- end_line
- 567
- extracted_at
- 2026-01-30T20:47:57.722Z
- extracted_by
- structure-extraction-lambda
- start_line
- 529
- text
- transient memory of the slumberer vanished, and he himself, not
unlikely, waked up and landed ere now--the crowd, as is usual, began in
all parts to break up from a concourse into various clusters or squads,
which in some cases disintegrated again into quartettes, trios, and
couples, or even solitaires; involuntarily submitting to that natural
law which ordains dissolution equally to the mass, as in time to the
member.
As among Chaucer's Canterbury pilgrims, or those oriental ones crossing
the Red Sea towards Mecca in the festival month, there was no lack of
variety. Natives of all sorts, and foreigners; men of business and men
of pleasure; parlor men and backwoodsmen; farm-hunters and fame-hunters;
heiress-hunters, gold-hunters, buffalo-hunters, bee-hunters,
happiness-hunters, truth-hunters, and still keener hunters after all
these hunters. Fine ladies in slippers, and moccasined squaws; Northern
speculators and Eastern philosophers; English, Irish, German, Scotch,
Danes; Santa Fé traders in striped blankets, and Broadway bucks in
cravats of cloth of gold; fine-looking Kentucky boatmen, and
Japanese-looking Mississippi cotton-planters; Quakers in full drab, and
United States soldiers in full regimentals; slaves, black, mulatto,
quadroon; modish young Spanish Creoles, and old-fashioned French Jews;
Mormons and Papists Dives and Lazarus; jesters and mourners, teetotalers
and convivialists, deacons and blacklegs; hard-shell Baptists and
clay-eaters; grinning negroes, and Sioux chiefs solemn as high-priests.
In short, a piebald parliament, an Anacharsis Cloots congress of all
kinds of that multiform pilgrim species, man.
As pine, beech, birch, ash, hackmatack, hemlock, spruce, bass-wood,
maple, interweave their foliage in the natural wood, so these mortals
blended their varieties of visage and garb. A Tartar-like
picturesqueness; a sort of pagan abandonment and assurance. Here reigned
the dashing and all-fusing spirit of the West, whose type is the
Mississippi itself, which, uniting the streams of the most distant and
opposite zones, pours them along, helter-skelter, in one cosmopolitan
and confident tide.
- title
- Chunk 2