ed in regard to his
fellow-creatures and the business of life, he could not be said to
possess his right mind. He had contrived--or, rather, he had
happened--to dissever himself from the world, to vanish, to give up
his place and privileges with living men without being admitted among
the dead. The life of a hermit is nowise parallel to his. He was in
the bustle of the city as of old, but the crowd swept by and saw him
not; he was, we may figuratively say, always beside his wife and at
his hearth, yet must never feel the warmth of the one nor the
affection of the other. It was Wakefield's unprecedented fate to
retain his original share of human sympathies and to be still involved
in human interests, while he had lost his reciprocal influence on
them. It would be a most curious speculation to trace out the effect
of such circumstances on his heart and intellect separately and in
unison. Yet, changed as he was, he would seldom be conscious of it,
but deem himself the same man as ever; glimpses of the truth, indeed,
would come, but only for the moment, and still he would keep saying,
"I shall soon go back," nor reflect that he had been saying so for
twenty years.

I conceive, also, that these twenty years would appear in the
retrospect scarcely longer than the week to which Wakefield had at
first limited his absence. He would look on the affair as no more than
an interlude in the main business of his life. When, after a little
while more, he should deem it time to re-enter his parlor, his wife
would clap her hands for joy on beholding the middle-aged Mr.
Wakefield. Alas, what a mistake! Would Time but await the close of our
favorite follies, we should be young men--all of us--and till
Doomsday.

One evening, in the twentieth year since he vanished, Wakefield is
taking his customary walk toward the dwelling which he still calls his
own. It is a gusty night of autumn, with frequent showers that patter
down upon the pavement and are gone before a man can put up his
umbrella. Pausing near the house, Wakefield discerns through the
parlor-windows of the second floor the red glow and the glimmer and
fitful flash of a comfortable fire. On the ceiling appears a grotesque
shadow of good Mrs. Wakefield. The cap, the nose and chin and the
broad waist form an admirable caricature, which dances, moreover, with
the up-flickering and down-sinking blaze almost too merrily for the
shade of an elderly widow. At this instant a shower chanc