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- 2026-01-30T20:48:05.594Z
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- ere his crazy errand could be done; and even then, Old Huckleberry
would be found long surfeited with clover, since, doubtless, being dead
many a summer, he must be buried beneath it. And many years after, in a
far different part of the town, and in far less winsome weather too,
passing with his bundle of flags through Red-Cross street, towards
Barbican, in a fog so dense that the dimmed and massed blocks of
houses, exaggerated by the loom, seemed shadowy ranges on ranges of
midnight hills, he heard a confused pastoral sort of sounds—tramplings,
lowings, halloos—and was suddenly called to by a voice to head off
certain cattle, bound to Smithfield, bewildered and unruly in the fog.
Next instant he saw the white face—white as an orange-blossom—of a
black-bodied steer, in advance of the drove, gleaming ghost-like
through the vapors; and presently, forgetting his limp, with rapid
shout and gesture, he was more eager, even than the troubled farmers,
their owners, in driving the riotous cattle back into Barbican.
Monomaniac reminiscences were in him—“To the right, to the right!” he
shouted, as, arrived at the street corner, the farmers beat the drove
to the left, towards Smithfield: “To the right! you are driving them
back to the pastures—to the right! that way lies the barn-yard!”
“Barn-yard?” cried a voice; “you are dreaming, old man.” And so,
Israel, now an old man, was bewitched by the mirage of vapors; he had
dreamed himself home into the mists of the Housatonic mountains; ruddy
boy on the upland pastures again. But how different the flat,
apathetic, dead, London fog now seemed from those agile mists which,
goat-like, climbed the purple peaks, or in routed armies of phantoms,
broke down, pell-mell, dispersed in flight upon the plain, leaving the
cattle-boy loftily alone, clear-cut as a balloon against the sky.
In 1817 he once more endured extremity; this second peace again
drifting its discharged soldiers on London, so that all kinds of labor
were overstocked. Beggars, too, lighted on the walks like locusts.
Timber-toed cripples stilted along, numerous as French peasants in
_sabots_. And, as thirty years before, on all sides, the exile had
heard the supplicatory cry, not addressed to him, “An honorable scar,
your honor, received at Bunker Hill, or Saratoga, or Trenton, fighting
for his most gracious Majesty, King George!” so now, in presence of the
still surviving Israel, our Wandering Jew, the amended cry was anew
taken up, by a succeeding generation of unfortunates, “An honorable
scar, your honor, received at Corunna, or at Waterloo, or at
Trafalgar!” Yet not a few of these petitioners had never been outside
of the London smoke; a sort of crafty aristocracy in their way, who,
without having endangered their own persons much if anything, reaped no
insignificant share both of the glory and profit of the bloody battles
they claimed; while some of the genuine working heroes, too brave to
beg, too cut-up to work, and too poor to live, laid down quietly in
corners and died. And here it may be noted, as a fact nationally
characteristic, that however desperately reduced at times, even to the
sewers, Israel, the American, never sunk below the mud, to actual
beggary.
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