48 CONDESCENSION IN FOREIGNERS. 



The pent-up air, struggling to free itself, 

 Gave out to meadow-grounds and bills a loud 

 Protracted yelling, like the noise of wolves 

 Howling in troops along the Bothnic main.&quot; 



Thoreau (unless the English lakes have a different 

 dialect from ours) calls it admirably well a &quot; whoop.&quot; 

 But it is a noise like none other, as if Demogorgon were 

 moaning inarticulately from under the earth. Let us get 

 within doors, lest we hear it again, for there is something 

 bodeful and uncanny in it. 



ON A CERTAIN CONDESCENSION IN 

 FOREIGNERS. 



WALKING one day toward the Village, as we used to call 

 it in the good old days when almost every dweller in the 

 town had been born in it, I was enjoying that delicious 

 sense of disenthralment from the actual which the deepen 

 ing twilight brings with it, giving, as it does, a sorb of 

 obscure novelty to things familiar. The coolness, the 

 hush, broken only by the distant bleat of some belated 

 goat, querulous to be disburthened of her milky load, the 

 few faint stars, more guessed as yet than seen ; the sense 

 that the coming dark would so soon fold me in the secure 

 privacy of its disguise all things combined in a result 

 as near absolute peace as can be hoped for by a man 

 who knows that there is a writ out against him in the 

 hands of the printer s devil. For the moment I was 

 enjoying the blessed privilege of thinking without being 

 called on to stand and deliver what I thought to the small 

 public who are good enough to take any interest therein. 

 I love old ways, and the path I was walking felt kindly 

 to the feet it had known for almost fifty years. How many 

 fleeting impressions it had shared with me ! How many 

 times I had lingered to study the shadows of the leaves 

 mezzotinted upon the turf that edged it by the moon, of 



