pon firm pavements into the centre of the town.
Here there is almost as brilliant an illumination as when some great
victory has been won either on the battlefield or at the polls. Two
rows of shops with windows down nearly to the ground cast a glow from
side to side, while the black night hangs overhead like a canopy, and
thus keeps the splendor from diffusing itself away. The wet sidewalks
gleam with a broad sheet of red light. The raindrops glitter as if the
sky were pouring down rubies. The spouts gush with fire. Methinks the
scene is an emblem of the deceptive glare which mortals throw around
their footsteps in the moral world, thus bedazzling themselves till
they forget the impenetrable obscurity that hems them in, and that can
be dispelled only by radiance from above.

And, after all, it is a cheerless scene, and cheerless are the
wanderers in it. Here comes one who has so long been familiar with
tempestuous weather that he takes the bluster of the storm for a
friendly greeting, as if it should say, "How fare ye, brother?" He is
a retired sea-captain wrapped in some nameless garment of the
pea-jacket order, and is now laying his course toward the
marine-insurance office, there to spin yarns of gale and shipwreck
with a crew of old seadogs like himself. The blast will put in its
word among their hoarse voices, and be understood by all of them. Next
I meet an unhappy slipshod gentleman with a cloak flung hastily over
his shoulders, running a race with boisterous winds and striving to
glide between the drops of rain. Some domestic emergency or other has
blown this miserable man from his warm fireside in quest of a doctor.
See that little vagabond! How carelessly he has taken his stand right
underneath a spout while staring at some object of curiosity in a
shop-window! Surely the rain is his native element; he must have
fallen with it from the clouds, as frogs are supposed to do.

Here is a picture, and a pretty one--a young man and a girl, both
enveloped in cloaks and huddled beneath the scanty protection of a
cotton umbrella. She wears rubber overshoes, but he is in his
dancing-pumps, and they are on their way no doubt, to some
cotillon-party or subscription-ball at a dollar a head, refreshments
included. Thus they struggle against the gloomy tempest, lured onward
by a vision of festal splendor. But ah! a most lamentable disaster!
Bewildered by the red, blue and yellow meteors in an apothecary's
window, they have