SHOOTING NIAGARA 223

drunken sailors and their bright scarved girls, the clatter of the
steam organs and the strumming of nigger minstrels. But any
poor street on frequent occasion presented the same scene in
miniature: a German band, a dancing polar bean a visit from
the Salvation Army or a band of morris dancers could bring the
population of every crowded house into the street. Most poor
districts had their quota of barrel-organs, whose owners, having
finished their day's work in wealthier parts, could generally be
prevailed upon to oblige with a tune to which the whole street
stepped it on the flags. A wedding was always the occasion for the
hire of a barrel organ for the day and for continuous music from
the time of the bridal couple's return to the adjournment of the
company to the nearest "boozer." Only a fight—a common
occurrence—could bring the harmony to a stop.

The supreme embodiment of the surviving character of the
English working people was the music hall. Here art held up
the mirror to nature. It was, as Mr. J. B. Booth of Pink 9Un fame
has written, "a purely native product, cheery, unregenerate,
optimistic." Springing spontaneously out of the sing-song of the
upper tavern room and the old out-of-door gardens of the artisan
of the pastoral past it became for a space of time a British institu-
tion. Its morality was to make the best of a bad job: its purpose
to make every one free and easy. Performers and audience, under
the genial and bacchanalian presidency of the chairman, with his
buttonhole, his mesmeric eye and his town crier's voice, combined
'in expressing their own individuality. At the old South London,
whenever there was a hitch in the programme, the chairman,
"Bob" Courtney, glittering with false diamonds and laying aside
his glass and cigar, would rise to sing his traditional, song,
"Britannia's Voice of Thunder," while the whole audience kept
time, drowning singing and even big drum with an equally
traditional refrain of "good old Bob! Bob! Bob! Bob!" Its songs,
circulating in succession among the entire population—
"Champagne Charlie," "Lardi-da," "It's all done by kindness,"
"How's your poor feet," "What ho! she bumps," "Pretty Polly
Perkins of Paddington Green." u Ask a policeman," and " Knocked
'em in the Old Kent Road"—were vernacular, irreverent, demo-
cratic, yet intensely individualistic, as of a nation of disinherited,
cheery aristocrats, and arose from deeply felt experience: they
were the English answer to the lot which had befallen the
English worker. They told a man (in rousing chorus) to "paddle