It was by far the strangest scene I had ever looked upon. London has nothing like it elsewhere, and New York, which is really destitute of any specially salient characteristic, could not in fifty years' time organize and bring together such a mass of old clothes, grease, patches, tatters, and remnants of decayed prosperity and splendor. In every old tattered trousers there was an unwritten epic; in every gaudily fashioned waistcoat there was a tale perhaps of sorrow and sadness and want, if any one could but point it out. The patches and rents that were botched up and mended, showed the hasty repairs in the old coats that hung in platoons and files from the niches; the jagged sewing and frayed edges in each of these old garments, could they speak, would tell an astonishing tale, or furnish the groundwork of a plot for a popular drama. The stalls were in rows, and the men and women and boys who did business there kept running about all the time I remained in the fair, shouting and screaming like possessed beings. Their great aim and object was to catch some unfortunate visitor by the lappel of his coat or snatch his elbow, his coat-tail, or any other available part of his clothing, hold on to him, shake an old waistcoat in his face, and if he didn't want a waistcoat, shake a dirty old pair of trousers in his face, talking all the time in an imploring, or may be a trembling tone, until the man would be compelled to break away by sheer force or call the police, who seemed to have enough to do in this place. [Illustration: RAG FAIR.] I stopped for a moment to look at a stall where about a hundred pairs of boots and shoes were displayed in rows, the thick-soled heavy-looking brogans of the laborer ranged next to the nicely-fashioned gaiter of the elegant, with their well-turned toes and arching insteps, and the man, a sharp-featured Hebrew, who was proprietor, seized me and thrust a second-hand pair of boots in my face, saying at the same time: [Sidenote: MODUS OPERANDI OF SELLING.] "You wan'sh a nish pair o' bootsh? S'help, I shells you thish pair for two shillings, and they wash never made lesh than a guinea and a half! Don't you want to buy these sphlendid bootsh; s'help me, I only makes'h two pensh?" I tried to get away, but he held to my arm and kept shaking the boots, while his sharp, black eyes glittered like sword points at the prospect of losing a sale. At last the detective, losing patience, jerked him away, and we passed on to the next slop stand. This was kept by an old Irish woman. The Jew was all mercantile acerbity and sharpness. This old humbug of a female Celt was all treacle and honey.