shoemaking in Lynn, where I really did see it, thirty years later. For
the purposes of the present visit, I contented myself with looking at a
machine in Haverhill, which chewed a shoe sole full of pegs, and dropped
it out of its iron jaws with an indifference as great as my own, and
probably as little sense of how it had done its work. I may be unjust to
that machine; Heaven knows I would not wrong it; and I must confess that
my head had no room in it for the conception of any machinery but the
mythological, which also I despised, in my revulsion from the
eighteenth-century poets to those of my own day.

I cannot quite make out after the lapse of so many years just how or when
I got to Haverhill, or whether it was before or after I had been in
Salem. There is an apparitional quality in my presences, at this point
or that, in the dim past; but I hope that, for the credit of their order,
ghosts are not commonly taken with such trivial things as I was. For
instance, in Haverhill I was much interested by the sight of a young man,
coming gayly down the steps of the hotel where I lodged, in peg-top
trousers so much more peg top than my own that I seemed to be wearing
mere spring-bottoms in comparison; and in a day when every one who
respected himself had a necktie as narrow as he could get, this youth had
one no wider than a shoestring, and red at that, while mine measured
almost an inch, and was black. To be sure, he was one of a band of negro
minstrels, who were to give a concert that night, and he had a light to
excel in fashion.

I will suppose, for convenience' sake, that I visited Haverhill, too,
before I reached Boston: somehow that shoe-pegging machine must come in,
and it may as well come in here. When I actually found myself in Boston,
there were perhaps industries which it would have been well for me to
celebrate, but I either made believe there were none, or else I honestly