It was more a mobile palace than a wagon, and wherever it went it stirred excitement: Crown's love, Crown's joy, Crown's estate, a wondrous toy.

New York City has never seemed more like a wondrous toy than in the 1944 Broadway musical "On the Town," which follows three sailors on 24-hour leave as they comb the city in search of Miss Turnstiles, a subway poster girl.

(They are also wondrous toys.)

Just a kid, Enoch told himself, with a box heaped high with new and wondrous toys.

He lay in the garret with gray light already beginning to break outside, his dazzled mind playing with details of the story as if they were wondrous toys.

This sense of the city as, in the words of Lorenz Hart, "a wondrous toy," is one of the many charms of a movie that belongs to the "cruisin' " genre of "Diner" and "American Graffiti."

There was one little fellow who sat apart from all the others and he held something in his lap and was turning it around, admiring it, happy in the possession of a wondrous toy.

They clambered over one another, regarded some hoops as wondrous new toys and built themselves a little house out of poles.

This wondrous toy is said to have a thread within that makes the sails go up and down, and by such action to keep us alive.

And if Corvettes are not for all of us or for every season, they are wondrous toys, even just to gaze upon.