ven amongst small children you can find sentiments of camaraderie, fierce loyalty, arch enemies and any kind of social interaction you would expect from adults. And then there is Julius. Julius, who's full name is Julius Struthers, is a small kid with large ambitions. He rallies the urchins around him, organizes them in small armies and in general treats them as his personal arsenal of mayhem. The boy is good, he knows how to lead even though he's only 10 years old. True, he operates his improvised army on rations of candy and promises of anything an urchin's little mind can conceive. And more. Fame and fortune means nothing to these scrawny dirty roaches. Food they need, alcohol they prefer and in between they like to cause trouble from one end of Fleet Street to the other. Julius is their trouble master and they trust him to organize the most splendid mischief this side of London has ever seen. And he does. His plans are elaborate. Some of the stunts pulled would make professor Moriarty blush and leave Holmes in total despair at home sucking his pipe. Julius understands the power of a pack of urchins behaving as urchins do. If you were to spot a man leaning against a lamppost head ducked deep in the collar of his coat, staring at a shop window, you would draw the conclusion that this man is up to no good. Seeing an urchin do the same thing you would perhaps draw the same conclusion that the little tike is up to no good, and you would be right. But that's expected from them and that's where Julius came in.

Julius was in it for the sheer achievement of it all. Even though he stood to gain considerable amounts of goods from some of his plans, the moment the plan worked he was done. Most of the time his mind would be racing to construct the next scheme, and a mighty scheme it would be. Mind you we are still talking about small children. A mighty scheme for urchins is to make Jones's horse sneeze. Every 5 minutes. I'm sure you are thinking that this is rather innocent. It is, the horse recovered quite well and Jones's head returned to its normal color about an hour later. Making the horse sneeze was just the prelude, the dress rehearsal. When the front of the animal proved controllable, Julius started concentrating on the other side. For weeks he tried various herbs and spices, plants and vegetables in all kinds of combinations to get the desired effect. For his test subject he used Ms. Grub's cat, a fat slow moving specimen of feline fur on velvety feet. At first nothing happened to the cat. It was perhaps a little more irritable than usual, but since the animal was considered 'temperamental' anyway, a term frequently used by Ms. Grub, she did not pay much attention. Only during the last two weeks when the usual purring became interrupted with either a loud burp or a long lasting breaking of wind, did Ms. Grub start to investigate. It was already too late. By then Julius had perfected his recipe and was onto bigger things. How he managed to sneak his trysels into the cat food we will never know but it must have been one of his smaller master strokes because Ms. Grub never noticed. It took quite some time before the cat returned to normal. The last we noticed of the cat's intestinal problems was when I was standing around the front of the store waiting to pick up some fabric Hubbard needed for a display box. The cat had been roaming around my legs and whatever I did, it would not go. All of a sudden the cat made a noise as if it had the hiccups. It sat on its hind legs and stared into space with eyes contemplating what its body would do next. With the loudest sound ever heard from an animal the cat let loose. The force of the air knocked the poor animal over and an immediate stench of rotten eggs and boiled leaks permeated the room. All I could do was shout to Ms. Grub that I would return later because it was already past my lunch break. The poor animal could not even get up anymore, or rather it had decided to give up and wait until its body had indicated when all was well.

