What man?

What man! Why the man that just turned the corner, with a great yellow
bundle under his arm.

Indeed! you know him then?

Never saw his face in all my life. But stay--what have we here? Get
your paper ready! Here comes a thick-set fellow, in a blue
round-about, with his hat pulled over his eyes, and one hand in his
trowsers' pocket--poor fellow! There he goes! But why one hand? He had
his reasons for it, I'll warrant ye, if the truth were known. He
walked by with bent knees, you observed, and with a most unpromising
stoop. He was feeling for his last four-pence; and found a hole in his
pocket. Can't you read the whole story in the man's gait?--in the
slow, sullen footfall--in the clutch of his fingers--in the stiffened
elbow, and the bent knees?

Another Washingtonian, perhaps?

No indeed! nothing of the sort. Had he been a Washingtonian, he would
have found something more than a hole in his pocket when he had got
through his week's work, and was beginning to find his way back to his
little ones.

Well, well, have it so, if you like; but what say you to the couple
you see there?

Stop!--that large woman, leading a child with a green veil--and the
other passing her in a hurry without lifting her eyes, and the moment
she has got by turning and looking after her, as if there were
something monstrous in the cast of that bonnet--a very proper bonnet
of itself--or in the color of that shawl--of gold and purple and
scarlet and green--both were but just entering upon the field of
vision as you spoke, and now both have vanished forever! And lo! a
tall man of a majestic presence, with a little black dog at his
heels--the veriest cur you ever saw! What must be the nature of such
companionship? Look! look! there goes another--a fashionably dressed
young man--followed by two or three more--intermixed with women and
children--and now they go trooping past by dozens! leaving you as
little time to note their peculiarities as you would have before the
table of a camera obscura, set up in the middle of Broadway at the
busiest season of the year. Let us breathe a little. And now the
current changes--the groups are smaller--the intervals longer--and if
we can do nothing else, we may watch their step and carriage, the play
of colors, and the whimsical motion of their arms and legs while they
go hurrying by, these phantoms of the hour. And then, what a world of
enjoyment just for the mere trouble of looking out of a wi