r running over to a neighbor's to
gossip. I went there frequently to observe their habits. The village
appeared to me a great news room; and on one side, to support it, as
once at Redding & Company's on State Street, they kept nuts and raisins,
or salt and meal and other groceries. Some have such a vast appetite
for the former commodity, that is, the news, and such sound digestive
organs, that they can sit forever in public avenues without stirring,
and let it simmer and whisper through them like the Etesian winds, or
as if inhaling ether, it only producing numbness and insensibility to
pain--otherwise it would often be painful to bear--without affecting the
consciousness. I hardly ever failed, when I rambled through the village,
to see a row of such worthies, either sitting on a ladder sunning
themselves, with their bodies inclined forward and their eyes glancing
along the line this way and that, from time to time, with a voluptuous
expression, or else leaning against a barn with their hands in their
pockets, like caryatides, as if to prop it up. They, being commonly out
of doors, heard whatever was in the wind. These are the coarsest mills,
in which all gossip is first rudely digested or cracked up before it is
emptied into finer and more delicate hoppers within doors. I observed
that the vitals of the village were the grocery, the bar-room, the
post-office, and the bank; and, as a necessary part of the machinery,
they kept a bell, a big gun, and a fire-engine, at convenient places;
and the houses were so arranged as to make the most of mankind, in
lanes and fronting one another, so that every traveller had to run the
gauntlet, and every man, woman, and child might get a lick at him. Of
course, those who were stationed nearest to the head of the line, where
they could most see and be seen, and have the first blow at him, paid
the highest prices for their places; and the few straggling inhabitants
in the outskirts, where long gaps in the line began to occur, and the
traveller could get over walls or turn aside into cow-paths, and so
escape, paid a very slight ground or window tax. Signs were hung out
on all sides to allure him; some to catch him by the appetite, as the
tavern and victualling cellar; some by the fancy, as the dry goods store
and the jeweller's; and others by the hair or the feet or the skirts,
as the barber, the shoemaker, or the tailor. Besides, there was a still
more terrible standing invitation to call