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WALDEN. 
peared to me a great news room; and on one side, to 
support it, as once at Redding & Company’s on State 
Street, they kept nuts and raisins, or salt and meal and 
other groceries. Some have such a vast appetite for 
the former commodity, that is, the news, and such sound 
digestive organs, that they can sit forever in public 
avenues without stirring, and let it simmer and whisper 
through them like the Etesian winds, or as if inhaling 
ether, it only producing numbness and insensibility to 
pain, — otherwise it would often be painful to hear, — 
without affecting the consciousness. I hardly ever 
failed, when I rambled through the village, to see a row 
of such worthies, either sitting on a ladder sunning them¬ 
selves, with their bodies inclined forward and their eyes 
glancing along the line this way and that, from time to 
time, with a voluptuous expression, or else leaning 
against a barn with their hands in their pockets, like 
caryatides, as if to prop it up. They, being commonly 
out of doors, heard whatever was in the wind. These 
are the coarsest mills, in which all gossip is first rudely 
digested or cracked up before it is emptied into finer 
and more delicate hoppers within doors. I observed that 
the vitals of the village were the grocery, the bar-room, 
the post-office, and the bank; and, as a necessary part 
of the machinery, they kept a bell, a big gun, and a fire- 
engine, at convenient places; and the houses were so ar¬ 
ranged as to make the most of mankind, in lanes and 
fronting one another, so that every traveller had to run 
the gantlet, and every man, woman, and child might get a 
lick at him. Of course, those who were stationed near¬ 
est to the head of the line, where they could most see 
and be seen, and have the first blow at him, paid the 
highest prices for their places; and the few straggling 
