THIS trade used to be more extensively carried on in the streets than it is at present. The reasons I heard assigned for the decadence were the greater cheapness of musical productions generally, and the present fondness for lithographic embellishments to every polka, waltz, quadrille, ballad, &c., &c. "People now hates, I do believe, a music-sheet," streetseller remarked.

The street manuscript-music trade was, certainly, and principally, piratical. An air became popular perhaps on a sudden, as it was pointed out to me, in the case, of "Jump, Jim Crow." At a musical publisher's, such an affair in the bloom of its popularity, would have been charged from to , twentyfive years ago, and the street-seller at that time, often also a book-stall keeper, would employ, or buy of those who offered them for sale, and who copied them for the purpose, a manuscript of the demanded music, which he could sell cheap in comparison.

A man who, until the charges of which I have before spoken, kept a -hand bookstall, in a sort of arched passage in the New Cut, , sold manuscript-music, and was often "sadly bothered," he said, at time by the musical propensities of a man who looked like a journeyman tailor. This man, whenever he had laid out a trifle at the book-stall, looked over the music, and often pulled a small flute from his pocket, and began to play a few bars from of the manuscripts, and this he continued doing, to the displeasure of the stallkeeper, until a crowd began to assemble, thinking, perhaps, that the flute-player was a streetmusician; he was then obliged to desist. Of the kind of music he sold, or of its mode of production, this street-bookseller knew nothing. He purchased it of a man who carried it to his stall, and as he found it sell tolerably well, he gave himself no further trouble concerning it. The supplier of the manuscript pencilled on each sheet the price it was to be offered at, allowing the stall-keeper from to per cent. profit, if the price marked was obtained. "I haven't seen anything of him, sir," said the street-bookseller, "for a long while. I dare say he was some poor musicianer, or singer, or a reduced gentleman, perhaps, for he always came after dusk, or else on bad dark days."

Although but partially connected with streetart, I may mention as a sample of the music sometimes offered in street-sale, that a bookstall keeper, weeks ago showed me a pile of music which he had purchased from a "waste collector," about months before, at the pound. Among this was some MS. music, which I specify below, and which the book-stall keeper was confident, on very insufficient grounds, I think, had been done for street-sale.

The music had, as regards -fourths of it, evidently been bound, and had been torn from the boards of the book, as only the paper portion is purchased for "waste." Some, however, were loose sheets, which had evidently never been subjected to the process of stitching. I

There are now no persons regularly employed in preparing MS. music for the streets. But occasionally a person skilled in music writing will, when he or she, I was told, had nothing better in hand, do a little for the street sale, disposing of the MSS. to any street-stationer or bookseller. If persons are this way employed, receiving a week each, the year through—which I am assured is the extent— we find upwards of thus earned, and about twice that sum taken by the street retailers.