Page:The London Guide and Stranger's Safeguard.djvu/114

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98
TREATMENT AND REPRISALS.

filling a distinguished office in the city of London, should be found selling a pound of tea "plated?" that is, at top and bottom a thin layer of fine hyson, and in the middle the rankest bohea, of Dutch importation!

Next to these, as a warning to avoidance, we must notice the


BARKERS,

Who are of Moorfields origin, where they press you to buy household-goods and furniture; as they do clothes in Rosemary Lane, Seven Dials, Field Lane, and Houndsditch. Ladies dresses used to be barked pretty much in Cranbourn Alley and the neighbourhood of Leicester Square; but it is pleasant to have to notice the abatement of the nuisance in a great measure. The shop-women content themselves, now-a-days, with merely asking strangers to look at their goods. I scarcely know what to recommend to my reader in such cases, for he would not like, perhaps, to follow my example: when these fellows were showing me from room to room, and dragging me upstairs and down, I used to manage to carry off portable articles, as ink-bottles—plated crewet-stands, small tea-caddies, and such like sort of little things as would easily squeeze