CHAPTER II.
In the days when Otto Kling's shop-windows attracted collectors in search of curios and battered furniture, "The Avenue," as its denizens always called Fourth Avenue between Madison Square Garden and the tunnel, was a little city in itself.
Almost all the needs of a greater one could be supplied by the stores fronting its sidewalks.

If tea, coffee, sugar, and similar stimulating and soothing groceries were wanted, old Bundleton, on the corner above Kling's, in a white apron and paper cuffs, weighed them out.

If it were butter or eggs, milk, cream, or curds, the Long Island Dairy--which was really old man Heffern, his daughter Mary, and his boy Tom--had them in a paper bag, or on your plate, or into your pitcher before you could count your change.

If it were a sirloin, or lamb-chops, or Philadelphia chickens, or a Cincinnati ham, fat Porterfield, watched over from her desk by fat Mrs.Porterfield, dumped them on a pair of glittering brass scales and sent them home to your kitchen invitingly laid out in a flat wicker basket.

If it were fish--fresh, salt, smoked, or otherwise--to say nothing of crabs, oysters, clams, and the exclusive and expensive lobster--it was Codman, a few doors above Porterfield's, who had them on ice, or in barrels, the varnished claws of the lobsters thrust out like the hands of a drowning man.
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.