der, and works out many a little
life-story, as did the ingenious Silas Wegg concerning the people who
passed his corner or lived in the houses of the neighborhood. Among the
more familiar types are college-students cramming for the day's
recitation, giggling school-girls, dapper clerks, pert messenger-boys
improving the time by reading a blood-and-thunder story-paper in the
very smallest of type, business-men, all nerve in the morning, and in
the afternoon chatting affably or half asleep, ladies keen for a
shopping-"meet" on Fourteenth Street, housewives with market-baskets,
and workingmen with tin pails. Each hour of the day develops its own
tide and type of travel, beginning with the lowest class of laborer and
ending with the belated reveller. There is a still hour in the morning,
awhile before noon, when the idlers and the dissipated begin to dribble
into or out of the city, and studies of the odd and the sad alike abound
for the Hogarthian pencil and imagination.

The "basket brigade" constitutes a large and regular detachment of the
trans-Hudson army. Pleasant it is (I can hear the parody-fiend murmur),
when things are green and price of meat is low, to move amid the
market-scene, where gourmands stout and housewives lean with baskets
come and go. Tempting too, alike to the dainty and the thrifty. Like
Robinet in the "Evenings at Home," it adds much to the relish of one's
little supper to have selected it one's self out of a whole marketful
and to inhale its imaginary savors all the way home. Then, it is so
nice to surprise the wife with the earliest of the season, or to pour
out upon the table a dozen golden oranges, or to bring a little light
into the invalid's eye by a basket of grapes or a fragrant bunch of
flowers, or to delight Tiny Tim with a trinket, or to let little Jacob
"know what oysters is." Especially on Saturday afternoons does the
basket brigade come out in force, and many a homely little idyl may be
conjured out of the family groups or the purveying parents who throng
and cumber the boat at such times. The capacities of the market-basket,
as then and there revealed, are prodigious, rivalling those of the trunk
of travel; and yet out of the cover will still protrude the legs of
unadjustable "broilers" and the green fringes of garden-stuff, and all
this not counting in the oyster-pail, or the great watermelon which has
to be carried separately by its wooden handle. The epicurean prospect of
the Sun