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 inherent in the mind of the race
this instinct,--that you should begin your photographic life naked.
Perhaps this is in response to a sentiment for symbol: naked came ye
into the world. Perhaps it is because your face at the time of your
initial photograph is as yet so unca