always look so much more like works of art than of nature--I know that
there is to be a circus somewhere very soon; and the gay bills pasted all
over the stable-front tell me that there are to be two performances at the
Port on the morrow. The grooms talk nothing and joke nothing but horse at
their labor; and their life seems such a low, ignorant, happy life, that
the secret nomad lurking in every respectable and stationary personality
stirs within me and struggles to strike hands of fellowship with them.
They lead a sort of pastoral existence in our age of railroads; they
wander over the continent with their great caravan, and everywhere pursue
the summer from South to North and from North to South again; in the mild
forenoons they groom their herds, and in the afternoons they doze under
their wagons, indifferent to the tumult of the crowd within and without
the mighty canvas near them,--doze face downwards on the bruised, sweet-
smelling grass; and in the starry midnight rise and strike their tents,
and set forth again over the still country roads, to take the next village
on the morrow with the blaze and splendor of their "Grand Entree." The
triumphal chariot in which the musicians are borne at the head of the
procession is composed, as I perceive by the bills, of four colossal gilt
swans, set tail to tail, with lifted wings and curving necks; but the
chariot, as I behold it beside the stable, is mysteriously draped in white
canvas, through which its gilding glitters only here and there. And does
it move thus shrouded in the company's wanderings from place to place, and
is the precious spottiness of the piebalds then hidden under envious
drapery? O happy grooms,--not clean as to shirts, nor especially neat in
your conversation, but displaying a Wealth of art in India-ink upon your
manly chests and the swelling muscles of your arms, and speaking in every
movement your freedom from all conventional gyves and shackles, _"seid
umschlungen!"_--in spirit; for the rest, you are rather too damp, and
seem to have applied your sudsy sponges too impartially to your own
trousers and the horses' legs to receive an actual embrace from a