been well oiled; a multitude of puppets are dressed in character,
representing all varieties of fashion, from the Puritan cloak and jerkin
to the latest Oak Hall coat; the lamps are trimmed, and shall brighten
into noontide sunshine, or fade away in moonlight, or muffle their
brilliancy in a November cloud, as the nature of the scene may require;
and, in short, the exhibition is just ready to commence. Unless
something should go wrong,--as, for instance, the misplacing of a
picture, whereby the people and events of one century might be thrust
into the middle of another; or the breaking of a wire, which would bring
the course of time to a sudden period,--barring, I say, the casualties to
which such a complicated piece of mechanism is liable,--I flatter myself,
ladies and gentlemen,--that the performance will elicit your generous
approbation.

Ting-a-ting-ting! goes the bell; the curtain rises; and we behold-not,
indeed, the Main Street--but the track of leaf-strewn forest-land over
which its dusty pavement is hereafter to extend.

You perceive, at a glance, that this is the ancient and primitive wood,--
the ever-youthful and venerably old,--verdant with new twigs, yet hoary,
as it were, with the snowfall of innumerable years, that have accumulated
upon its intermingled branches. The white man's axe has never smitten a
single tree; his footstep has never crumpled a single one of the withered
leaves, which all the autumns since the flood have been harvesting
beneath. Yet, see! along through the vista of impending boughs, there is
already a faintly traced path, running nearly east and west, as if a
prophecy or foreboding of the future street had stolen into the heart of
the solemn old wood. Onward goes this hardly perceptible track, now
ascending over a natural swell of land, now subsiding gently into a
hollow; traversed here by a little streamlet, which glitters like a snake