exhibit himself in public. On his boards the Fifth Avenue
crowd on this fair spring day saw this:

Do you thank God you are alive?

So do we!

And notice the DIFFERENCE!

The shabby-genteel man, ex-Republican, with steel-rimmed spectacles, who
now looked for all the world like a bookkeeper out of a job, had this:

I am the Result.

The Cause was not Drink.

It was HUNGER.

A young fellow who looked so much as if he had just left a hospital that
thousands of spectators imagined they smelled iodoform carried this:

All men must die.

Knowing this, WE HOPE!

An octogenarian, not over four and one-half feet tall, very
frail-looking, was next. To him H. Rutgers had assigned this banner:

If Society won't feed us

We'll feed the Society of Worms--

POTTER'S FIELD

Under a big foot--property of a popular chiropodist on lower Broadway;
terms twenty-five cents per, five for a dollar--was this:

We are the World's Unfortunates:

BORN TO BE KICKED!

Then followed a haggard-faced man who looked like an exaggerated picture
of poverty. He carried:

There are poorer than we.

HELP THEM!

A man with the stride of a conqueror bore a banner:

AND STILL WE BELIEVE IN GOD!

The crowd looked puzzled. What the dickens did believing in God have to
do with anything? To end the bother of thinking they looked at the next
one.

Look at Fifth Avenue!

WHY?

See what we are!

WHY?

They obeyed. They saw Fifth Avenue. Why? They did not know why. And then
they saw what the sandwich-men were. And they wondered why the
sandwich-men asked why. Why not? Pshaw! The placard that followed was:

If you wish to see

One hundred starving men

Follow us.

YOU WILL REMEMBER IT!

Say, that was something that nobody had seen and therefore everybody
could joke about. Every woman had the same remark and the same grin:
"Haven't I seen my husband?"

Before the parade had gone half a square Fifth Avenue was blocked. Apart
from the interference of the band and the sandwiches with vehicular
traffic, there was the paralysis of the pedestrians. The Peacock Parade
halted. Slim figures, half-naked, flat-bosomed, stalked swayingly to the
curb and stared with eyes in which was the insolent sex challenge that
New York males answer with furs and jewels. And as they looked the
challenge of sex died in the eyes of the women: the marchers had no sex;
anybody could see they had no money