h,
aged, melancholy, yet often simply cheerful, and sometimes delicately
intelligent aspect of Clifford, peering from behind the faded crimson
of the curtain,--watching the monotony of every-day occurrences with a
kind of inconsequential interest and earnestness, and, at every petty
throb of his sensibility, turning for sympathy to the eyes of the
bright young girl!

If once he were fairly seated at the window, even Pyncheon Street would
hardly be so dull and lonely but that, somewhere or other along its
extent, Clifford might discover matter to occupy his eye, and
titillate, if not engross, his observation. Things familiar to the
youngest child that had begun its outlook at existence seemed strange
to him. A cab; an omnibus, with its populous interior, dropping here
and there a passenger, and picking up another, and thus typifying that
vast rolling vehicle, the world, the end of whose journey is everywhere
and nowhere; these objects he followed eagerly with his eyes, but
forgot them before the dust raised by the horses and wheels had settled
along their track. As regarded novelties (among which cabs and
omnibuses were to be reckoned), his mind appeared to have lost its
proper gripe and retentiveness. Twice or thrice, for example, during
the sunny hours of the day, a water-cart went along by the Pyncheon
House, leaving a broad wake of moistened earth, instead of the white
dust that had risen at a lady's lightest footfall; it was like a summer
shower, which the city authorities had caught and tamed, and compelled
it into the commonest routine of their convenience. With the
water-cart Clifford could never grow familiar; it always affected him
with just the same surprise as at first. His mind took an apparently
sharp impression from it, but lost the recollection of this
perambulatory shower, before its next reappearance, as completely as
did the street itself, along which the heat so quickly strewed white
dust again. It was the same with the railroad. Clifford could hear
the obstreperous howl of the steam-devil, and, by leaning a little way
from the arched window, could catch a glimpse of the trains of cars,
flashing a brief transit across the extremity of the street. The idea
of terrible energy thus forced upon him was new at every recurrence,
and seemed to affect him as disagreeably, and with almost as much
surprise, the hundredth time as the first.

Nothing gives a sadder sense of decay than this loss or susp