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- 2026-01-30T20:48:26.981Z
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- parade forth, as if only you _yourself_ were the discoverer of this
Portuguese diamond in your literature.’ But even granting all this--and
adding to it, the assumption that the books of Hawthorne have sold by
the five thousand--what does that signify? They should be sold by the
hundred thousand; and read by the million; and admired by every one who
is capable of admiration.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
COCK-A-DOODLE-DOO!
OR THE CROWING OF THE NOBLE COCK BENEVENTANO
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 travellers 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 hypos to sleep, I sallied out to walk on my hill-side 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 vapour 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.
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