From the top bar of this iron frame swung two heavy
pieces of leather cemented together. Next to this coalesced leather
dangled a large Z made up of three pieces of plate glass stuck together
at the ends, and amply demonstrating the adhesive power of the
cementing mixture to be purchased there.

Next to the glass Z again were two rows of chipped and serrated plates
and saucers, plates and saucers of all kinds and colors, with holes
drilled in their edges, and held together like a suspended chain-gang
by small brass links. At some time in its career each one of these
cups and saucers had been broken across or even shattered into
fragments. Later, it had been ingeniously and patiently glued
together. And there it and its valiant brothers in misfortune swung
together in a double row, with a cobblestone dangling from the bottom
plate, reminding the passing world of remedial beneficences it might
too readily forget, attesting to the fact that life's worst fractures
might in some way still be made whole.

Yet so impassively, so stolidly statuesque, did this figure stand
beside the gas-pipe that to all intents he might have been cemented to
the pavement with his own glue. He seldom moved, once his frame had
been set up and his wares laid out. When he did move it was only to
re-awaken the equally plethoric motion of his slowly oscillating links
of cemented glass and chinaware. Sometimes, it is true, he disposed of
a phial of his cement, producing his bottle and receiving payment with
the absorbed impassivity of an automaton.

Huge as his figure must once have been, it now seemed, like his
gibbeted plates, all battered and chipped and over-written with the
marks of time. Like his plates, too, he carried some valiant sense of
being still intact, still stubbornly united, still oblivious of every
old-time fracture, still bound up into personal compactness by some
power which defied the blows of destiny.

In all seasons, winter and summer, apparently, he wore a long and
loose-fitting overcoat. This overcoat must once have been black, but
it had faded to a green so conspicuous that it made him seem like a
bronze figure touched with the mellowing _patina_ of time.

It was in the incredibly voluminous pockets of this overcoat that the
old peddler carried his stock in trade, paper-wrapped bottles of
different sizes, and the nickels and dimes and quarters of his daily
trafficking. And as the streams of life purled past him