me, and we were to go together to the Sunday market in this district, which is almost entirely inhabited by Jews, although a greater part of the out-door trade and costermongering is done by Christian Cockneys.

I found Ralph living up a two-pair back, in one of the queerest, old-fashioned wooden houses in the Newgate shambles. Directly over my head was the dome of St. Paul's, with the morning fog clearing away from its peak, and the sun was gradually appearing to gild the tall cross on the apex, and the tower of St. Faith's, under St. Paul's. The stairs were ricketty and dark, and the wainscotting quite fanciful. A woman of twenty-five or six years of age, rather tidy in appearance, I saw holding the big chubby baby, the pride of the Ralph family. The family were at breakfast, and had been busy discussing fresh plaice and soles from Billingsgate. The baby was allowed to tumble all over the floor and bite its fingers.

“How are you this morning, sir," said patrolman Ralph; "it promises to be a pertickelerly fine Sunday does this, and a nice one for stroll to see the sights."

Ralph took down his hat and overcoat from a nail, and bidding his wife good-bye affectionately, we strolled out into the streets. We took a walk up Newgate street to Cheapside, through the Poultry, through Cornhill, passing the Bank and Mansion House on our way, and finally opposite the Aldgate Church, with its curious old Sir Christopher Wren spire, we found ourselves standing against the railing which encloses a little green square of grass belting the church.

"Now, sir," said Dick Ralph, "we are just going into one of the worst places in London. There's a regular mob here all the time, and hits just as much as a man can do to pass the peddlers without having his 'at and coat taken hoff him by the Sheenies who are selling of hall sorts of things on the Sunday market. You can buy hanything from a gimlet here in Petticoat lane to a suit of clothes in Rag Fair."

Houndsditch is a wide street which runs down from the Aldgate High street to Bishopsgate street. At the other end is the street called the Minories, going in the direction of the

Tower, which frowns upon the river. Here, also, is the district called "Petticoat lane," which embraces a number of short streets, courts, lanes, and filthy alleys, with such characteristic names as "Sandy's Row," Frying Pan alley," "Little Love court, ," "Catharine Wheel alley," " Hebrew Place," "Fisher's alley," "Tripe yard," "Gravel lane," "Harper's alley," "Boar's Head yard," "Stoney lane," "Swan court," and "Borer's lane."

These are only a few of the choice thoroughfares in this locality, and all of them are dirty and swarming with a class who obtain their living in the streets. There are, it is calculated, living and doing business in Petticoat lane and its lesser tributaries of streets and alleys, about six thousand men, women, and children who profess the Jewish faith, and are in humble circumstances, who have to struggle and compete with the Irish of the poorer class in the street trades, though the Jews have a monopoly of the old clothes' trade.

Houndsditch is in every way superior to the other streets which surround it. It is wider, the shops are of a better order, and it is noticeable that very few of their doors are open on a Sunday morning. As the detective and I passed through the street I noticed such names as "Abrams & Son," "L. Benjamin," ""Isaacs & Co.," "Moses & Son," "Hyams & Co.," and other like names over the doors of fruit shops, jeweller shops, mercer shops, clothiers, and in one or two instances, over the doors of small publics. It is, however, not a common thing to find a Jewish name over a liquor shop door in London.

"We are in the very nick of time to see the show," said Ralph to me-it was nearly nine o'clock of the Sunday morning, and we had gone down Houndsditch about three of our New York blocks.

"The market is from eight o'clock Sunday morning until about two in the hafternoon, and the business is as brisk as can be all that time," said Ralph.

The houses were all old, and all of them had a slouching, mean look, with funny gables, grimy windows in the upper stories, and queerly peaked and stunted roofs, overhung by tubular

red chimneys, which stood up like rows of corn in a field when seen from a distance.

noses.

The people whom we met in the streets had an Eastern look, with peculiarly brilliant, almond-shaped eyes, and prominent Some others had the Celtic features and spoke to each other with the unmistakable brogue. The policemen that we met, too, seemed to partake of the characteristics of the place, and I fancied that I could trace a resemblance in their faces to those by whom they were surrounded.

