ON A CERTAIN CONDESCENSION IN 

 FOREIGNERS. 



TTT^ALKING one day toward the Village, as we used 

 VV 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 deepening twilight brings with it, giving 

 as it does a sort 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 al- 

 most 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 the bare boughs etched 

 with a touch beyond Rembrandt by the same unconscious 

 artist on the smooth page of snow ! If I turned round, 

 through dusky tree-gaps came the first twinkle of even- 



