e 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
shop-window 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. Oh,
my stars! Is this a toyshop, 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 chinaware fit to be the dining-set of those same princely
personages when they make a regal banquet in the stateliest hall 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 next a Chinese mandarin who nods his head at
Annie and myself. Here we may review a whole army of horse and foot in
red-and-blue uniforms, with drums, fifes, trumpets, and all kinds of
noiseless music; they have halted on the shelf of this window after
their weary march from Liliput. But what cares Annie for soldiers? No
conquering queen is she--neither a Semiramis nor a Catharine; her
whole heart is set upon that doll who gazes at us with such a
fashionable stare. This is the little girl's true plaything. Though
made of wood, a doll is a visionary and ethereal personage endowed by
childish fancy with a peculiar life; the mimic lady is a heroine of
romance, an actor and a sufferer in a thousand shadowy scenes, the
chief inhabitant of that wild world with which children ape the real
one.