period. Yes, it is a
romance, a very wonderful romance, and we all have our place in it. We
grope and ferret about, and yet remain where we are, but the ball
keeps turning, without emptying the ocean over us; the clod on which
we move about, holds, and does not let us through. And then it's a
story that has been acting for thousands upon thousands of years, and
is still going on. My best thanks for the book about the boulders.
Those are fellows indeed! they could tell us something worth hearing,
if they only knew how to talk. It's really a pleasure, now and then to
become a mere nothing, especially when a man is as highly placed as I
am. And then to think that we all, even with patent lacquer, are
nothing more than insects of a moment on that ant-hill the earth,
though we may be insects with stars and garters, places and offices!
One feels quite a novice beside these venerable million-year-old
boulders. On New Year's-eve I was reading the book, and had lost
myself in it so completely, that I forgot my usual New Year's
diversion, namely, the wild hunt to Amack. Ah, you don't know what
that is!

"The journey of the witches on broomsticks is well enough known--that
journey is taken on St. John's-eve, to the Brocken; but we have a wild
journey also, which is national and modern, and that is the journey to
Amack on the night of the New Year. All indifferent poets and
poetesses, musicians, newspaper writers and artistic notabilities, I
mean those who are no good, ride in the New Year's-night through the
air to Amack. They sit backwards on their painting brushes or quill
pens, for steel pens won't bear them, they're too stiff. As I told
you, I see that every New Year's night, and could mention the
majority of the riders by name, but I should not like to draw their
enmity upon myself, for they don't like people to talk about their
ride to Amack on quill pens. I've a kind of niece, who is a fishwife,
and who, as she tells me, supplies three respectable newspapers with
the terms of abuse and vituperation they use, and she has herself been
at Amack as an invited guest; but she was carried out thither, for she
does not own a quill pen, nor can she ride. She has told me all about
it. Half of what she said is not true, but the other half gives us
information enough. When she was out there, the festivities began with
a song: each of the guests had written his own song, and each one sung
his own song, for he thought that the best, an