od where anybody might see him, almost
as immobile as a cigar-store Indian and much less decorative, with a
peripatetic shoeblack busy at his feet. His standing attitude was a
little like Washington crossing the Delaware; and when he sat down, he
was not wholly unlike the picture of Jupiter in Mr. Bulfinch's
well-known _Age of Fable_. He had his shoes shined on the sidewalk,
congesting traffic; he had them shined in the park, with the birds
singing; wherever he had them shined, he was as lacking in
self-consciousness as a baby sucking its thumb. Peripatetic shoeblacks
pursued pedestrians, and no sensitive gentleman was safe from them
merely because he had carefully and well shined his own shoes before he
came out. But how rarely nowadays do we see this peripatetic shoeblack!
Soon he will be as extinct as the buffalo, and the shoe-blacking parlor
is his Buffalo Bill.

In the shoe-blacking parlor we are all tarred with the same brush, all
daubed with the same dauber; we have nothing, as the rather enigmatical
phrase goes, _on_ one another. Indeed, we hardly look at one another,
and are as remote as strangers sitting side by side in a theatre.
Individually, in a steady, subconscious way, I think we are all
wondering how we are going to get down when the time comes. One will
hop, like a great sparrow; another will turn round and descend backward;
another will come down with an absent-minded little wave of the foot, as
if he were quite used to having his shoes shined and already thinking of
more serious business; another--but this is sheer nervousness and lack
of _savoir-faire_--will step off desperately, as if into an abyss, and
come down with a thump. Sometimes, but rarely, a man will fall off. It
is a throne--and perhaps this is true of all thrones--from which no
altogether self-satisfactory descent is possible; and we all know it,
sitting behind our newspapers, or staring down on decadent Greece
shining at our feet, or examining with curious, furtive glances those
calendars the feminine beauty of which seems peculiar to shoe-blacking
parlors, and has sometimes led us to wonder whether the late Mr.
Comstock ever had his shoes shined.

And now, behold! the slave-king at my feet has found a long, narrow
strip of linen, not, I fear, antiseptic, but otherwise suggestive of a
preparedness course in first aid to the injured. He breathes on my shoes
(O unhygienic shoeblack!), dulling them to make them brighter with his
strip o