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Here, under a baker’s shop kept by an Italian padrone, slept o’ nights the little organ grinders and hurdy-gurdy boys, who used to wander through the London suburbs and far into the countryside, to the delight of English nurseries from which coppers were flung down to these grubby, dark-eyed urchins with little shivering monkeys in their coat pockets or on their music boxes. They were the slaves of the padrone and had to bring him all their earnings and get beaten if they did not bring enough, before they slept in the cellars of this London slum, among the black beetles and the rats.

In one back yard lived a gray bear, belonging to two wanderers from the mountains of Savoy, and I used to hear the rattle of his chains before they led him out on his hind legs with a big pole between his paws.

Above a big yard crowded with piano organs sat, in a little room at the top of a high ladder, a fat old Italian who put the music on the streets. He sat before an open organ case with a roll of cartridge paper into which he stabbed little holes, which afterward made the notes played by a spiked cylinder when the organ grinder turned his handle. It was he who selected the tunes, thus conferring immortality on many poor devils of musicians who heard their melodies whistled by the errand boys to this music of the streets, and became famous thereby. But it was the fat old Italian at the top of the tall ladder who was the interpreter of their genius to the popular ear of the great public of the streets and slums. He put in the trills, and the “twiddley bits,” stabbing with his bradawl on the cartridge roll, as though inspired by the divine afflatus, while his hair, above a massive face and three chins, was all curls and corkscrews, as though crotchets, and quavers, semiquavers, and demi-semiquavers, arpeggios and chromatics were thrusting through his brain.