volume of words and smoke. What a wrinkled and unshorn old man! Can age
and neglect do so much for any of us? This ruinous person was associated
with a hand-cart as decrepit as himself, but not nearly so cheerful; for
though he spoke up briskly with a spirit uttered from far within the
wrinkles and the stubble, the cart had preceded him with a very lugubrious
creak. It groaned, in fact, under a load of tin cans, and I was to learn
from the old man that there was, and had been, in his person, for thirteen
years, such a thing in the world as a peddler of buttermilk, and that
these cans were now filled with that pleasant drink. They did not invite
me to prove their contents, being cans that apparently passed their vacant
moments in stables and even manure-heaps, and that looked somehow emulous
of that old man's stubble and wrinkles. I bought nothing, but I left the
old peddler well content, seated upon a thill of his cart, smoking
tranquilly, and filling the keen spring evening air with fumes which it
dispersed abroad, and made to itself a pleasant incense of.

I left him a whole epoch behind, as I entered the Avenue and lounged
homeward along the stately street. Above the station it is far more
picturesque than it is below, and the magnificent elms that shadow it
might well have looked, in their saplinghood, upon the British straggling
down the country road from the Concord fight; and there are some ancient
houses yet standing that must have been filled with exultation at the same
spectacle. Poor old revolutionaries! they would never have believed that
their descendants would come to love the English as we do.

The season has advanced rapidly during my progress from Dublin to the
Avenue; and by the time I reach the famous old tavern, not far from the
station, it is a Sunday morning of early summer, and the yellow sunlight
falls upon a body of good comrades who are grooming a marvelous number of
piebald steeds about the stable-doors. By token of these beasts--which