Page:Morley--Travels in Philadelphia.djvu/271

 against an electric bulb to show its transparency. When he found his audience unresponsive he would always say, "You know I don't have to do this for a living. If you people don't appreciate goods that have quality, I'm going to pack up and go to Ocean City." But he never went. Almost every evening, chagrined by some one's failure to bid properly for a cut-glass lady-finger container or a porcelain toothbrush-rack, he would ask the attendant to set it aside. "I'll buy it myself," he would cry, and as he kept on buying these curious tidbits for himself throughout the summer, we used to wonder what his wife would say when they all arrived.

Along the quiet Boardwalk we saunter, as the crisp breeze comes off the wide ocean spaces. Bang! bang! bang! sound the hammers, as the shutters go up on the beauty parlor, the toy shop, the shop where sweet-grass baskets were woven, and the stall where the little smiling doll known as Helene, the Endearing Beach Vamp, was to be won by knocking down two tenpins with a swinging pendulum. How easy it was to cozen the public with that! A bright red star was painted at the back of the pendulum's swing, and the natural assumption of the simple competitor was that by aiming at that star he would win the smiling Helene. Of course, as long as one aimed at the star success was impossible. The Japanese dealers, with the pertinacity of their race, are almost the last to linger. Their innocent little gaming boards,