stimulus upon the attention. When all the faculties are wide-awake in
pursuit of a single object, or fixed in the spasm of an absorbing
emotion, they are oftentimes clairvoyant in a marvellous degree in
respect to many collateral things, as Wordsworth has so forcibly
illustrated in his sonnet on the Boy of Windermere, and as Hawthorne has
developed with such metaphysical accuracy in that chapter of his wondrous
story where Hester walks forth to meet her punishment.

Be that as it may,--though I set out with a full and heavy heart, though
many times my blood chilled with what were perhaps needless and unwise
fears, though I broke through all my habits without thinking about them,
which is almost as hard in certain circumstances as for one of our young
fellows to leave his sweetheart and go into a Peninsular campaign, though
I did not always know when I was hungry nor discover that I was
thirsting, though I had a worrying ache and inward tremor underlying all
the outward play of the senses and the mind, yet it is the simple truth
that I did look out of the car-windows with an eye for all that passed,
that I did take cognizance of strange sights and singular people, that I
did act much as persons act from the ordinary promptings of curiosity,
and from time to time even laugh very much as others do who are attacked
with a convulsive sense of the ridiculous, the epilepsy of the diaphragm.

By a mutual compact, we talked little in the cars. A communicative
friend is the greatest nuisance to have at one's side during a railroad
journey, especially if his conversation is stimulating and in itself
agreeable. "A fast train and a 'slow' neighbor," is my motto. Many
times, when I have got upon the cars, expecting to be magnetized into an
hour or two of blissful reverie, my thoughts shaken up by the vibrations
into all sorts of new and pleasing patterns, arranging themselves in
curves and nodal points, like the grains of sand in Chladni's famous