Do you remember the accomplished harper who made gay with his music the old flagged courts of the City? No one interfered with the performances of that descendant of David. He was permitted to make music within the sacred precincts of the courtyard in which stands Rothschild’s famous house in St. Swithin’s Lane. It was to this gracious permission, doubtless, that might be traced the rumour—repeated by the credulous sort in the City—that this player on stringed instruments was a poor relation of the financial princes of New Court. Since that musician was called away, no successor has been permitted to waken the dulcet echoes of New Court. Nor, indeed, are the efforts of strolling artists on sackbut or psaltery encouraged in the obscure byways of the City, a circumstance which is, I think, to be deplored. Whenever I visited the City, a merchant who always fascinated me was one who had a pitch in the opening of a passage at the eastern end of the Poultry. Alas! the very passage itself is built over now, and the merchant and his wares have not become even a part of tradition. I have asked City men about him a score of times. I have never yet met one who remembers ever having seen him—ever having heard of him. They are the most expert forgetters in the world, are City men. And it is perhaps as well. A large proportion of the day’s transactions there are best forgotten. The vanished merchant of the vanished passage had set up a stand on which he exhibited miniature articles in copper. The goods were most exquisitely finished, and were perfect models—made to scale—of their originals. Culinary articles were his chief stock-in-trade—kettles, frying-pans, Dutch ovens, dish-covers, coffee-pots, saucepans—all beautifully executed, and the largest of them not more than three inches in diameter. At one time I had an entire _batterie de cuisine_ bought from him. He, too, should have had a successor; but possibly a successor might have found himself flattened out by the stores. The sleight-of-hand performer has been gently pushed off the public highways. Him also I regret, and offer what incense I may to his memory. A smart-looking, precise, never-in-a-hurry young man, his expression was invariably pensive, suspicions, contemptuous. He carried a little round table with a faded red cloth fixed to it, like that of a card-table, which indeed, in a way, it was. Ah those delightful tricks! Cinquevalli and Charles Bertram have since worked their miracles for my behoof, but they have failed to arouse the same sensations which the performers of the West End street corners raised in my ingenuous mind.