life as in the days of pretty Nelly Gwynne. Sheep-trotters, too,
are given over to women, with rice-milk, which is a favorite
street-dainty, requiring a good deal of preparation; they sell curds and
whey, and now and then, though very seldom, they have a coffee or
elder-wine stand, the latter being sold hot and spiced, as a preventive
of rheumatism and chill. To these sales they add fire-screens and
ornaments (the English grate in summer being filled with every order of
paper ornamentation), laces, millinery, cut flowers, boot and corset
laces, and small-wares of every description, including wash-leathers,
dressed and undressed dolls, and every variety of knitted articles,
mittens, cuffs, socks, etc.

It will be seen that the range in street trades is far wider for the
English than for the American woman, to whom it would almost never occur
as a possible means of livelihood. But London holds several thousands of
these women, a large proportion Irish, it is true, with a mixture of
other nationalities, but English still predominating. The Irishwoman is
more fluent, and can even patter in slight degree, but has less
intelligence, and confines herself to the lower order of trades. For
both Irish and English there is the same deep-seated horror of the
workhouse. All winter a young Irishwoman has sat at the corner of a
little street opening from the Commercial Road, a basket of apples at
her side, and her thin garments no protection against the fearful chill
of fog and mist. She had come to London, hoping to find a brother and go
over with him to America; but no trace of him could be discovered, and
so she borrowed a shilling and became an apple-seller.

"God knows," she said, "I'd be betther off in the house [workhouse], for
it's half dead I am entirely; but I'd rather live on twopence a day than
come to that."

Practically she was living on very little more. An aunt, also a
street-seller, had taken her in. She rented a small room near by, for
which they paid two shillings a week, their whole expenses averaging
sixpence each a day. Naturally they were half starved; but they
preferred this to "the house," and no one who has examined these
retreats can blame them.

It is the poor who chiefly patronize these street-sellers, and they
swarm where the poor are massed. The "Borough," on the Surrey side of
the river, with its innumerable little streets and lanes, each more
wretched than the last, has hundreds of them, no less t