What will he do now? is the thought that holds his audience bound in a spell.  Ah!  His face breaks into light.  He snatches up his collar and industriously adjusts it without a cravat.  He picks up a small object which he holds aloft between thumb and forefinger, turning it this way and that.  It is the ready-made bow of a bow tie, the bow and nothing more.  Yes, there are patent prongs to it, which he deftly slips beneath the wings of his collar.  So!  No trouble whatever.  Instantaneous.  A smile of luxurious blandness spreads over the face of the young man.  Thus he stands for a moment.  Then stoops and places in a corner of the window a large card inscribed “Ten Cents.”  With a pleasing sense of curiosity satisfied, the current of your own life as distinct from show-window shows flows back again into your consciousness.  You turn, and the great movement of the city takes you, although some souls of spacious leisure and of apparently insatiable curiosity linger on to drink in the happiness of witnessing a repetition of the fascinating exhibition.

Of such shows is the freedom of the kingdom of heaven.  There is the other young man in a show window a bit further on who all day long gashes blocks of wood with a magic razor, only to sharpen it to greater keenness, so that before you he continually cuts with it the finest hairs.  There is the young woman garbed as a nurse who treats the corns on a gigantic plaster foot.  In show windows cooks are cooking appetising dishes; damsels are combing magnificent, patent-medicine grown tresses; and in show windows are spectacles of infinite variety and without number.  All for the delight without cost of a penny of those whose hearts are as a little child.  There is the trim maid who folds and unfolds a Davenport couch.  I had a friend one time of a roving disposition (alas! he is now in jail) who once got the amazingly enviable job of doing nothing but smoke an endless succession of cigars in a show window.

Brother (as Lavengro used to say), there is nothing high about the cost of pleasure.  But hold! would you, without a thought, pass by here?  Though this, yon show, is without its rapt throng to do it reverence, it is, to an ardent mind, the most enticing, and the most instructive, of all the classic exhibitions to be seen from the pavement, the one fullest of all of (in the words of one Quinney) “meat and gravy.”  Always tarry, fellow man, before the cheap photographer’s.

Any one who has ever been enough interested in human matters to examine the sidewalk exhibitions of the cheap photographer does not need to be told that the fine old star character there, a character somewhat analogous in popular appeal and his permanency as an institution to the heavy villain of melodrama, a character old as the hills, yet fresh as the morning, is the naked baby.  Nobody ever saw a cheap photographer’s display without its naked baby.  Just why he should be naked is not clear.  However, there is undoubtedly