their expenses.  They perform entire overtures and long concerted pieces, being furnished with spiral barrels, and might probably produce a tolerable effect at the distance of a mile or so—­at least we never heard one yet without incontinently wishing it a mile off.  By a piece of particular ill-fortune, we came one day upon one undergoing the ceremony of tuning, on a piece of waste-ground at the back of Coldbath Prison.  The deplorable wail of those tortured pipes and reeds, and the short savage grunt of the bass mystery, haunted us, a perpetual day-and-night-mare, for a month.  We could not help noticing, however, that the jauntily-dressed fellow, whose fingers were covered with showy rings, and ears hung with long drops, who performed the operation, managed it with consummate skill, and with an ear for that sort of music most marvellously discriminating.

6.  Blind bird-organists.  Though most blind persons either naturally possess or soon acquire an ear for music, there are yet numbers who, from the want of it or from some other cause, never make any proficiency as performers on an instrument.  Blindness, too, is often accompanied with some other disability, which disqualifies its victims for learning such trades as they might otherwise be taught.  Hence many, rather than remain in the workhouse, take to grinding music in the streets.  Here we are struck with one remarkable fact:  the Irishman, the Frenchman, the Italian, or the Savoyard, at least so soon as he is a man, and able to lug it about, is provided with an instrument with which he can make a noise in the world, and prefer his clamorous claim for a recompense; while the poor blind Englishman has nothing but a diminutive box of dilapidated whistles, which you may pass fifty times without hearing it, let him grind as hard as he will.  It is generally nothing more than an old worn-out bird-organ, in all likelihood charitably bestowed by some compassionate Poll Sweedlepipes, who has already used it up in the education of his bull-finches.  The reason, we opine, must be that the major part, if not the whole, of the peripatetic instruments of the metropolis are the property of speculators, who let them out on hire, and that the blind man, not being considered an eligible customer, is precluded from the advantage of their use.  However this may be, the poor blind grinder is almost invariably found furnished as we have described him, jammed up in some cranny or corner in a third-rate locality, where, having opened or taken off the top of his box, that the curious spectator may behold the mystery of his too quiet music—­the revolving barrel, the sobbing bellows, and the twelve leaden and ten wooden pipes—­he turns his monotonous handle throughout the live-long day, in the all but vain appeal for the commiseration of his fellows.  This is really a melancholy spectacle, and one which we would gladly miss altogether in our casual rounds.