Crossing the street, we went through a court about a hundred feet wide, that seemed to lead into a covered shed, from which came a din and clamor of voices that was almost deafening.

There was a wooden building like a market covered over, to to which we ascended by a flight of three steps.

"This is the Rag Fair, sir; I suppose you heard on't before. It's a werry strange place, Rag Fair. But don't stop to look at anythink, or them as keeps the stands will tear you to pieces to make you buy.”

Although I took as much heed as possible of the injunction, it was impossible not to look. It was a very queer place in more senses than one. To get an idea of it take a section of Washington Market, New York, with its stalls and blocks, and buyers and sellers; and on the walls where the pork, mutton, and beef are hung to be inspected and sold, and, instead of the flesh. of the cow, pig, and peaceful sheep, hang hundreds upon hundreds of pairs of trousers-trousers that have been worn by young men of fashion, trousers without a wrinkle or just newly scoured, trousers taken from the reeking hot limbs of navies and pot boys, trousers from lumbering men-of-war's men, from spruce young shop boys, trousers that have been worn by criminals executed at Newgate, by patients in fever hospitals; waistcoats that were the pride of fast young brokers in the city, waistcoats flashy enough to have been worn by the Marquis of Hastings at a race-course, or the Count D'Orsay at a literary assemblage; take thousands of spencers, highlows, fustian jackets, some greasy, some unsoiled, shooting-coats, short-coats, and

A CONGRESS OF RAGS.

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cutaways; coats for the jockey and the dog-fighter, for the peer and the pugilist, pilot-jackets and sou-westers, drawers and stockings, the latter washed and hung up in all their appealing innocence, there being thousands of these garments that I have enumerated, and thousands of others that none but a master cutter could think of without a softening of the brain, take two hundred men, women, and children, mostly of the Jewish race, with here and there a burly Irishman sitting placidly smoking a pipe amid the infernal din; and shake all these ingredients up well, and you have a faint idea of what I saw in Rag Fair.

Take five thousand pair of shoes, boots, gaiters, bootees, brogans, watermen's boots, shoes of criminals, and suspiciouslooking boots, taken from the feet of thieves, flashy-looking women's gaiters and cordovans purchased from prostitutes and wretched women in garrets, who had sold them to buy food or a drink of gin.

Take all these articles, scatter them around, hang them on nails and hooks depending from greasy stalls ascending to the old tumble down roof, and then the reader will have a dose offered to him such as I got when I fell on Rag Fair, Petticoat lane.

It was by far the strangest scene I had ever looked upon. London has nothing like it elsewhere, and New York, which is really destitute of any specially salient characteristic, could not in fifty years' time organize and bring together such a mass of old clothes, grease, patches, tatters, and remnants of decayed prosperity and splendor. In every old tattered trousers there was an unwritten epic; in every gaudily fashioned waistcoat there was a tale perhaps of sorrow and sadness and want, if any one could but point it out.

The patches and rents that were botched up and mended, showed the hasty repairs in the old coats that hung in platoons and files from the niches; the jagged sewing and frayed edges in each of these old garments, could they speak, would tell an astonishing tale, or furnish the groundwork of a plot for a popular drama.

The stalls were in rows, and the men and women and boys who did business there kept running about all the time I remained in the fair, shouting and screaming like possessed beings. Their great aim and object was to catch some unfortunate visitor by the lappel of his coat or snatch his elbow, his coat-tail, or any other available part of his clothing, hold on to him, shake an old waistcoat in his face, and if he didn't want a waistcoat, shake a dirty old pair of trousers in his face, talking all the time in an imploring, or may be a trembling tone,

until the man would be compelled to break away by sheer force or call the police, who seemed to have enough to do in this place.

I stopped for a moment to look at a stall where about a hundred pairs of boots and shoes were displayed in rows, the thicksoled heavy-looking brogans of the laborer ranged next to the nicely-fashioned gaiter of the elegant, with their well-turned