an.

Were it a question of drugs, there was Pestler, the apothecary, with his
four big green globes illuminated by four big gas-jets, the joy of the
children. A small fellow this Pestler, with a round head and up-brushed
hair set on a long, thin stem of a neck, the whole growing out of a pair
of narrow shoulders, quite like a tulip from a glass jar.

And then there were Jarvis, the spectacle man, and that canny Scotchman
Sanderson, the florist, who knew the difference between roses a week
old and roses a day old, and who had the rare gift of so mixing the
two vintages that hardly enough dead stock was left over for funerals
including those presided over by his fellow conspirator Digwell, the
undertaker, who lived over his mausoleum of a back room.

And, of course, there were the bakeshop emitting enticing smells, mostly
of currants and burnt sugar, and the hardware store, full of nails and
pocket-knives, and old Mr. Jacobs, the tailor, who sat cross-legged on
a wide table in a room down four stone steps from the sidewalk, and the
grog-shops--more's the pity--one on every corner save Kling's.

Hardly a trace is now left of any one of them, so sudden and
overwhelming has been the march of modern progress. Even the little
Peter Cooper House, picked up bodily by that worthy philanthropist and
set down here nearly a hundred years ago, is gone, and so are the row
of musty, red-bricked houses at the lower end of this Little City in
Itself. And so are the tenants of this musty old row, shady locksmiths
with a tendency toward skeleton keys; ingenious upholsterers who
indulged in paper-hanging on the sly; shoemakers who did half-soling and
heeling, their day's work set to dry on the window-sill, not to mention
those addicted to the use of the piano, banjo, or harp, as well as the
wig and dress makers who lightened the general gloom.

And with the disappearance of these old landmarks--and it all took place
within less than ten years--there disappeared, also, the old family life
of "The Avenue," in which each home shared in the good-fellowship of the
whole, all of them contributing to that sane and sustaining stratum,
if we did but know it, of our civic structure--facts that but few New
Yorkers either recognize or value.

On the block below Kling's in those other days was the quaint Book
Shop owned by Tim Kelsey, the hunchback, a walking encyclopaedia of
knowledge, much of it as musty and out of date as most of his books;
w