An irritant of the time, akin to automobile speedsters of to-day, lay in the Irish cartmen, who loved a race even more than a fight, and whom Coleman denounced the more vigorously because they were Democrats to a man. The bakers’ boys were called “flying Mercuries”; to excite terror, said the _Evening Post_ in 1805, they particularly delighted in crashing round a narrow street corner at a dead gallop, splashing those whom they did not graze. The journal in 1817 felt it proper to attack the practice of riding fast horses home from the blacksmith’s without a bridle. Among the annoyances showing a lack of due city regulations was the appearance in 1820 of an ingenious mode of kite-flying. As flown in daytime, kites had always been admirably calculated to scare horses. Now they were being sent up at night by hordes of urchins, said the _Evening Post_, with a parachute and a little car affixed, the car containing lighted candles, and the whole so constructed that it could be separated from the kite at pleasure. They were miraculously adapted for setting roofs afire. Most residential streets must have been fairly quiet; but they were not sufficiently so to suit the harassed editor. We find him in 1803 declaiming in order against the varied noises: “The measured ditty of the young sweep at daybreak, upon the chimney top; the tremendous nasal yell of ‘Ye rusk!’; the sonorous horn that gives dreadful note of ‘gingerbread!’; and the echoing sound of ‘Hoboy!’ at midnight, accompanied with its never-failing appeal to more senses than one.” These “hoboy gentlemen,” whose profession was connected with Mrs. Warren’s, were still an abomination in 1816, “bellowing out their filthy ditties” for two hours after eleven. As late as 1819, at the flush of dawn every morning, a stage traversed the whole length of Broadway northward, the guard merrily blowing his horn as it went and all the dogs barking. Hucksters, like beggars, seem at all times to have been troublesome. At any rate, Coleman in August, 1823, fulminated against them as to be found on every street and almost at every door, and as offering “almost everything that can be named, from a lady’s leghorn hat to a shoestring, from a saddle to a cowskin, from a gold ring to a jewsharp.” Busy householders and ordinary rent-paying tradesmen held them in equal dislike.