Some friends of his--partial, no doubt--had said
that his style somewhat resembled Junius's; but of course, you
know--well, what he could say was that in the last campaign his
articles were widely sought for. He did not know but he had a copy
of one. Here his hand dived into the breast-pocket of his coat,
with a certain deftness that indicated long habit, and, after
depositing on his lap a bundle of well-worn documents, every one of
which was glaringly suggestive of certificates and signatures, he
concluded he had left it in his trunk.
I breathed more freely. We were sitting in the rotunda of a famous
Washington hotel, and only a few moments before had the speaker, an
utter stranger to me, moved his chair beside mine and opened a
conversation. I noticed that he had that timid, lonely, helpless
air which invests the bucolic traveler who, for the first time,
finds himself among strangers, and his identity lost, in a world so
much larger, so much colder, so much more indifferent to him than
he ever imagined. Indeed, I think that what we often attribute to
the impertinent familiarity of country-men and rustic travelers on
railways or in cities is largely due to their awful loneliness and
nostalgia.
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