pression which it makes on every new adventurer, even if he
plunge into it while the warmest tide of life is bubbling through his
veins. What, then, must it have been to Hepzibah and Clifford,--so
time-stricken as they were, yet so like children in their
inexperience,--as they left the doorstep, and passed from beneath the
wide shelter of the Pyncheon Elm! They were wandering all abroad, on
precisely such a pilgrimage as a child often meditates, to the world's
end, with perhaps a sixpence and a biscuit in his pocket. In
Hepzibah's mind, there was the wretched consciousness of being adrift.
She had lost the faculty of self-guidance; but, in view of the
difficulties around her, felt it hardly worth an effort to regain it,
and was, moreover, incapable of making one.

As they proceeded on their strange expedition, she now and then cast a
look sidelong at Clifford, and could not but observe that he was
possessed and swayed by a powerful excitement. It was this, indeed,
that gave him the control which he had at once, and so irresistibly,
established over his movements. It not a little resembled the
exhilaration of wine. Or, it might more fancifully be compared to a
joyous piece of music, played with wild vivacity, but upon a disordered
instrument. As the cracked jarring note might always be heard, and as
it jarred loudest amidst the loftiest exultation of the melody, so was
there a continual quake through Clifford, causing him most to quiver
while he wore a triumphant smile, and seemed almost under a necessity
to skip in his gait.

They met few people abroad, even on passing from the retired
neighborhood of the House of the Seven Gables into what was ordinarily
the more thronged and busier portion of the town. Glistening
sidewalks, with little pools of rain, here and there, along their
unequal surface; umbrellas displayed ostentatiously in the
shop-windows, as if the life of trade had concentrated itself in that
one article; wet leaves of the horse-chestnut or elm-trees, torn off
untimely by the blast and scattered along the public way; an unsightly,
accumulation of mud in the middle of the street, which perversely grew
the more unclean for its long and laborious washing,--these were the
more definable points of a very sombre picture. In the way of movement
and human life, there was the hasty rattle of a cab or coach, its
driver protected by a waterproof cap over his head and shoulders; the
forlorn figure of an old