, he
was employed, partly out of charity, by one of the keepers, to trim the
sward in an oval enclosure within St. James' Park, a little green but a
three-minutes' walk along the gravelled way from the brick-besmoked and
grimy Old Brewery of the palace which gives its ancient name to the
public resort on whose borders it stands. It was a little oval, fenced
in with iron pailings, between whose bars the imprisoned verdure peered
forth, as some wild captive creature of the woods from its cage. And
alien Israel there--at times staring dreamily about him--seemed like
some amazed runaway steer, or trespassing Pequod Indian, impounded on
the shores of Narraganset Bay, long ago; and back to New England our
exile was called in his soul. For still working, and thinking of home;
and thinking of home, and working amid the verdant quietude of this
little oasis, one rapt thought begat another, till at last his mind
settled intensely, and yet half humorously, upon the image of Old
Huckleberry, his mother's favorite old pillion horse; and, ere long,
hearing a sudden scraping noise (some hob-shoe without, against the iron
pailing), he insanely took it to be Old Huckleberry in his stall,
hailing him (Israel) with his shod fore-foot clattering against the
planks--his customary trick when hungry--and so, down goes Israel's
hook, and with a tuft of white clover, impulsively snatched, he hurries
away a few paces in obedience to the imaginary summons. But soon
stopping midway, and forlornly gazing round at the enclosure, he
bethought him that a far different oval, the great oval of the ocean,
must be crossed ere his crazy errand could be done; and even then, Old
Huckleberry would be found long surfeited with clover, since, doubtless,
being dead many a summer, he must be buried beneath it. And many years
after, in a far different part of the town, and in far less winsome
weather too, passing with his bundle of flags through Red-Cross street,
towards Barbican, in a fog so dense that the dimmed and massed blocks
of houses, exaggerated by the loom, seemed shadowy ranges on ranges of
midnight hills, he heard a confused pastoral sort of sounds--tramplings,
lowings, halloos--and was suddenly called to by a voice to head off
certain cattle, bound to Smithfield, bewildered and unruly in the fog.
Next instant he saw the white face--white as an orange-blossom--of a
black-bodied steer, in advance of the drove, gleaming ghost-like through
the vapors; and