Yankee Gypsies John Greenleaf Whittier
"Here's to budgets, packs, and wallets; Here's to all the wandering train." BURNS.(1)
I CONFESS it, I am keenly nsitive to "skyey influences." (2) I profess no indifference to the movements of that capricious old gentleman known as the clerk of the weather. I cannot conceal my interest in the behavior of that patriarchal bird who wooden similitude gyrates on the church spire. Winter proper is well enough. Let the thermometer go to zero if it will; so much the better, if thereby the very winds are frozen and unable to flap their stiff wings. Sounds of bells in the keen air, clear, musical, heart-inspiring; quick tripping of fair moccasined feet on glittering ice pavements; bright eyes glancing above the uplifted muff like a sultana's behind the folds of her *yashmak;*(3) schoolboys coasting down street like mad Greenlanders; the cold brilliance of oblique sunbeams flashing back from wide surfaces of glittering snow, or blazing upon ice jewelry of tree and roof: there is nothing in all this to complain of.
A storm of summer has its redeeming sublimities,--its slow, upheaving mountains of cloud glooming in the western horizon like new-created volcanoes, veined with fire, shattered by exploding thunders. Even the wild gales of the equinox have their varieties,--sounds of wind- shaken woods and waters, creak and clatter of sign and cament, hurricane puffs, and down-rushing rain-spouts. But this dull, da
rk autumn day of thaw and rain, when the very clouds em too spiritless and languid to storm outright or take themlves out of the way of fair weather; wet beneath and above, reminding one of that rayless atmosphere of Dante's Third Circle, where the infernal Priessnitz(4) administers his hydropathic torment,--
"A heavy, curd, and relentless drench,-- The land it soaks is putrid;"
upper
天道留学中介or rather, as everything animate and inanimate is ething in warm mist, suggesting the idea that Nature, grown old and rheumatic, is trying the efficacy of a Thomsonian steam-box(5) on a grand scale; no sounds save the heavy plash of muddy feet on the pavements; the monotonous, melancholy drip from trees and roofs; the distressful gurgling of waterducts, swallowing the dirty amalgam of the gutters; a dim, leaden-colored horizon of only a few yards in diameter, shutting down about one,
beyond which nothing is visible save in faint line or dark projection; the ghost of a church spire or the eidolon of a chimney-pot,--he who can extract pleasurable emotions from the alembic of such a day has a trick of alchemy with which I am wholly unacquainted.
steak(1) From the closing air in *The Jolly Beggars,* a cantata. (2) "A breath thou art Servile to all the sky
ey influences, That dost this habitation, where thou keep'st Hourly afflict." Shakespeare: *Measure for Measure,* act III. scene 1. (3) "She turns and turns again, and carefully glances around her on all sides, to e that she is safe from the eyes of Mussulmans, and then suddenly withdrawing the yashmak she shines upon your heart and soul with all the pomp and might of her beauty." Kinglake's *Eothen,* chap. iii. In a note to *Yashmak* Kinglake explains that it is not a mere mi- transparent veil, but thoroughly conceals all the features except the eyes: it is withdrawn by being pulled down. (4) Vincenz Priessnitz was the originator of the water-cure. After experimenting upon himlf and his neighbors he took up the profession of hydropathy and established baths at his native place, Grafenberg in Silesia, in 1829. He died in 1851. (5) Dr. Samuel Thomson, a New Hampshire physician, advocated the u of the steam bath as a restorer of system when diad. He died in 1843 and left behind an autobiography (*Life and Medical Discoveries*) which contains a record of the percutions he underwent.
Hark! a rap at my door. Welcome anybody just now. One gains nothing by attempting to shut out the sprites of the weather. They come in at the keyhole; they peer through the dripping panes; they insinuate themlves through the crevices of the cament, or plump down chimney astride of the raindrops.
英文讣告I ri and throw open the door. A tall, shambling, loo- jointed figure;
a pinched, shrewd face, sun-brown and wind- dried; small, quick-winking black eyes,--there he stands, the water dripping from his pulpy hat and ragged elbows.
