he _will_ keep thinking of his anxieties, if he
_will_ open the merchant Abudah's chest and walk arm-in-arm with the
hag--why, wherever he is, and whether he walk fast or slow, the chances
are that he will not be happy. And so much the more shame to himself!
There are perhaps thirty men setting forth at that same hour, and I
would lay a large wager there is not another dull face among the thirty.
It would be a fine thing to follow, in a coat of darkness, one after
another of these wayfarers, some summer morning, for the first few miles
upon the road. This one, who walks fast, with a keen look in his eyes,
is all concentrated in his own mind; he is up at his loom, weaving and
weaving, to set the landscape to words. This one peers about, as he
goes, among the grasses; he waits by the canal to watch the
dragon-flies; he leans on the gate of the pasture, and cannot look
enough upon the complacent kine. And here comes another, talking,
laughing, and gesticulating to himself. His face changes from time to
time, as indignation flashes from his eyes or anger clouds his forehead.
He is composing articles, delivering orations, and conducting the most
impassioned interviews, by the way. A little farther on, and it is as
like as not he will begin to sing. And well for him, supposing him to be
no great master in that art, if he stumble across no stolid peasant at a
corner; for on such an occasion, I scarcely know which is the more
troubled, or whether it is worse to suffer the confusion of your
troubadour, or the unfeigned alarm of your clown. A sedentary
population, accustomed, besides, to the strange mechanical bearing of
the common tramp, can in no wise explain to itself the gaiety of these
passers-by. I knew one man who was arrested as a runaway lunatic,
because, although a full-grown person with a red beard, he skipped as
he went like a child. And you would be astonished if I were to tell you
all the grave and learned heads who have confessed to me that, when on
walking tours, they sang--and sang very ill--and had a pair of red ears
when, as described above, the inauspicious peasant plumped into their
arms from round a corner. And here, lest you should think I am
exaggerating, is Hazlitt's own confession, from his essay "On Going a
Journey," which is so good that there should be a tax levied on all who
have not read it:--

"Give me the clear blue sky over my head," says he, "and the green turf
beneath my feet, a winding road be