attentive auditors, is Ann Hutchinson. And here comes Vane--

"But, my dear sir," interrupts the same gentleman who before questioned
the showman's genealogical accuracy, "allow me to observe that these
historical personages could not possibly have met together in the Main
Street. They might, and probably did, all visit our old town, at one
time or another, but not simultaneously; and you have fallen into
anachronisms that I positively shudder to think of!"

"The fellow," adds the scarcely civil critic, "has learned a bead-roll of
historic names, whom he lugs into his pictorial puppet-show, as he calls
it, helter-skelter, without caring whether they were contemporaries or
not,--and sets them all by the ears together. But was there ever such a
fund of impudence? To hear his running commentary, you would suppose
that these miserable slips of painted pasteboard, with hardly the
remotest outlines of the human figure, had all the character and
expression of Michael Angele's pictures. Well! go on, sir!"

"Sir, you break the illusion of the scene," mildly remonstrates the
showman.

"Illusion! What illusion?" rejoins the critic, with a contemptuous
snort. "On the word of a gentleman, I see nothing illusive in the
wretchedly bedaubed sheet of canvas that forms your background, or in
these pasteboard slips that hitch and jerk along the front. The only
illusion, permit me to say, is in the puppet-showman's tongue,--and that
but a wretched one, into the bargain!"

"We public men," replies the showman, meekly, "must lay our account,
sometimes, to meet an uncandid severity of criticism. But--merely for