, and
who would have been likely enough to amuse themselves at the expense of
the amateur workingman. The hotel-keeper put me into a back room of
the third story of his spacious establishment. The day was lowering,
with occasional gusts of rain, and an ugly tempered east wind, which
seemed to come right off the chill and melancholy sea, hardly mitigated
by sweeping over the roofs, and amalgamating itself with the dusky
element of city smoke. All the effeminacy of past days had returned
upon me at once. Summer as it still was, I ordered a coal fire in the
rusty grate, and was glad to find myself growing a little too warm with
an artificial temperature.

My sensations were those of a traveller, long sojourning in remote
regions, and at length sitting down again amid customs once familiar.
There was a newness and an oldness oddly combining themselves into one
impression. It made me acutely sensible how strange a piece of
mosaic-work had lately been wrought into my life. True, if you look at
it in one way, it had been only a summer in the country. But,
considered in a profounder relation, it was part of another age, a
different state of society, a segment of an existence peculiar in its
aims and methods, a leaf of some mysterious volume interpolated into
the current history which time was writing off. At one moment, the
very circumstances now surrounding me--my coal fire and the dingy room
in the bustling hotel--appeared far off and intangible; the next
instant Blithedale looked vague, as if it were at a distance both in
time and space, and so shadowy that a question might be raised whether
the whole affair had been anything more than the thoughts of a
speculative man. I had never before experienced a mood that so robbed
the actual world of its solidity. It nevertheless involved a charm, on
which--a devoted epicure of my own emotions--I resolved to pause, and
enjoy the moral sillabub until quite dissolved away.

Whatever had been my taste for solitude and natural scenery, yet the
thick, foggy, stifled element of cities, the entangled life of many men
together, sordid as it was, and empty of the beautiful, took quite as
strenuous a hold upon my mind. I felt as if there could never be
enough of it. Each characteristic sound was too suggestive to be
passed over unnoticed. Beneath and around me, I heard the stir of the
hotel; the loud voices of guests, landlord, or bar-keeper; steps
echoing on the staircase; the r