le, and not the
exception. Some might naturally think that anxiety and the weariness of
a prolonged search after a near relative would have prevented my taking
any interest in or paying any regard to the little matters around me.
Perhaps it had just the contrary effect, and acted like a diffused
stimulus upon the attention. When all the faculties are wide-awake
in pursuit of a single object, or fixed in the spasm of an absorbing
emotion, they are often-times clairvoyant in a marvellous degree in
respect to many collateral things, as Wordsworth has so forcibly
illustrated in his sonnet on the Boy of Windermere, and as Hawthorne
has developed with such metaphysical accuracy in that chapter of his
wondrous story where Hester walks forth to meet her punishment.

Be that as it may,--though I set out with a full and heavy heart, though
many times my blood chilled with what were perhaps needless and unwise
fears, though I broke through all my habits without thinking about them,
which is almost as hard in certain circumstances as for one of our young
fellows to leave his sweet-heart and go into a Peninsular campaign,
though I did not always know when I was hungry nor discover that I was
thirsting, though I had a worrying ache and inward tremor underlying all
the outward play of the senses and the mind, yet it is the simple truth
that I did look out of the car-windows with an eye for all that passed,
that I did take cognizance of strange sights and singular people, that I
did act much as persons act from the ordinary promptings of curiosity,
and from time to time even laugh very nearly as those do who are
attacked with a convulsive sense of the ridiculous, the epilepsy of the
diaphragm.

By a mutual compact, we talked little in the cars. A communicative
friend is the greatest nuisance to have at one's side during a
railroad-journey, especially if his conversation is stimulating and in.
itself agreeable. "A fast train and a 'slow' neighbor," is my motto.
Many times, when I have got upon the cars, expecting to be magnetized
into an hour or two of blissful reverie, my thoughts shaken up by the
vibrations into all sorts of new and pleasing patterns, arranging
themselves in curves and nodal points, like the grains of sand in
Chladni's famous experiment,--fresh ideas coming up to the surface,
as the kernels do when a measure of corn is jolted in a farmer's
wagon,--all this without volition, the mechanical impulse alone keeping
the t