any one of the strings at the bottom of the box being pulled, causes a doll's head to appear at the hole, which decides, according to its number, the good or ill fortune of the halfpenny adventurer. He acknowledges to his surrounding visitors that he "knows nothing of the lingo of his predecessors, the famed Tiddy Dolls of their day, but that he is quite certain that if _their_ gingerbread rolled down the throat like a wheel-barrow, _his_ nuts are far superior, for that, should any one of his noble friends prove so fortunate as to draw a prize of one hundred of them, he would be entitled to those of half the usual size, so delicately small that they would be no bigger than the quack doctor's pills, who chalks his name on the walls far and near about London; and as for the innocency of these little pills, he had been assured by a leading member of the Society for the Suppression of Vice, who was very fond of tasting them, that they would do no harm to an _infant babe_, no, not even if they were given it on a Sunday within church time." This mode of gulling the boys with nuts of half the size, if they won a double prize, was equalled by a well-known churchwarden, within these few years, who, upon his coming into office, ordered threepenny loaves to be made instead of sixpenny, so that he might be respectfully saluted by as many more poor people as he passed through the church-yard on a Sunday after his distribution, and thereby obtain popularity. Nor is the device in question very dissimilar to the mode adopted in some modern private lotteries, where there are no blanks to chagrin the purchasers. The simpleton who attempts to sell gingerbread-nuts gains but little custom compared with the man of dashing wit; and there have been many of the latter description on the town within memory, particularly, about thirty-five years ago, a short red-nosed fellow in a black bushy wig, who trundled a wheel-barrow through St. Martin's Court, Cranbourn Alley, and the adjacent passages. This man, who was attended by a drab of a wife to take the money, was master of much drollery; he would contrast the heated polities of the day with the mildness of his gingerbread, to the no small amusement of Mr. Sheridan, who, when on his way to the election meetings held at the Shakspeare tavern, in favour of his friend Mr. Fox, was once seen to smile and pouch this fellow a shilling; that distinguished mark of approbation from the author of the "School for Scandal" being gained by this gingerbread man by means of the following couplet: "May Curtis, with his "Speedy Peace, and soon," Send gingerbread up to the man in the moon." This fellow would frequently boast of his having danced Horne Tooke upon his knee when he was shopman to that gentleman's father, then a poulterer, or, in genteeler terms, a "Turkey Merchant," called by the vulgar a "Feather Butcher," at the time he lived in Newport Market.