cannot think, or write, or attend to their ordinary business. They stroll
up and down the streets, or saunter out upon the public places. We
confessed to an illustrious author that we laid down the volume of his
work which we were reading when the war broke out. It was as interesting
as a romance, but the romance of the past grew pale before the red light
of the terrible present. Meeting the same author not long afterwards, he
confessed that he had laid down his pen at the same time that we had
closed his book. He could not write about the sixteenth century any more
than we could read about it, while the nineteenth was in the very agony
and bloody sweat of its great sacrifice.

Another most eminent scholar told us in all simplicity that he had fallen
into such a state that he would read the same telegraphic dispatches over
and over again in different papers, as if they were new, until he felt as
if he were an idiot. Who did not do just the same thing, and does not
often do it still, now that the first flush of the fever is over?
Another person always goes through the side streets on his way for the
noon extra,--he is so afraid somebody will meet him and tell the news he
wishes to read, first on the bulletin-board, and then in the great
capitals and leaded type of the newspaper.

When any startling piece of war-news comes, it keeps repeating itself in
our minds in spite of all we can do. The same trains of thought go
tramping round in circle through the brain, like the supernumeraries that
make up the grand army of a stage-show. Now, if a thought goes round
through the brain a thousand times in a day, it will have worn as deep a
track as one which has passed through it once a week for twenty years.
This accounts for the ages we seem to have lived since the twelfth of
April last, and, to state it more generally, for that ex post facto
operation of a great calamity, or any very powerful impression, which we