There was a grave and well-dressed gentleman who stopped recently at
the stand of Mrs. M'Patrick O'Finnigan, which is just in the midst of
the gay promenade, to transact some business in peanut candy. The
interest of the public in that operation was inconceivable. If he had
been Mr. Vanderbilt buying out Mr. Astor--if he had been a lunatic
astray from the asylum, or a clown escaped from the circus--he could
hardly have excited more attention. The passengers stared in
amazement. Some young gentlemen, escorting certain young ladies from
school, cracked excellent jokes upon the honest buyer of peanut candy;
and if his daughter or any friend had chanced to pass and had seen
him, she would probably have been seriously troubled and half ashamed.

Now peanut candy is very good, and at Mrs. M'Patrick O'Finnigan's
stand it is very cheap. Nobody is ashamed of liking it, nor of eating
it. If the grave gentleman had stepped into Caswell's brilliant shop,
let us suppose--where, perhaps, it is also sold--and had called for
that particular sweet, nobody would have stared nor made a joke nor
felt that it was extraordinary. Yet, how many of the brave generals in
the war, who charged in the very face of flaming batteries, would dare
to stop at Mrs. O'Finnigan's and buy ten cents' worth of peanut candy
if they saw Mrs. Sweller's carriage approaching, or Miss Dasher just
coming upon the walk? And as for the Misses Spanker, who daily drive
in that superb open wagon with yellow wheels, and who resemble nothing
so much as the figures in a Parisian doll-carriage, if they saw an
admirer of theirs bargaining for peanut candy at a street stand they
would not know him--they would no more bow to a man so lost to all the
finer sense of the _comme il faut_ than they would nod to a
street-sweeper. It is astonishing what an effect is produced upon some
human beings of the tender sex by clothing them in silks cut in a