“Oh where, and oh where

Is my bonny laddie gone?”

Old Song.

One day, as I was going by

That part of Holborn christened High,

I heard a loud and sodden cry,

That chill’d my very blood;

And lo! from out a dirty alley,

Where pigs and Irish wont to rally,

I saw a crazy woman sally,

Bedaub’d with grease and mud.

She turn’d her East, she turn’d her West,

Staring like Pythoness possest,

With streaming hair and heaving breast,

As one stark mad with grief.

This way and that she wildly ran,

Jostling with woman and with man —

Her right hand held a frying pan,

The left a lump of beef.

At last her frenzy seemed to reach

A point just capable of speech,

And with a tone almost a screech,

As wild as ocean bird’s,

Or female Banter mov’d to preach,

She gave her “sorrow-words.”

“O Lord! O dear, my heart will break, I shall

go stick stark staring wild!

Has ever a one seen anything about the streets

like a crying lost-looking child?

Lawk help me, I don’t know where to look, or to

run, if I only knew which way —

A Child as is lost about London Streets, and especially

Seven Dials, is a needle in a bottle of hay.

I am all in a quiver — get out of my sight, do, you

wretch, you little Kitty M’Nab!

You promised to have half an eye to him, you

know you did, you dirty deceitful young drab.

The last time as ever I see him, poor thing;

was with my own blessed Motherly eyes,

Sitting as good as gold in the gutter,

a-playing at making little dirt pies.

I wonder he left the court where he was better off

than all the other young boys,

With two bricks, an old shoe, nine oyster-shells,

and a dead kitten by way of toys.

When his father comes home, and he always comes home

as sure as ever the clock strikes one,

He’ll be rampant, he will, at his child being lost;

and the beef and the inguns not done!

La bless you, good folks, mind your own consarns,

and don’t be making a mob in the street;

O Sergeant M’Farlane! you have not come across

my poor little boy, have you, in your beat?

Do, good people, move on! don’t stand staring at me

like a parcel of stupid stuck pigs;

Saints forbid! but he’s p’r’aps been inviggled

away up a court for the sake of his clothes

He’d a very good jacket, for certain,

for I bought it myself for a shilling one day in Rag Fair;

And his trowsers considering not very much patch’d,

and red plush, they was once his Father’

His shirt, it’s very lucky I’d got washing in the tub,

or that might have gone with the rest

But he’d got on a very good pinafore

with only two slits and a burn on the breast.

He’d a goodish sort of hat, If the crown was sew’d in,

and not quite so much jagg’d at the brim,

With one shoe on, and the other shoe is a boot,

and not a fit, and, you’ll know by that if it’s him.

Except being so well dress’d, my mind would misgive,

some old beggar woman in want of an orphan,

Had borrow’d the child to go a begging with,

but I’d rather see him laid out in his coffin!

Do, good people, move on, such a rabble of boys!

I’ll break every bone of ’em I come near,

Go home — you’re spilling the porter — go home —

Tommy Jones, go along home with your beer.

This day is the sorrowfullest day of my life,

ever since my name was Betty Morgan,

Them vile Savoyards! they lost him once before

all along of following a Monkey and an Organ:

O my Billy — my head will turn right round — if

he’s got kiddynapp’d with them Italians,

They’ll make him a plaster parish image boy,

they wi............