handling. The portrait must be so generally negative that the most
delicate pencil is likely to spoil it by introducing some too
positive tint. Every touch must be kept down, or else you destroy
the subdued tone which is absolutely essential to the whole effect.
Perhaps more may be done by contrast than by direct description.
For this purpose I make use of another cake and candy merchant, who,
likewise infests the railroad depot. This latter worthy is a very
smart and well-dressed boy of ten years old or thereabouts, who
skips briskly hither and thither, addressing the passengers in a
pert voice, yet with somewhat of good breeding in his tone and
pronunciation. Now he has caught my eye, and skips across the room
with a pretty pertness, which I should like to correct with a box on
the ear. "Any cake, sir? any candy?"

No, none for me, my lad. I did but glance at your brisk figure in
order to catch a reflected light and throw it upon your old rival
yonder.

Again, in order to invest my conception of the old man with a more
decided sense of reality, I look at him in the very moment of
intensest bustle, on the arrival of the cars. The shriek of the
engine as it rushes into the car-house is the utterance of the steam
fiend, whom man has subdued by magic spells and compels to serve as
a beast of burden. He has skimmed rivers in his headlong rush,
dashed through forests, plunged into the hearts of mountains, and
glanced from the city to the desert-place, and again to a far-off
city, with a meteoric progress, seen and out of sight, while his
reverberating roar still fills the ear. The travellers swarm forth
from the cars. All are full of the momentum which they have caught
from their mode of conveyance. It seems as if the whole world, both