Punch, or the London Charivari | Page 7

one window which suggests nothing but the obscure branch of a highly-decayed bank in the dimmest cathedral town. On the dingy screen which entirely fills the window is written simply in letters which time has almost erased, "---- ---- PICTURES." Nothing could be less enticing. Yet inside, I daresay, fortunes are made daily. I noticed no trace of this method at the Advertisers' Exhibition; they might give it a trial.
Now no doubt you fondly think that Bond Street is wholly devoted to luxuries; perhaps you have abandoned your dream of actually buying something in Bond Street? You are wrong. To begin with, there are about ten places where you can buy food, and, though there is no pub. now, there is a caf�� (with a licence). There are two grocers and a poulterer. There is even a fish-shop--you didn't know that, did you? I am bound to say it seemed to have only the very largest fish, but they were obviously fish.
Anyone can go shopping in Bond Street. I knew a clergyman once who went in and asked for a back-stud. He was afterwards unfrocked for riotous living, but the stud was produced. You can buy a cauliflower in Bond Street--if you know the ropes. There is a shop which merely looks like a very beautiful florist's. There are potatoes in the window, it is true, but they are "hot-house" ones; inside there is no trace of a common vegetable. But if you ask facetiously for a cauliflower (as I did) the young lady will disappear below ground and actually return with a real cauliflower (de luxe, of course). I remember few more embarrassing episodes.
And if you like to inquire at the magnificent provision-merchant's he too will conjure up from the magic cellars boot-cream and metal-polish and all those vulgar groceries which make life possible. That is the secret of Bond Street. Beneath that glittering display of luxurious trivialities there are vast reserves of solid prosaic necessaries, only waiting to be asked for. A man could live exclusively on Bond Street. I don't know where you would buy your butchers' meat, but I have a proud fancy that, if you went in and said something to one of those sleek and sorrowful jewellers, he too would vanish underground and blandly return to you with a jewelled steak or a plush chop.
Many years ago, they tell me, there was a butcher in Bond Street. Perhaps you dealt there. For my part I was not eating much meat in those days. But I can imagine his window--a perfect little grotto of jasper and onyx, with stalactites of pure gold, and in the middle, resting on a genuine block of Arctic ice, an exquisite beef-sausage. I wish he would come back.
It is difficult to realise that there is anything but shop-windows in Bond Street, but I like to think that, up there in those upper storeys which one never sees, there does dwell a self-contained little community to whom Bond Street is merely the village street, down which the housewives pass gossiping each morning to the greengrocer's or the fishmonger's and never purchase any pearls at all.
When the butcher comes back I think I shall join them.
A. P. H.
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[Illustration: Father. "LOOK HERE, BILLY, MR. SMITH CALLED AT THE OFFICE THIS MORNING ABOUT YOUR FIGHT WITH HIS BOY YESTERDAY."
Son. "DID HE? I HOPE YOU GOT ON AS WELL AS I DID."]
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[Illustration: Joan (whose mother has just bought her a pair of woollen gloves). "OH, MUMMY, I WISH YOU HAD GOT KID. I HATE THIS KIND; THEY MAKE MY SWEETS SO HAIRY."]
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THE SAD CASE OF EL GRECO.
It was at the National Gallery, situated on the north side of Trafalgar Square, that I first made the acquaintance of one DOMENICO THEOTOCOPULI, a native of Crete, who--probably because his own people wanted him to be a stockbroker or something--set up as a painter in Spain, and was dubbed by the Dons "El Greco," as you might say "Scottie."
For years I have been rather tickled by his manner of depicting Popes and Saints as if they were reflected in elongating mirrors labelled, "Before Dining at the Toreador Restaurant." But until quite lately I hardly ever met anyone who had even noticed him, so I felt quite bucked on the old chap's account when I heard that he was considered one of the most distinguished of the Spanish painters, past and present, who are on view just now at Burlington House.
And what surprises me is not that old THEOTOCOPULI should attract so much attention in Piccadilly, but that such lots of people seem never to have known that he has been exhibiting himself all this time in Trafalgar Square.
I'm sure Mrs. Bletherwood didn't, for one, when she