chology of such existences: at the very utmost it is possible only
to describe such impulses and perceptions of nomadism as lie within the
very small range of one's own observation. And whatever in these be
strictly personal can have little interest or value except in so far as
it holds something in common with the great general experience of
restless lives. To such experience may belong, I think, one ultimate
result of all those irrational partings,--self-wreckings,--sudden
isolations,--abrupt severances from all attachment, which form the
history of the nomad ... the knowledge that a strange silence is ever
deepening and expanding about one's life, and that in that silence
there are ghosts.

II

... Oh! the first vague charm, the first sunny illusion of some fair
city,--when vistas of unknown streets all seem leading to the
realization of a hope you dare not even whisper; when even the shadows
look beautiful, and strange facades appear to smile good omen through
light of gold! And those first winning relations with men, while you
are still a stranger, and only the better and the brighter side of
their nature is turned to you!... All is yet a delightful, luminous
indefiniteness--sensation of streets and of men,--like some beautifully
tinted photograph slightly out of focus....

Then the slow solid sharpening of details all about you,--thrusting
through illusion and dispelling it--growing keener and harder day by
day, through long dull seasons, while your feet learn to remember all
asperities of pavements, and your eyes all physiognomy of buildings and
of persons,--failures of masonry,--furrowed lines of pain. Thereafter
only the aching of monotony intolerable,--and the hatred of sameness
grown dismal,--and dread of the merciless, inevitable, daily and hourly
repetition of things;--while those impulses of unrest, which are Nature's
urgings through that ancestral experience which lives in each one
of us,--outcries of sea and peak and sky to man,--ever make wilder
appeal.... Strong friendships may have been formed; but there finally
comes a day when even these can give no consolation for the pain of
monotony,--and you feel that in order to live you must decide,--regardless
of result,--to shake forever from your feet the familiar dust of that
place....

And, nevertheless, in the hour of departure you feel a pang. As train
or steamer bears you away from the city and its myriad associations,
the old illusive impressio