"That's the skeleton of Jonathan Wild," said the surgeon, "It has been in our family for a hundred years, I believe." CHAPTER XXVI. STREET SIGHTS OF LONDON. VERY strange sights are seen in London. No city that I have ever visited will compare with London for the number of its street peddlers, hawkers, booth proprietors, open-air performers, ballad singers, mountebanks, and other street itinerants. From daybreak until dark, and long into the night, in the ramification of Streets and Lanes, Squares, Mews, and Ovals, the ear of the stranger is saluted with the harshest and most discordant sounds which emanate from the throats of a street-selling population of both sexes, large enough alone to make the population of a fifth-rate city. The London Cockney who has heard the same grating sounds from the days of his earliest childhood, never stops in his walk to listen to the cries, but the stranger in London is compelled by the very want of melody or intelligibility in the hawker's cries to listen, yet it is useless for him to attempt to solve the meaning of their uncouth and barbarous gibberage. For these seventy-five thousand men, women, and boys, as well as girls, many of a tender age--have their several dialects, and signals, and patois, which it would be madness to try to understand without a thorough schooling in the rudiments of their language and several occupations. In another part of this work I have taken a glance at the London Costermongers and their habits and amusements, such as they are. Beside this, the largest and most hard-working class of street hawkers, there are a hundred other branches of street merchandise, and all these different branches have their followers, who navigate every quarter of the metropolis, trying to pick up a shilling here and there from the sale of their commodities, as luck or energy may chance to send the shilling their way. It is calculated that the gross receipts of the street peddlers of London amount to as much as £5,000,000 a year. This would make an average of £70 a year, or nearly $500 for each person engaged in street peddling. Of course in this aggregate I must include all those who keep stands or booths of a greater or lesser magnitude. Some of these poor wretches may earn in good weeks about fifteen to twenty shillings, while at other seasons when green stuff is scarce, it is rarely that they exceed more than eight shillings on an average for the same amount of labor and hawking. Ten shillings, however, is a fair week's earning if that amount be realized during the current year. It may be calculated that the profits will average as high as £1,500,000 where the gross receipts for sales are as high as £5,000,000.