A very puzzling London Cry, yet at one time a very common one, was "A tormentor for your fleas!"[6] What the instrument so heralded could have been, one can but dimly guess. A contributor to _Fraser's Magazine_, tells us that in a collection of London Cries appended to Thomas Heywood's _Rape of Lucrece_ (1608), he gives us this one: "Buy a very fine mouse-trap, or a tormentor for your fleaes;" and the cry of the mouse-trap man in Ben Jonson's Bartholomew Fair (1614), is, "Buy a mouse-trap, a mouse-trap, or a tormentor for a flea." The flea-trap is also alluded to in _The Bonduca_ of Beaumont and Fletcher, and in _Travels of Twelve-Pence_, by Taylor, the Water Poet; and it reappears in a broadside in the Roxburgh Collection of Ballads, "The Common Cries of London" [dated 1662, but probably written a hundred years earlier]: "Buy a trap, a mouse-trap, a torment for the fleas!" When the great Bard of the Lake School was on a tour, he made a call at an inn where Shelley happened to be; but the conversation, which the young man would fain have turned to philosophy and poetry and art, was almost confined to the elder poet's prosaic description of his dog as "an excellent flea-trap." It may be assumed that fleas were plentiful when this cry was in vogue; and it may have been that the trap was part of the (undressed?) skin of an animal with the hair left on, in which fleas would naturally take refuge, drowning, perhaps, being their ultimate fate. But all this is mere conjecture. It was unlikely that so close an observer of London life as Addison should leave unnoticed the Cries of London; and the _Spectator_ is interspersed with occasional allusions to them. In No. ccli. we read: "There is nothing which more astonishes a Foreigner, and frights a Country Squire, than the Cries of London. My good Friend Sir ROGER often declares that he cannot get them out of His Head, or go to sleep for them, the first Week that he is in Town. On the contrary, WILL HONEYCOMB calls them the _Ramage de la Ville_, and prefers them to the Sounds of Larks and Nightingales, with all the Musick of the Fields and Woods." In Steele's comedy of _The Funeral_, Trim tells some ragged soldiers, "There's a thousand things you might do to help out about this town, as to cry Puff-Puff Pyes; have you any Knives or Scissors to grind? or late in an evening, whip from _Grub Street_ strange and bloody News from _Flanders_; Votes from the House of Commons; Buns, rare Buns; Old Silver Lace, Cloaks, Sutes or Coats; Old Shoes, Boots or Hats." Gay, too, who, in his microscopic lyric of the streets, _Trivia_, omitted little, thus sings of various street cries:-- Now Industry awakes her busy sons; Full charged with News the breathless hawker runs; Shops open, coaches roll, carts shake the ground, And all the streets with passing cries resound. * * * * * [Illustration: "_Buy a doll, Miss?_"]