ow, I cannot tell, and it is dismal waiting to see. The wildness is
gone with the moon, and there is nothing left but a dark night. I
wonder how long before she will reappear? Are the people in the moon
staring through an eclipse of the Sun? I should like to see her come
out again, and clothe herself in splendor. I think I will go back to
Walden. Ah! even my philosopher, aping Homer, nods. It shimmers a
little, on the lake, among the mountains--of the moon.

I declare! I believe I have been asleep. What of it? It is just as
well. I have no doubt the moon will come out again all right,--which
is more than I shall do if I go on in this way. I feel already as if
the top of my head was coming off. Once I was very unhappy, and I sat
up all night to make the most of it. It was many hundred years ago,
when I was younger than I am now, and did not know that misery was not
a thing to be caressed and cosseted and coddled, but a thing to be
taken, neck and heels, and turned out doors. So I sat up to revel in
the ecstasy of woe. I went along swimmingly into the little hours, but
by two o'clock there was a great sameness about it, and I grew
desperately sleepy. I was not going to give it up, however, so I
shocked myself into a torpid animation with a cold bath, it being
mid-winter, and betwixt bath and bathos, managed to keep agoing till
daylight. Once since then I was very happy, and could not keep my eyes
shut. Those are the only two times I ever sat up all night, and, on
the whole, I think I will go to bed; wherefore, O people on the earth,
marking eagerly the moon's eclipse, and O people on the moon, crowding
your craggy hills to see an eclipse of the sun, Good night!

Then the lost June came back. Frost melted out of the air, summer
melted in, and my book beckoned me onward with a commanding gesture.
Consequently I took my trunk, Halicarnassus his cane, and we started on
our travels. But the shadow of the eclipse hung over us still. An
evil omen came in the beginning. Just as I was stepping into the car, I
observed a violent smoke issuing from under it. I started back in
alarm.

"They are only getting up steam," said Halicarnassus. "Always do, when
they start."

"I know better!" I answered briskly, for there was no time to be
circumlocutional. "They don't get up steam under the cars."

"Why not? Bet a sixpence you couldn't get Uncle Cain's Dobbin out of
his jog-trot without building a fire under him