its artillery rushing to battle. Hour by hour, the clocks in many
steeples responded one to another. In some public hall, not a great way off,
there seemed to be an exhibition of a mechanical diorama; for, three times
during the day, occurred a repetition of obstreperous music, winding up with the
rattle of imitative cannon and musketry, and a huge final explosion. Then ensued
the applause of the spectators, with clap of hands, and thump of sticks, and the
energetic pounding of their heels. All this was just as valuable, in its way, as
the sighing of the breeze among the birch-trees, that overshadowed Eliot's
pulpit.
    Yet I felt a hesitation about plunging into this muddy tide of human
activity and pastime. It suited me better, for the present, to linger on the
brink, or hover in the air above it. So I spent the first day, and the greater
part of the second, in the laziest manner possible, in a rocking-chair, inhaling
the fragrance of a series of cigars, with my legs and slippered feet
horizontally disposed, and in my hand a novel, purchased of a railroad
bibliopolist. The gradual waste of my cigar accomplished itself with an easy and
gentle expenditure of breath. My book was of the dullest, yet had a sort of
sluggish flow, like that of a stream in which your boat is as often aground as
afloat. Had there been a more impetuous rush, a more absorbing passion of the
narrative, I should the sooner have struggled out of its uneasy current, and
have given myself up to the swell and subsidence of my thoughts. But, as it was,
the torpid life of the book served as an unobtrusive accompaniment to the life
within me and about me. At intervals, however, when its effect grew a little too
soporific - not for my patience, but for the possibility of keeping my eyes open
- I bestirred myself, started from the rocking-chair, and looked out of the
window.
    A gray sky; the weathercock of a steeple, that rose beyond the opposite
range of buildings, pointing from the eastward; a sprinkle of small,
spiteful-looking raindrops on the window-pane! In that ebb-tide of my energies,
had I thought of venturing abroad, these tokens would have checked the abortive
purpose.
    After several such visits to the window, I found myself getting pretty well
acquainted with that little portion of the backside of the universe which it
presented to my view. Over against the hotel and its adjacent houses, at the
distance of