Page:The Strand Magazine (Volume 3).djvu/68

 enraged pater-familias, who has just carefully tied up the knocker with a white kid glove, and muffled all the bells, calls out to the man, "Go away, do. Don't you see the straw?" The organ-grinder touches his hat, grins, sends the monkey to climb up the water-pipe, and begins another tune. Ultimately he gets locked up, and then coolly tells the magistrate that he did not go away because he thought the straw was put down so that the noise of the carts should not drown the music!

The Savoyard hurdy-gurdy player is almost extinct. The music is produced by the friction of a wheel on one or more strings, and the tone is regulated by pressure on keys. The men admit that they get more money for sitting as artists models than from playing. The hurdy-gurdy is amongst stringed instruments what the bag-pipes are amongst the wind instruments, but yet no one ever hears them played together. Probably the players themselves could not stand the combined noise.

The Italians send out their wives with two babies—not always their own—and, when the children get big enough, they take the place of the almost obsolete monkey, and do the begging. Older Italian girls pick up a lot of money in the City, and their success has prompted several English and Irish girls to imitate them by colouring their skins with walnut juice, and rigging themselves out in the Italian style. Many of these girls in earlier life danced round the piano-organs in the streets, and were paid to do so by the organ-grinders, as people who would give nothing for the music would give a penny to see the little ones dancing. Such a juvenile "Bal al fresco" makes a pretty picture, not thought unworthy of the walls of the Royal Academy.

Amongst the intolerable street musicians must certainly be placed the Indian tom-tom player. His instrument is a drum of a very primitive kind, made out of a section of the hollow trunk of a tree, over each end of which a skin is tightly stretched. It is about the size of an oyster barrel, and the noise is produced by beating it with the hands. There are but two tones—once from each end—and the mournful monotony of the