THERE are kinds of fruit sold in the streets —"green fruit" and "dry fruit."

In commerce, all fruit which is edible as it is taken from the tree or the ground, is known as "green." A subdivision of this green fruit is into "fresh" or "tender" fruit, which includes currants, gooseberries, strawberries, and, indeed, all fruits that demand immediate consumption, in contradistinction to such productions as nuts which may be kept without injury for a season. All fruit which is "cured" is known as "dry" fruit. In summer the costers vend "green fruit," and in the winter months, or in the early spring, when the dearness or insufficiency of the supply of green fruit renders it unsuited for their traffic, they resort, but not extensively, to "dry fruit." It is principally, however, when an abundant season, or the impossibility of keeping the dry fruit much longer, has tended to reduce the price of it, that the costlier articles are to be found on the costermonger's barrow.

Fruit is, for the most part, displayed on barrows, by the street-dealers in it. Some who supply the better sort of houses—more especially those in the suburbs—carry such things as apples and plums, in clean round wickerbaskets, holding pecks or half-pecks.

The commoner "green" fruits of home produce are bought by the costermonger in the markets. The foreign green fruit, as pine-apples, melons, grapes, chestnuts, coker-nuts, Brazilnuts, hazel-nuts, and oranges, are purchased by them at the public sales of the brokers, and of the Jews in Duke's-place. The more intelligent and thrifty of the costers buy at the public sales on the principle of association, as I have elsewhere described. Some costermongers expend as much as at a time in such green fruit, or dry fruit, as is not immediately perishable, at a public sale, or at a fruit-warehouse, and supply the other costers.

The regular costermongers seldom deal in oranges and chestnuts. If they sell walnuts, they reserve these, they say, for their Sunday afternoon's pastime. The people who carry oranges, chestnuts, or walnuts, or Spanish nuts about the town, are not considered as costermongers, but are generally, though not always, classed, by the regular men, with the watercress-women, the sprat-women, the winkle-dealers, and such others, whom they consider beneath them. The orange season is called by the costermonger the "Irishman's harvest." Indeed, the street trade in oranges and nuts is almost entirely in the hands of the Irish and their children; and of the children of costermongers. The costers themselves would rather starve—and do starve now and then — than condescend to it. The trade in coker-nuts is carried on greatly by the Jews on Sundays, and by young men and boys who are not on other days employed as street-sellers.

The usual kinds of fruit the regular costers deal in are strawberries, raspberries (plain and stalked), cherries, apricots, plums, green-gages, currants, apples, pears, damsons, green and ripe gooseberries, and pine-apples. They also deal in vegetables, such as turnips, greens, brocoli, carrots, onions, celery, rhubarb, new potatoes, peas, beans (French and scarlet, broad and Windsor), asparagus, vegetable marrow, seakale, spinach, lettuces, small salads, radishes, etc. Their fruit and vegetables they usually buy at Coventgarden, Spitalfields, or the Borough markets. Occasionally they buy some at Farringdon, but this they reckon to be very little better than a "haggler's market," — a "haggler" being, as I before explained, the middle-man who attends in the fruit and vegetable-markets, and buys of the salesman to sell again to the retail dealer or costermonger.

Concerning the quantity of fruit and vegetables sold in the streets, by the London costermongers. This, as I said, when treating of the street-trade in fish, can only be arrived at by ascertaining the entire quantity sold wholesale at the London markets, and then learning from the best authorities the proportion retailed in the public thoroughfares, Fully to elucidate this matter, both as to the extent of the metropolitan supply of vegetables and fruit, ("foreign" as well as "home-grown," and "green" as well as "dry") and the relative quantity of each, vended through the agency of the costermongers, I caused inquiries to be instituted at all the principal markets and brokers (for not even the vaguest return on the subject had, till then, been prepared), and received from all the gentlemen connected therewith, every assistance and information, as I have here great pleasure in acknowledging.

To carry out my present inquiry, I need not give returns of the articles sold by the costermongers, nor is it necessary for me to cite any but those dealt in by them generally. Their exceptional sales, such as of mushrooms, cucumbers, &c., are not included here.

The following Table shows the ordinary annual supply of (nearly all produced within a radius of miles from the Bank) to each of the London "green" markets.

The various proportions of the several kinds of fruit and vegetables sold by the costermongers are here calculated for the markets, from returns which have been obtained from each market separately. To avoid unnecessary detail, however, these several items are lumped together, and the aggregate proportion above given.

The foregoing Table, however, relates chiefly to "home grown" supplies. Concerning the quantity of foreign fruit and vegetables imported into this country, the proportion consumed in London, and the relative amount sold by the costers, I have obtained the following returns:—

Here, then, we have the entire metropolitan supply of the principal vegetables and green fruit (both home grown and foreign), as well as the relative quantity "distributed" throughout London by the costermongers; it now but remains for me, in order to complete the account, to do the same for "the dry fruit."