Bootblacks have a sense of rhythm unparalleled.  Of this the long rag is their instrument.  They draw it once or twice across the shoe to set the key and then they go into a swift and pattering melody.  If there is an unusual genius in the bootblack—­some remnant of ancient Greece—­he plays such a lively tune that one’s shoulders jig to it.  If there were a dryad or other such nimble creature on the street, she would come leaping as though Orpheus strummed a tune, but the dance is too fast for our languid northern feet.

Nowhere are apples redder than on a cart.  Our hearts go out to Adam in the hour of his temptation.  I know one lady of otherwise careful appetite who even leans toward dates if she may buy them from a cart.  “Those dear dirty dates,” she calls them, but I cannot share her liking for them.  Although the cart is a beguiling market, dates so bought are too dusty to be eaten.  They rank with the apple-john.  The apple-john is that mysterious leathery fruit, sold more often from a stand than from a cart, which leans at the rear of the shelf against the peppermint jars.  For myself, although I do not eat apple-johns, I like to look at them.  They are so shrivelled and so flat, as though a banana had caught a consumption.  Or rather, in the older world was there not a custom at a death of sending fruits to support the lonesome journey?  If so, the apple-john came untasted to the end.  Indeed, there is a look of old Egypt about the fruit.  Whether my fondness for gazing at apple-johns springs from a distant occasion when as a child I once bought and ate one, or whether it arises from the fact that Falstaff called Prince Hal a dried apple-john, is an unsolved question, but I like to linger before a particularly shrivelled one and wonder what its youth was like.  Perhaps like many of its betters, it remained unheralded and unknown all through its fresher years and not until the coming of its wrinkled age was it at last put up to the common view.  The apple-john sets up kinship with an author.

The day of all fools is wisely put in April.  The jest of the day resides in the success with which credulity is imposed upon, and April is the month of easiest credulity.  Let bragging travellers come in April and hold us with tales of the Anthropopagi!  If their heads are said to grow beneath their shoulders, still we will turn a credent ear.  Indeed, it is all but sure that Baron Munchausen came back from his travels in the Spring.  When else could he have got an ear?  What man can look upon the wonders of the returning year—­the first blue skies, the soft rains, the tender sproutings of green stalks without feeling that there is nothing beyond belief?  If such miracles can happen before his eyes, shall not the extreme range even of travel or metaphysics be allowed?  What man who has smelled the first fragrance of the earth, has heard the birds on their northern flight and has seen an April brook upon its course, will withhold his credence even though the jest be plain?