We should have suspected what was going to happen next. First a horse sneezing its tiny brain out, then a cat producing more methane than Welder's distillation experiments. Julius waited. He waited long enough until we had forgotten the cat incident and long enough for Jones's horse to recover from a nervous tic that would make it raise its upper lips every time Jones would take out his handkerchief. The full story was later told to me by Sebastian, who in this particular case turned out to be an innocent bystander. Julius had trained the urchins to create a network of stooges around Jones and his horse. He needed several minutes to feed the horse enough of his mixture for the desired amount to be digested. Jones and his horse slumped through our end of Fleet Street and as per usual stopped at the entrance to our alcove. Jones would go into the bakery and buy a scone or other such pastry. It's a miracle the horse could drag both Jones and his carriage around town. Inside the store Jones had a clear view of Fleet Street through the bakery's large windows. Always the horse would stand there, head slightly down, contemplating the exact nature of Newton's first law. From where Jones was standing in the shop, he had a perfect view of the entire front of the horse. Julius had calculated that if he could make the horse stand still but move its head down just a little more, it would seem as if the animal had discovered a flaw in Newton's first law and was contemplating the best way of writing e rebuttal. The horse could not move too much. One step forward or one step backward and Jones would know. His exact ritual and the many years of exercising its precise schema would certainly show if there was anything out of the ordinary going on. Julius had tested this out in fact. Exactly a week before he had squeezed himself against the wall and inched himself towards the horse. Jones's horse knew all the kids, he could smell one apart from the other a mile away. This time Julius crept closer as Jones was in the shop and at the opportune moment stuck a cigar in the horse's mouth. The horse did nothing, kind of chewed on it a little bit. Before any innocent bystanders could even start to open their mouths Jones was already on his way to see who had done this. Julius was of course nowhere to be seen, but the test had confirmed that you did not mess with Jones's horse.

It was on a Saturday morning and Jones as usual parked his carriage with blurry eyed horse next to the bakery. Slowly he walked in and started investigating the contents of the jewelry box as he called it. Julius crept closer with a bucket. The bucket was completely closed off at the top with some cloth and out of the top stuck a long straw. Julius had coated the top of the straw with sugar and was now dangling the end of it below the window frame. The horse noticed the straw and slowly moved its large and tired head downward. Right at that moment an urchin entered the bakery and asked for a carrot cake. Mrs. Fineley, the baker's wife looked round Jones and with a contemplative voice told the urchin they did not sell carrot cake. This was the point where Julius managed to have the horse take a few long sips through the straw. Jones luckily takes forever to pick his pastry for the day. Not half a minute later another urchin casually walked into the store and rapped his knuckles on the glass display case. D'you have carrot cake? The kid asked. "What is it with you kids and carrot cake today?" asked Mrs. Finely perturbed. Without saying a word the urchin turned around and walked out. Jones raised his cap and scratched his head. "I tell you these kids play the strangest games these days", he said. The horse outside was clearly enjoying whatever Julius was feeding him. In walks another urchin. This time Mrs. Fineley cuts off the little kid and says: "let me guess, you want carrot cake". With an innocent face and a clear voice the little kid says: "No m'am that would be disgusting", and walks out of the store. At this point both Jones and Mrs. Finely are looking at each other with a mix of annoyance and confusion, which is a good thing because had they looked out the window they would have seen the horse taking very long sips through Julius's straw. 

Operation 'Jonesing the Horse' was considered a complete success. Julius crept away as soon as he heard the bakery's store bell ring for the sixth time, indicating that the third urchin had just left the store. On cue the urchins spread out and took up positions along Fleet Street to witness the results of Julius's scheme. They did not have to wait long. The horse looked fine, perhaps a little more active than was usual on a Saturday morning. Calmly Jones steered the cab into the slow moving traffic, where various other carriages carried courting couples on their leisurely way towards social obligations or perhaps a museum. Wares were sold on the pavement and pretty much anywhere where there was space. Peddlers did not even need that and would carry their merchandize all along Fleet Street and beyond. Sebastian, who recounted these events told me that it took longer than expected for the chaos to ensue. The horse was already out of sight from where he was standing, but the sudden outburst of unmistakable sound easily traversed all the way to his location. Carriages instantly sped up to get away from the sudden sewer stench covering a large part of Fleet Street. Eyewitness accounts tell us of people collapsing to the ground from sheer lack of oxygen. The peddlers ran for it, dropping their merchandise. The courting couples closed any doors and windows in their carriage. Those unfortunate enough to be in an open carriage grabbed their faces or even jumped out of the moving mobiles. We never did find out what Julius put in that bucket. We did notice that ever since that accident Jones's horse wears a long mantle covering it's entire upper body and most of all its rear end.