fessions recruit themselves.
The eyeglass man still stands at his corner with his tray. He is,
moreover, too sodden a creature to play upon a pipe. Nor is there any
dwindling of shoe-lace peddlers. The merchants of popcorn have not
fallen off in number, and peanuts hold up strong. Rather, these
Christmas musicians are of the tribe which at other festivals sell us
little flags and bid us show our colors. They come from country fairs
and circuses. All summer long they bid us gather for the fat man, or
they cry up the beauties of a Turkish harem. If some valiant fellow in
a painted tent is about to swallow glass, they are his horn and drum
to draw the crowd. I once knew a side-show man who bent iron bars
between his teeth and who summoned stout men from his audience to
swing upon the bar, but I cannot believe that he has discharged the
bawling rascal at his door. I rather choose to think that the piper
was one of those self-same artists who, on lesser days, squeeze comic
rubber faces in their fingers, or make the monkey climb its
predestined stick.

Be this as it may, presently the piper hit on a persuasive tune and I
abandoned all thought of the Noah's ark--my errand of the morning for
my nephew--and joined the crowd that followed him. Hamelin Town was
come again. But street violins I avoid. They suggest mortgages and
unpaid rent.

But with the world before him why should a man turn dentist? He must
have been a cruel fellow from his rattle. When did his malicious
ambition first sprout up towards molars and bicuspids? Or who would
scheme to be a plumber? He is a cellarer--alas, how shrunk from former
days! Or consider the tailor! Perhaps you recall Elia's estimate. "Do
you ever see him," he asks, "go whistling along the foot-path like a
carman, or brush through a crowd like a baker, or go smiling to
himself like a lover?"

Certainly I would not wish to be a bookkeeper and sit bent all day
over another's wealth. I would not want to bring in on lifted fingers
the meats which another eats. Nor would I choose to be a locksmith,
which is a kind of squint-eyed business, up two dismal stairs and at
the rear. A gas lamp flares at the turn. A dingy staircase mounts into
a thicker gloom. The locksmith consorts with pawnbrokers, with cheap
sign-makers and with disreputable doctors; yet he is not of them. For
there adheres to him a sort of romance. He is a creature of another
time, set in our midst by the merest chance. The domest