Main Street, and show the trees in their full foliage, the rose-bushes in
bloom, and a border of green grass along the sidewalk. There! But what!
How! The scene will not move. A wire is broken. The street continues
buried beneath the snow, and the fate of Herculaneum and Pompeii has its
parallel in this catastrophe.

Alas! my kind and gentle audience, you know not the extent of your
misfortune. The scenes to come were far better than the past. The
street itself would have been more worthy of pictorial exhibition; the
deeds of its inhabitants not less so. And how would your interest have
deepened, as, passing out of the cold shadow of antiquity, in my long and
weary course, I should arrive within the limits of man's memory, and,
leading you at last into the sunshine of the present, should give a
reflex of the very life that is flitting past us! Your own beauty, my
fair townswomen, would have beamed upon you, out of my scene. Not a
gentleman that walks the street but should have beheld his own face and
figure, his gait, the peculiar swing of his arm, and the coat that he put
on yesterday. Then, too,--and it is what I chiefly regret,--I had
expended a vast deal of light and brilliancy on a representation of the
street in its whole length, from Buffum's Corner downward, on the night
of the grand illumination for General Taylor's triumph. Lastly, I should
have given the crank one other turn, and have brought out the future,
showing you who shall walk the Main Street to-morrow, and, perchance,
whose funeral shall pass through it!

But these, like most other human purposes, lie unaccomplished; and I have
only further to say, that any lady or gentlemen who may feel dissatisfied
with the evening's entertainment shall receive back the admission fee at
the door.