- end_line
- 4374
- extracted_at
- 2026-01-30T07:57:45.581Z
- extracted_by
- structure-extraction-lambda
- start_line
- 4312
- text
- In all parts of the world many high-spirited revolts from rascally
despotisms had of late been knocked on the head; many dreadful
casualties, by locomotive and steamer, had likewise knocked hundreds
of high-spirited travelers on the head (I lost a dear friend in one of
them); my own private affairs were also full of despotisms, casualties,
and knockings on the head, when early one morning in spring, being too
full of hypoes to sleep, I sallied out to walk on my hillside pasture.
It was a cool and misty, damp, disagreeable air. The country looked
underdone, its raw juices squirting out all round. I buttoned out
this squitchy air as well as I could with my lean, double-breasted
dress-coat--my overcoat being so long-skirted I only used it in my
wagon--and spitefully thrusting my crab-stick into the oozy sod, bent
my blue form to the steep ascent of the hill. This toiling posture
brought my head pretty well earthward, as if I were in the act of
butting it against the world. I marked the fact, but only grinned at it
with a ghastly grin.
All round me were tokens of a divided empire. The old grass and the
new grass were striving together. In the low wet swales the verdure
peeped out in vivid green; beyond, on the mountains, lay light patches
of snow, strangely relieved against their russet sides; all the humped
hills looked like brindled kine in the shivers. The woods were strewn
with dry dead boughs, snapped off by the riotous winds of March, while
the young trees skirting the woods were just beginning to show the
first yellowish tinge of the nascent spray.
I sat down for a moment on a great rotting log nigh the top of the
hill, my back to a heavy grove, my face presented toward a wide
sweeping circuit of mountains enclosing a rolling, diversified
country. Along the base of one long range of heights ran a lagging,
fever-and-agueish river, over which was a duplicate stream of dripping
mist, exactly corresponding in every meander with its parent water
below. Low down, here and there, shreds of vapor listlessly wandered
in the air, like abandoned or helmless nations or ships--or very soaky
towels hung on criss-cross clothes-lines to dry. Afar, over a distant
village lying in a bay of the plain formed by the mountains, there
rested a great flat canopy of haze, like a pall. It was the condensed
smoke of the chimneys, with the condensed, exhaled breath of the
villagers, prevented from dispersion by the imprisoning hills. It was
too heavy and lifeless to mount of itself; so there it lay, between the
village and the sky, doubtless hiding many a man with the mumps, and
many a queasy child.
My eye ranged over the capacious rolling country, and over the
mountains, and over the village, and over a farmhouse here and there,
and over woods, groves, streams, rocks, fells--and I thought to myself,
what a slight mark, after all, does man make on this huge great earth.
Yet the earth makes a mark on him. What a horrid accident was that
on the Ohio, where my good friend and thirty other good fellows were
sloped into eternity at the bidding of a thick-headed engineer, who
knew not a valve from a flue. And that crash on the railroad just
over yon mountains there, where two infatuate trains ran pell-mell
into each other, and climbed and clawed each other's backs; and one
locomotive was found fairly shelled like a chick, inside of a passenger
car in the antagonist train; and near a score of noble hearts, a bride
and her groom, and an innocent little infant, were all disembarked
into the grim hulk of Charon, who ferried them over, all baggageless,
to some clinkered iron-foundry country or other. Yet what's the use
of complaining? What justice of the peace will right this matter?
Yea, what's the use of bothering the very heavens about it? Don't the
heavens themselves ordain these things--else they could not happen?
- title
- Chunk 1