The Comfort of Old Clothes. 241 



clock tells the hours more musically than does 

 a cheap Yankee rattle-trap that ticks in a way 

 suggestive of Walt Whitman's barbaric yawp, 

 so, I say, why so impatient when old clothes are 

 mentioned? Scott, in the "Surgeon's Daugh- 

 ter," makes a character in the story remark, " Old 

 recollections are like old clothes and should be 

 sent off wholesale." I do not believe it. The 

 future is unknowable, we live only in the present, 

 but we have come out of the past, and so long 

 as I keep dragging myself out of this past I pur- 

 pose pulling my old coat with me, nor ask when 

 I shall let go my hold and renew the vexations 

 incident to the putting on of a new garment. 



Not long since I was poking about in the 

 mud, tracing the course of a mole that had 

 burrowed and uplifted the earth directly after 

 a prolonged midwinter rain, when I was im- 

 periously hailed by a stranger and asked who 

 lived at the end of the lane, pointing with his 

 carriage whip directly towards my house. I 

 meekly replied " I do," and watched the move- 

 ments of a black-hawk that was sailing past. 



" I don't mean the tenant house," the stranger 

 replied, impatiently. 



10 



