The Journal of a Disappointed Man

Near Reilly's Tavern, I saw a pavement artist who had drawn a loaf with the inscription in both French and English: "This is easy to draw but hard to earn." A baby's funeral trotted briskly over the Tower Bridge among Pink's jam waggons, carts carrying any goods from lead pencils and matches to bales of cotton and chests of tea. In the St. Catherine's Way there is one part like a deep railway cutting, the whole of one side for a long way, consisting of the brickwall of a very tall warehouse with no windows in it and beautifully curved and producing a wonderful effect. Walked past great blocks of warehouses and business establishments--a wonderful sight; and everywhere bacon factors, coffee roasters, merchants. On London Bridge, paused to feed the sea-gulls and looked down at the stevedores. Outside Billingsgate Market was a blackboard on an easel--for market prices--but instead some one had drawn an enormously enlarged chalk picture of a cat's rear and tail with anatomical details. In Aldgate, stopped to inspect a street stall containing popular literature--one brochure entitled Suspended for Life to indicate the terrible punishment meted out to ----, a League footballer. The frontispiece enough to make a lump come in the juveniles' throats! Another stall held domestic utensils with an intimation, "Anything on this stall lent for 1d." A newsvendor I heard exclaim to a fellow-tradesman in the same line of business,-- "They come and look at your bloody plakaard and then passe on." Loitered at a dirty little Fleet Street bookshop where Paul de Koch's The Lady with the Three Pairs of Stays was displayed prominently beside a picture of Oscar Wilde.