"I live two steps underground, with a wiscom riscom, and why not. Walk in, ladies and gentlemen. My shop is on the second floor backwards, with a brass knocker at the door. Here's your nice gingerbread, your spiced gingerbread, which will melt in your mouth like a red-hot brickbat, and rumble in your inside like Punch in his wheelbarrow!" He always finished up by singing the fag end of a song--"Tiddy Diddy Doll, lol, lol, lol;" hence his nickname of Tiddy Doll. Hogarth has introduced this character in his Execution scene of the Idle Apprentice at Tyburn. Tiddy Doll had many feeble imitators; and the woman described in the lines that follow, taken from a child's book of the period, must have been one of them. Tiddy Diddy Doll, lol, lol, lol, Tiddy Diddy Doll, dumplings, oh! Her tub she carries on her head, Tho' of'ener under arm. In merry song she cries her trade, Her customers to charm. A halfpenny a plain can buy, The plum ones cost a penny, And all the naughty boys will cry Because they can't get any. [Illustration: "_Large silver eels!_"] Fifty years ago "Young Lambs to Sell, two for a penny," which still lingers, was a well known cry. They were children's toys, the fleece made of white cotton-wool, attractively but perhaps a trifle too unnaturally spangled with Dutch gilt. The head was of composition, the cheeks were painted red, there were two black spots to do duty for eyes, and the horns and legs were of tin, which latter adornment, my younger readers may suggest, foreshadowed the insufficiently appreciated tinned mutton of a later period. The addition of a bit of pink tape tied round the neck by way of a collar made a graceful finish, and might be accepted as a proof that the baby sheep was perfectly tame. Young lambs to sell, young lambs to sell. Two for a penny, young lambs to sell. If I'd as much money as I could tell, I wouldn't cry young lambs to sell. Dolly and Molly, Richard and Nell, Buy my Young Lambs and I'll use you well! The later song-- Old chairs to mend, old chairs to mend. If I'd as much money as I could spend, I'd leave off crying old chairs to mend-- --is obviously copied from the original cry of "Young Lambs to Sell." In addition to a few tools, the stock-in-trade of the travelling chair-mender principally consisted of rushes, which in later days gave place to cane split into strips of uniform width--a return to more [Illustration: "_Young lambs to sell._"] [Illustration: "_Buy my fine Myrtles and Roses!_"]