"One-a-penny, poker; two-a-penny, tongs! One-a-penny; two-a-penny, hot cross buns. One-a-penny, two-a-penny, hot cross-buns! If your daughters will not eat them, give them to your sons. But if you haven't any of those pretty little elves, You cannot then do better than eat them up yourselves; One-a-penny, two-a-penny, hot cross buns: All, hot, hot, hot, all hot. One-a-penny, two-a-penny, hot cross buns! Burning hot! smoking hot, r-r-r-roking hot-- One-a-penny, two-a-penny, hot cross buns." But the street hot-cross-bun trade is languishing--and languishing, will ultimately die a natural death, as the master bakers and pastrycooks have entered into it more freely, and now send round to their regular customers for orders some few days before each succeeding Good Friday. A capital writer of NOTES, COMMENT and GOSSIP, who contributes every week to the _City Press_, under the _nom de plume_ of "Dogberry," gave--_inter alia_--a few "_Good Words_," the result of his "_Leisure Hours_" in that journal, on the subject of "Good Friday Customs." March 24, 1883, thus:-- "That the buns themselves are as popular as ever they were when the Real Original Bun Houses existed in Chelsea, was manifest on Thursday evening, though the scene is now changed from the west to the east. Bishopsgate-street was indeed all alive with people of high and low degree crowding in and out of Messrs. Hill & Sons, who, I am told, turned no less than 47 sacks of flour, representing over 13,000 lbs., into the favourite Good Friday cakes. This mass was sweetened by 2,800 lbs. of sugar, moistened with 1,500 quarts of milk, and 'lightened' with 2,200 lbs. of butter. Something like 25,000 paper bags were used in packing the buns, and upwards of 150 pairs of hands were engaged in the making and distribution of the tasty morsels at Bishopsgate and at the West-end branch of Messrs. Hill, at Victoria. The customary business of the firm must have been interrupted considerably by Good Friday, and the forty-seven sacks of flour made into buns represented, I presume, a considerable deduction from the hundred and ninety to two hundred which the firm work up in one form or another every week. But then you can't eat your (Good Friday) cake and have it. There were other bakers and confectioners in the City, too, who appeared to do a thriving trade in buns--notably Messrs. Robertson & Co., in Aldersgate-street. Long live the Good Friday bun!" DOGBERRY. HOT CROSS BUNS. BY MISS ELIZA COOK.