This old picture has long ceased to be representative of Whitechapel's everyday aspect. The coach has long ago whirled away into limbo, the elegantly-dressed groups have been gathered to Abraham's, or another's, bosom, and Whitechapel knows their kind no more. Bustle, and a dismal overcrowding of carts, waggons, costermongers' barrows, tram-cars and omnibuses are more characteristic of to-day. Also, the Jewish element is very pronounced; chiefly foreign Jews, inconceivably dirty. Many of the shop-fronts bear the names of Cohen, Abraham, Solomon and the like, and others ending in "baum," or "heim." But on Tuesdays and Thursdays of every week the spacious street regains something of its old rural character, in the open-air hay and straw market held here, the largest in the kingdom. It fills the broad thoroughfare and overflows into the side streets: the countrymen who have come up on the great waggons by road from remote parts of Essex lounging picturesquely against the sweet-smelling hay or straw, attending to their horses, or refreshing in the old taverns. It is Arcady come again. The eyes are gladdened by the long vista of the hay-wains, and the nose gratefully inhales the rustic scent of their heaped-up loads. It is true that Central Londoners also have their so-called Haymarket, but hay is the least likely of articles to be purchased there in these days. What do they think, those countrymen, of the Whitechapel folks, the "chickaleary blokes," used, as a writer in the middle of the nineteenth century remarked, to "all sorts of high and low villainy," from robbery with violence to "prigging a wipe," and the selling of painted sparrows for canaries? Nor was Whitechapel a desirable place when Mr Pickwick travelled to Ipswich. "Not a wery nice neighbourhood," said Sam, as they rumbled along the crowded and filthy street. "It's a wery remarkable circumstance," he continued, "that poverty and oysters go together.... The poorer a place is, the greater call there seems to be for oysters.... An oyster-stall to every half-dozen houses. The street's lined vith 'em. Blessed if I don't think that ven a man's wery poor, he rushes out of his lodgings and eats oysters in regular desperation." Sam was a keen observer; but there is now a deeper depth than oysters. Periwinkles and poverty; whelks and villainy foregather in Whitechapel at the dawn of the Twentieth Century.