I speak to him; but he returns no answer. With a dumb show of miry, quite touching, he hands me a soiled piece of parchment, whereon I read what purports to be a melancholy account of shipwreck and disaster, to the particular detriment, loss, and damnification of one Pietro Frugoni, who is,
in conquence, sorely in want of the alms of all charitable Christian persons, and who is, in short, the bearer of this veracious document, duly certified and indord by an Italian consul in one of our Atlantic cities, of a high-sounding, but to Yankee organs unpronounceable, name.
Here commences a struggle. Every man, the Mahometans tell us, has two attendant angels,--the good one on his right shoulder, the bad on his left. "Give," says Benevolence, as with some difficulty I fish up a small coin from the depths of my pocket. "Not a cent," says lfish Prudence; and I drop it from my fingers. "Think," says the good angel, "of the poor stranger in a strange land, just escaped from the terrors of the a-storm, in which his little property has perished, thrown half-naked and helpless on our shores, ignorant of our language, and unable to find employment suited to his capaci
ty." "A vile impostor!" replies the left-hand ntinel; "his paper purchad from one of tho ready-writers in New York who manufacture beggar-credentials at the low price of one dollar per copy, with earthquakes, fires, or shipwrecks, to suit customers."
Amidst this confusion of tongues I take another survey of my visitant. Ha! a light dawns upon me. That shrewd, old face, with its sharp, winking eyes, is no stranger to me. Pietro Frugoni, I have en thee before. *Si, signor,* that face of thine has looked at me over a dirty white neckcloth, with the corners of that cunning mouth drawn downwards, and tho small eyes turned up in sanctimonious gravity, while thou wast offering to a crowd of half-grown boys an extemporaneous exhortation in the capacity of a travelling preacher. Have I not en it peering out from under a blanket, as that of a poor Penobscot Indian, who had lost the u of his hands while trapping on the Madawaska? Is it not the face of the forlorn father of six small children, whom the "marcury doctors" had "pined" and crippled? Did it not belong to that down-east unfortunate who had been out to the "Genee country"(1) and got the "fevernnager," and who hand shook so pitifully when held out to receive my poor gift? The same, under all disguis,--Stephen Leathers, of Barrington,--him, and none other! Let me conjure him into his own likeness:--怎样快速学英语
(1) The *Genee country* is the name by which the western part of New York, bordering on Lakes
美国国旗的含义Ontario and Erie, was known, when, at the
肚皮舞培训学校clo of the last and beginning of this century, it was to people on the Atlantic coast the Great West. In 1792 communication was opened by a road with the Pennsylvania ttlements, but the early ttlers were almost all from New England.
"Well, Stephen, what news from old Barrington?"
"Oh, well, I thought I knew ye," he answers, not the least disconcerted. "How do you do? and how's your folks? All well, I hope. I took this 'ere paper, you e, to help a poor furriner, who could n't make himlf understood any more than a wild goo. I though I'd just start him for'ard a little. It emed a marcy to do it."
carteloWell and shiftily answered, thou ragged Proteus. One cannot be angry with such a fellow. I will just inquire into the prent state of his Gospel mission and about the condition of his tribe on the Penobscot; and it may be not amiss to congratulate him on the success of the steam-doctors in sweating the "pin" of the regular faculty out of him. But he evidently has no wish to enter into idle conversation. Intent upon his benevolent errand he is already clattering down stairs. Involuntarily I glance out of the window just in ason to catch a single glimp of him ere he is swallowed up in th
e mist.
He has gone; and, knave as he is, I can hardly help exclaiming, "Luck go with him!" He has broken in upon the sombre train of my thoughts and called up before me pleasant and grateful recollections. The old farm-hou nestling in its valley; hills stretching off to the south and green meadows to the east; the small stream which came noisily down its ravine, washing the old garden-wall and softly lapping on fallen stones and mossy roots of beeches and hemlocks; the tall ntinel poplars at the gateway; the oak-forest, sweeping unbroken to the northern horizon; the grass-grown carriage-path, with its rude and crazy bridge,--the dear old landscape of my boyhood lies outstretched before me like a daguerreotype from that picture within, which I have borne with me in all my wanderings. I am a boy again, once more conscious of the feeling, half terror, half exultation, with which I ud to announce the approach of this very vagabond and his "kindred after the flesh."傅滢>氖灯
The advent of wandering beggars, or "old stragglers," as we were wont
