presently, forgetting his limp, with rapid shout and
gesture, he was more eager, even than the troubled farmers, their
owners, in driving the riotous cattle back into Barbican. Monomaniac
reminiscences were in him--"To the right, to the right!" he shouted, as,
arrived at the street corner, the farmers beat the drove to the left,
towards Smithfield: "To the right! you are driving them back to the
pastures--to the right! that way lies the barn-yard!" "Barn-yard?" cried
a voice; "you are dreaming, old man." And so, Israel, now an old man,
was bewitched by the mirage of vapors; he had dreamed himself home into
the mists of the Housatonic mountains; ruddy boy on the upland pastures
again. But how different the flat, apathetic, dead, London fog now
seemed from those agile mists which, goat-like, climbed the purple
peaks, or in routed armies of phantoms, broke down, pell-mell, dispersed
in flight upon the plain, leaving the cattle-boy loftily alone,
clear-cut as a balloon against the sky.

In 1817 he once more endured extremity; this second peace again drifting
its discharged soldiers on London, so that all kinds of labor were
overstocked. Beggars, too, lighted on the walks like locusts.
Timber-toed cripples stilted along, numerous as French peasants in
_sabots_. And, as thirty years before, on all sides, the exile had heard
the supplicatory cry, not addressed to him, "An honorable scar, your
honor, received at Bunker Hill, or Saratoga, or Trenton, fighting for
his most gracious Majesty, King George!" so now, in presence of the
still surviving Israel, our Wandering Jew, the amended cry was anew
taken up, by a succeeding generation of unfortunates, "An honorable
scar, your honor, received at Corunna, or at Waterloo, or at Trafalgar!"
Yet not a few of these petitioners had never been outside of the London
smoke; a sort of crafty aristocracy in their way, who, without having
endangered their own persons much if anything, reaped no insignificant
share both of the glory and profit of the bloody battles they claimed;
while some of the genuine working heroes, too brave to beg, too cut-up
to work, and too poor to live, laid down quietly in corners and died.
And here it may be noted, as a fact nationally characteristic, that
however desperately reduced at times, even to the sewers, Israel, the
American, never sunk below the mud, to actual beggary.

Though henceforth elbowed out of many a chance threepenny job by the
added thousands wh