ing as the train
pulled into the narrow, smoke-blackened, queerly familiar train-shed;
under the dirty glass roof the thick smoke still gathered into roundish
clumps and floated back and forth in long ragged ribbons, just as when
Tonio Kroeger rode away with nothing but mockery in his heart.--He
attended to his baggage, ordered it brought to the hotel, and left the
station.

Those were the black, immoderately broad and high two-horse cabs of the
city, standing outside in a row. He did not take one; he merely looked
at them as he looked at everything: the narrow gables and pointed
turrets that greeted him across the nearest roofs, the fair-haired,
idly awkward people round about him, with their broad yet rapid
speech--and a nervous laughter rose up in him that was secretly
allied to sobbing.--He went on foot, quite slowly, with the incessant
pressure of the moist wind on his face, over the bridge on whose
balustrade mythological figures stood, and then along the harbor for
some distance.

Good heavens, how tiny and crooked the whole place seemed! Had these
narrow gable-fringed streets risen to the town in such comical
steepness through all those years? The smoke-stacks and masts of the
ships swayed gently in the breeze and in the twilight on the murky
river. Should he go up yonder street, the one on which stood the house
that he had in mind? No, tomorrow. He was so sleepy now. His head was
heavy from the journey, and slow, nebulous thoughts crossed his mind.

At times, during these thirteen years, when his stomach was out of
order, he had dreamed that he was again at home in the echoing old
house on the slanting street, and that his father was there again too,
chiding him severely because of his degenerate mode of life,--which
censure he regularly regarded as quite proper. And this present moment
now had nothing to distinguish it from one of those illusory and
unrending dream-fabrics, in which one may ask himself whether this be
hallucination or reality, and of necessity and with deep conviction
declare for the latter, only to wake up after all ... He walked through
the sparsely peopled, draughty streets, lowering his head against the
wind, and moved like a somnambulist in the direction of the hotel, the
best in the city, where he intended to spend the night. A bow-legged
man, carrying a pole surmounted by a flame, walked along before him
with a rocking sailor's gait, lighting the gas-lamps.

How _did_ he feel? What