Page:Morley--Travels in Philadelphia.djvu/50

 chicks, tender yellow balls of fluff that cause grizzled bums to moralize droopingly on the sweetness of youth and innocence. They (the chicks) were swarming around their feeding pans like diplomats at the Hotel Crillon in Paris.

These feeding pans are made like circular mouse-traps, with small holes just large enough for the chicks to thrust in their heads. One ambitious infant, however, a very Trotzky among chicks, had got quite inside the pan, and three purple-nosed Falstaffs on the pavement were waiting with painful agitation to see whether he would emerge safely. In a goldfish bowl above, spotted newts were swimming, advertised at fifteen cents each as desirable "scavengas." Baby turtles the size of a dollar piece were crawling over one another in a damp tray. Bright-eyed rabbits twitched their small noses along the pane.

Then came Louis Guanissno, the famous balloon man, moving along in a blaze of color, his red and blue and yellow balloons tugging and gleaming in the sunny air. Louis is a poem to watch, a polychrome joy to behold. And such graceful suavity! "Here's health and prosperity, and God bless you," he says, his kindly rugged face looking down at you; "and when you want any little balloons"— On a sunny afternoon there are sure to be many browsers picking over the dusty volumes in the pavement boxes of that little bookshop near the old archway above Filbert street. Down the dark