It must be owned, the Covent-garden affords some good fruit;
which, however, is always engrossed by a few individuals of
overgrown fortune, at an exorbitant price; so that little else
than the refuse of the market falls to the share of the
community; and that is distributed by such filthy hands, as I
cannot look at without loathing. It was but yesterday that I saw
a dirty barrow-bunter in the street, cleaning her dusty fruit
with her own spittle; and, who knows but some fine lady of St
James's parish might admit into her delicate mouth those very
cherries, which had been rolled and moistened between the filthy,
and, perhaps, ulcerated chops of a St Giles's huckster -- I need
not dwell upon the pallid, contaminated mash, which they call
strawberries; soiled and tossed by greasy paws through twenty
baskets crusted with dirt; and then presented with the worst
milk, thickened with the worst flour, into a bad likeness of
cream: but the milk itself should not pass unanalysed, the
produce of faded cabbage-leaves and sour draff, lowered with hot
water, frothed with bruised snails, carried through the streets
in open pails, exposed to foul rinsings, discharged from doors
and windows, spittle, snot, and tobacco-quids from foot
passengers, overflowings from mud carts, spatterings from coach
wheels, dirt and trash chucked into it by roguish boys for the
joke's sake, the spewings of infants, who have slabbered in the
tin-measure, which is thrown back in that condition among the
milk, for the benefit of the next customer; and, finally, the
vermin that drops from the rags of the nasty drab that vends this
precious mixture, under the respectable denomination of milk-maid.
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