were congregated to witness the exercises of the engine company, this
being the afternoon of their monthly practice. They deluged the roof of
the meeting-house, till the water fell from the eaves in a broad
cascade; then the stream beat against the dusty windows like a thunder-
storm; and sometimes they flung it up beside the steeple, sparkling in
an ascending shower about the weathercock. For variety's sake the
engineer made it undulate horizontally, like a great serpent flying over
the earth. As his last effort, being roguishly inclined, he seemed to
take aim at the sky, falling short rather of which, down came the fluid,
transformed to drops of silver, on the thickest crowd of the spectators.
Then ensued a prodigious rout and mirthful uproar, with no little wrath
of the surly ones, whom this is an infallible method of distinguishing.
The joke afforded infinite amusement to the ladies at the windows and
some old people under the hay-scales. I also laughed at a distance, and
was glad to find myself susceptible, as of old, to the simple mirth of
such a scene.

"But the thoughts that it excited were not all mirthful. I had
witnessed hundreds of such spectacles in my youth, and one precisely
similar only a few days before my departure. And now, the aspect of the
village being the same, and the crowd composed of my old acquaintances,
I could hardly realize that years had passed, or even months, or that
the very drops of water were not falling at this moment, which had been
flung up then. But I pressed the conviction home, that, brief as the
time appeared, it had been long enough for me to wander away and return
again, with my fate accomplished, and little more hope in this world.
The last throb of an adventurous and wayward spirit kept me from
repining. I felt as if it were better, or not worse, to have compressed
my enjoyments and sufferings into a few wild years, and then to rest
myself in an early grave, than to have chosen the untroubled and