Sometimes the sale on the rounds may be the same as that at the stalls, or 10 or 20 per cent. more or less, according to the weather, as shrimps can be sold by the itinerant dealers better than by the stall-keepers in wet weather, when people prefer buying at their doors. But in hot weather the stall trade is the best, “for people often fancy that the s’rimps is sent out to sell ’cause they’ll not keep no longer. It’s only among customers as knows you, you can do any good on a round then.”
The costermongers sell annually, it appears, about 770,000 pints of shrimps. At 2_d._ a pint (a very low calculation) the street sale of shrimps amount to upwards of 6,400_l._ yearly.
[Illustration: ORANGE MART, DUKE’S PLACE.--[_From a Daguerreotype by_ BEARD.]]
The trade in oysters is unquestionably one of the oldest with which the London--or rather the English--markets are connected; for oysters from Britain were a luxury in ancient Rome.
Oysters are now sold out of the smacks at Billingsgate, and a few at Hungerford. The more expensive kind such as the real Milton, are never bought by the costermongers, but they buy oysters of a “good middling quality.” At the commencement of the season these oysters are 14_s._ a “bushel,” but the measure contains from a bushel and a half to two bushels, as it is more or less heaped up. The general price, however, is 9_s._ or 10_s._, but they _have_ been 16_s._ and 18_s._ The “big trade” was unknown until 1848, when the very large shelly oysters, the fish inside being very small, were introduced from the Sussex coast. They were sold in Thames-street and by the Borough-market. Their sale was at first enormous. The costermongers distinguished them by the name of “scuttle-mouths.” One coster informant told me that on the Saturdays he not unfrequently, with the help of a boy and a girl, cleared 10_s._ by selling these oysters in the streets, disposing of four bags. He thus sold, reckoning twenty-one dozen to the bag, 2,016 oysters; and as the price was two for a penny, he took just 4_l._ 4_s._ by the sale of oysters in the streets in one night. With the scuttle-mouths the costermonger takes no trouble: he throws them into a yard, and dashes a few pails of water over them, and then places them on his barrow, or conveys them to his stall. Some of the better class of costermongers, however, lay down their oysters carefully, giving them oatmeal “to fatten on.”