INTRODUCTION

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INTRODUCTION

I know many people who have felt the same inclination that sometimes
comes over me, to choose bad weather to go out in. They are generally
men who have passed from a childhood lived in the open air of the
country, to an occupation which entails much sitting still, and for whom
the room sometimes seems to become too narrow and confined--or else they
are poets. Their recollection and imagination live, more or less unknown
to themselves, in a continual longing to get away from the confined air
of a room, and the barrack-life of a town.

So one day when the country comes into the town in the shape of a
downright storm of wind and rain, which shakes the tiles on the roofs,
and now and then flings one after you, while the streets become rivers,
and every corner an ambush from which the whirlwind makes a sudden
attack upon your umbrella, and, after a more or less prolonged and
adroit struggle, tears it, and turns it inside out, until at last you
stand with only the stick and the ribs left in your hand--at such a
time, it now and then happens that a quiet, dignified civil servant, or
business man, instead of sitting at home, as usual, in the afternoon in
his comfortable room after the day's toil in the office, says to his
wife that he "is sorry he must go out into the town for a little while."
And what he unfortunately must go out for is, of course, "business." For
little would it become a sedate, grave man, perhaps an alderman, and one
of the fathers of the town, to acknowledge, even to himself, that he is
childish enough to go and wander about in bad weather, that he only
wants to walk down to the quay to see the spray dash over the bitts, and
to watch the ships in the harbour playing at shipwreck. He must, of
course, have something to do there; if nothing else, at any rate to see
"ne quid detrimenti capiat respublica"; that is to say, that the town,
whose welfare, in one way or another, it is his business to look after,
is not blown down.

The fact is, there is a revolution in the streets--not a political
revolution, Heaven preserve him from that--but one which has an
attraction for him, because it awakens all his old recollections, and in
which, much to his disgrace, he contrives surreptitiously to join,
although, in its own way, it too defies all police arrangements, breaks
windows, puts out street-lamps, tears the tile