for the mottoes which they enclose, by love-sick maids and bachelors!
O, my mouth waters, little Annie, and so doth yours; but we will not be
tempted, except to an imaginary feast; so let us hasten onward, devouring
the vision of a plum-cake.

Here are pleasures, as some people would say, of a more exalted kind,
in the window of a bookseller. Is Annie a literary lady? Yes; she is
deeply read in Peter Parley's tomes, and has an increasing love for
fairy-tales, though seldom met with nowadays, and she will subscribe,
next year, to the Juvenile Miscellany. But, truth to tell, she is apt to
turn away from the printed page, and keep gazing at the pretty pictures,
such as the gay-colored ones which make this shopwindow the continual
loitering-place of children. What would Annie think, if, in the book
which I mean to send her, on New Year's day, she should find her sweet
little self, bound up in silk or morocco with gilt edges, there to remain
till she become a woman grown with children of her own to read about
their mother's childhood! That would be very queer.

Little Annie is weary of pictures, and pulls me onward by the hand, till
suddenly we pause at the most wondrous shop in all the town. O, my
stars! Is this a toy-shop, or is it fairy-land? For here are gilded
chariots, in which the king and queen of the fairies might ride side by
side, while their courtiers, on these small horses, should gallop in
triumphal procession before and behind the royal pair. Here, too, are
dishes of china-ware, fit to be the dining set of those same princely
personages, when they make a regal banquet in the stateliest ball of
their palace, full five feet high, and behold their nobles feasting adown
the long perspective of the table. Betwixt the king and queen should sit
my little Annie, the prettiest fairy of them all. Here stands a turbaned
Turk, threatening us with his sabre, like an ugly heathen as he is. And