will speak in a whisper when there is a man about the house?--and you
lose yourself in the "leader," or the prices current.

The skirmishers have evidently suffered disaster; for the firing becomes
more and more distant, and at length dies from your hearing. You are
favored with a call from the improvident little boy, who requests you to
grant him the privilege of collecting such of his unexploded
fire-crackers as may be in your front yard, giving you, at the same
time, the interesting information that they are to be made into
"spit-devils." You are overwhelmed by a profound bow from the grocer's
lad as he passes your window, and you invite him in and beg that he will
honor you by accepting half a dollar and a handful of doughnuts:--the
lady in the merino morning-wrapper has provided a cake-basket full for
the occasion. You are also waited on by the milkman, who, you are glad
to see, is really flesh and blood, and not, as you have sometimes
supposed, an unearthly bell-ringer who visited this sublunary sphere
only at five A.M., and then for the sole purpose of disturbing
your morning nap. You are also complimented by the wood-man and
wood-sawyer, an English sailor with a wooden leg, who once nearly
swamped you in a tornado of nautical interjections, on your presenting
him a new pea-jacket. And then comes the German fruit-woman, whose first
customer you have the distinguished honor to be, and who, in
consequence, has taken breakfast in your kitchen for the last ten years.
You remember that on one occasion she spoke of her little boy, named
Heinderich, who was suffering with his teeth; and when you hope that
Heinderich is better, you are surprised to learn that he is quite a
large boy, going to the public school, and that the lady in the merino
morning-wrapper has just sent him a new cap.

The heaping pile of doughnuts gradually lessens, until finally there is