunate rivals.

The vast majority of the strolling harpers and violinists are children;
generally boys below the age of sixteen. They are chiefly Italians,
though a few Swiss, French and Germans are to be found among them. They
are commonly to be found in the streets in pairs; but sometimes three
work together, and again only one is to be found. There are several
hundreds of these children on the streets. Dirty, wan, shrunken,
monkey-faced little creatures they are. Between them and other children
lies a deep gulf, across which they gaze wistfully at the sports and joys
that may not be theirs. All day long, and late into the night, they must
ply their dreary trade.

Although natives of the land of song, they have little or no musical
talent, as a class, and the majority of them are furnished with harps and
violins from which not even Orpheus himself could bring harmony. Not a
few of the little ones endeavor to make up in dancing what they lack in
musical skill. They work energetically at their instruments, but they do
no more than produce the vilest discord. At the best, their music is
worthless, and their voices have a cracked, harsh, monotonous sound; but
the sound of them is also very sad, and often brings a penny into the
outstretched hand.

At all hours of the day, and until late at night you may hear their music
along the street, and listen to their sad young voices going up to the
ear that is always open to them. They are half clothed, half fed, and
their filthiness is painful to behold. They sleep in fair weather under
a door-step or in some passage way or cellar, or in a box or hogshead on
the street, and in the winter huddle together in the cold and darkness of
their sleeping places, for we cannot call them homes, and long for the
morning to come. The cold weather is very hard upon them, they love the
warm sunshine, and during the season of ice and snow are in a constant
state of semi-torpor. You see them on the street, in their thin, ragged
ga