and two peevish bald old gentlemen seemed to be hermetically sealed
up inside, eternally reading the paper. That wonderful mystery,
the music-shop, carried it off as usual (except that it had more
cabinet pianos in stock), as if season or no season were all one to
it. It made the same prodigious display of bright brazen wind-
instruments, horribly twisted, worth, as I should conceive, some
thousands of pounds, and which it is utterly impossible that
anybody in any season can ever play or want to play. It had five
triangles in the window, six pairs of castanets, and three harps;
likewise every polka with a coloured frontispiece that ever was
published; from the original one where a smooth male and female
Pole of high rank are coming at the observer with their arms a-
kimbo, to the Ratcatcher's Daughter. Astonishing establishment,
amazing enigma! Three other shops were pretty much out of the
season, what they were used to be in it. First, the shop where
they sell the sailors' watches, which had still the old collection
of enormous timekeepers, apparently designed to break a fall from
the masthead: with places to wind them up, like fire-plugs.
Secondly, the shop where they sell the sailors' clothing, which
displayed the old sou'-westers, and the old oily suits, and the old
pea-jackets, and the old one sea-chest, with its handles like a
pair of rope ear-rings. Thirdly, the unchangeable shop for the
sale of literature that has been left behind. Here, Dr. Faustus
was still going down to very red and yellow perdition, under the
superintendence of three green personages of a scaly humour, with
excrescential serpents growing out of their blade-bones. Here, the
Golden Dreamer, and the Norwood Fortune Teller, were still on sale
at sixpence each, with instructions for making the dumb cake, and
reading destinies in tea-cups, and with a picture of a young woman
with a high waist lying on a sofa in an attitude so uncomfortable