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- 7270
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- 2026-01-30T20:48:05.594Z
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- start_line
- 7211
- text
- strangers, at the more public corners and intersections of sewers—the
Charing-Crosses below; one soldier having the other by his remainder
button, earnestly discussing the sad prospects of a rise in bread, or
the tide; while through the grating of the gutters overhead, the rusty
skylights of the realm, came the hoarse rumblings of bakers’ carts,
with splashes of the flood whereby these unsuspected gnomes of the city
lived.
Encouraged by the exodus of the lost tribes of soldiers, Israel
returned to chair-bottoming. And it was in frequenting Covent-Garden
market, at early morning, for the purchase of his flags, that he
experienced one of the strange alleviations hinted of above. That
chatting with the ruddy, aproned, hucksterwomen, on whose moist cheeks
yet trickled the dew of the dawn on the meadows; that being surrounded
by bales of hay, as the raker by cocks and ricks in the field; those
glimpses of garden produce, the blood-beets, with the damp earth still
tufting the roots; that mere handling of his flags, and bethinking him
of whence they must have come, the green hedges through which the wagon
that brought them had passed; that trudging home with them as a gleaner
with his sheaf of wheat;—all this was inexpressibly grateful. In want
and bitterness, pent in, perforce, between dingy walls, he had rural
returns of his boyhood’s sweeter days among them; and the hardest
stones of his solitary heart (made hard by bare endurance alone) would
feel the stir of tender but quenchless memories, like the grass of
deserted flagging, upsprouting through its closest seams. Sometimes,
when incited by some little incident, however trivial in itself,
thoughts of home would—either by gradually working and working upon
him, or else by an impetuous rush of recollection—overpower him for a
time to a sort of hallucination.
Thus was it:—One fair half-day in the July of 1800, by good luck, he
was employed, partly out of charity, by one of the keepers, to trim the
sward in an oval enclosure within St. James’ Park, a little green but a
three-minutes’ walk along the gravelled way from the brick-besmoked and
grimy Old Brewery of the palace which gives its ancient name to the
public resort on whose borders it stands. It was a little oval, fenced
in with iron pailings, between whose bars the imprisoned verdure peered
forth, as some wild captive creature of the woods from its cage. And
alien Israel there—at times staring dreamily about him—seemed like some
amazed runaway steer, or trespassing Pequod Indian, impounded on the
shores of Narraganset Bay, long ago; and back to New England our exile
was called in his soul. For still working, and thinking of home; and
thinking of home, and working amid the verdant quietude of this little
oasis, one rapt thought begat another, till at last his mind settled
intensely, and yet half humorously, upon the image of Old Huckleberry,
his mother’s favorite old pillion horse; and, ere long, hearing a
sudden scraping noise (some hob-shoe without, against the iron
pailing), he insanely took it to be Old Huckleberry in his stall,
hailing him (Israel) with his shod fore-foot clattering against the
planks—his customary trick when hungry—and so, down goes Israel’s hook,
and with a tuft of white clover, impulsively snatched, he hurries away
a few paces in obedience to the imaginary summons. But soon stopping
midway, and forlornly gazing round at the enclosure, he bethought him
that a far different oval, the great oval of the ocean, must be crossed
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
- title
- Chunk 3