All the oldest London mendicants find their
way, at different hours of the week, up and down the Square. There is,
I believe, no other square in London where musicians are permitted. On
Monday morning there is the blind man with the black patch over one eye;
he has an organ (a very old one, with a painted picture of the Battle of
Trafalgar on the front of it) and he wears an old black skull-cap. He
wheezes out his old tunes (they are older than other tunes that March
Square hears, and so, perhaps, March Square loves them). He goes
despondently, and the tap of his stick sounds all the way round the
Square. A small and dirty boy--his grandson, maybe--pushes the organ for
him. On Tuesday there comes the remnants of a German band--remnants
because now there are only the cornet, the flute and the trumpet. Sadly
wind-blown, drunken and diseased they are, and the Square can remember
when there were a number of them, hale and hearty young fellows, but
drink and competition have been too strong for them. On Wednesdays there
is sometimes a lady who sings ballads in a voice that can only be
described as that contradiction in terms "a shrill contralto.
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