ension of
the power to deal with unaccustomed things, and to keep up with the
swiftness of the passing moment. It can merely be a suspended
animation; for, were the power actually to perish, there would be
little use of immortality. We are less than ghosts, for the time
being, whenever this calamity befalls us.

Clifford was indeed the most inveterate of conservatives. All the
antique fashions of the street were dear to him; even such as were
characterized by a rudeness that would naturally have annoyed his
fastidious senses. He loved the old rumbling and jolting carts, the
former track of which he still found in his long-buried remembrance, as
the observer of to-day finds the wheel-tracks of ancient vehicles in
Herculaneum. The butcher's cart, with its snowy canopy, was an
acceptable object; so was the fish-cart, heralded by its horn; so,
likewise, was the countryman's cart of vegetables, plodding from door
to door, with long pauses of the patient horse, while his owner drove a
trade in turnips, carrots, summer-squashes, string-beans, green peas,
and new potatoes, with half the housewives of the neighborhood. The
baker's cart, with the harsh music of its bells, had a pleasant effect
on Clifford, because, as few things else did, it jingled the very
dissonance of yore. One afternoon a scissor-grinder chanced to set his
wheel a-going under the Pyncheon Elm, and just in front of the arched
window. Children came running with their mothers' scissors, or the
carving-knife, or the paternal razor, or anything else that lacked an
edge (except, indeed, poor Clifford's wits), that the grinder might
apply the article to his magic wheel, and give it back as good as new.
Round went the busily revolving machinery, kept in motion by the
scissor-grinder's foot, and wore away the hard steel against the hard
stone, whence issued an intense and spiteful prolongation of a hiss as
fierce as those emitted by Satan and his compeers in Pandemonium,
though squeezed into smaller compass. It was an ugly, little, venomous
serpent of a noise, as ever did petty violence to human ears. But
Clifford listened with rapturous delight. The sound, however
disagreeable, had very brisk life in it, and, together with the circle
of curious children watching the revolutions of the wheel, appeared to
give him a more vivid sense of active, bustling, and sunshiny existence
than he had attained in almost any other way. Nevertheless, its charm
lay chief