A JOURNEY TO NATURE 



look askance and begin to inquire how much 

 paper I had out, and whether I had been buying 

 diamonds lately. But by all odds they would 

 wonder at the triviality of an immortal soul that 

 could interest itself in the vagaries of the season, 

 when there were so many large events waiting on 

 the market. 



But, of course, when the markets are forgotten 

 in the wreck of matter with all its events, the 

 frosts will still come, and when the globe itself is 

 burned to a cinder, other suns will rise somewhere, 

 and other winters weave the same old crystals ; 

 all of which is intolerably eternal and preachy, I 

 know, but when the frost gets into one s mind, 

 these films spin themselves across the reflection ; 

 and the first frost had affected me like the first 

 gray hairs. These confoundedly complacent ter 

 mites in their village carried about with them an 

 air of self-assurance. They gave you to under 

 stand that their kerosene lamps were filled and 

 trimmed, and their treasures laid up in their cel 

 lars, and the world could go hang itself. A 

 stranger is peculiarly susceptible to this kind of 

 well-built impudence when the frost comes. He 

 rather enjoys it in August or September, when 

 one can get along without a kerosene lamp or a 

 woodpile, but in late October it puts him at some 

 disadvantage. It has the import of a parable, and 

 knocks gently at his conscience or his moral thrift 

 shakes up his retrospection, so that he looks 

 through the colours of his autumn for the coming 

 ghost. These fellows, the Doctor said, were like 



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