Momentarily firm in this respect, and secure in his own geniality from the carping criticisms of conscience, he turned from all tender retrospections, and lazily, as he sat, reviewed a little company of late incidents. From yesterday with its snubs and its petty hurts, to the melancholy and monotonous flight of this morning--even that now had its accents to be indulgently recalled. His thoughts went back along the wintry road he had traversed, and dwelt comically upon the figure of an old oddity he had seen peering down upon him from a leaf-ruined gazebo--an oddity, the personification of much inquisitiveness, that was muffled in many capes and that held a great blue umbrella between its old head and the blast. He remembered how a half-dozen snow-buntings had fled over a hedge-row as he went by; how down a certain swoop of meadow-land a flock of screaming gulls had dived; how, where in a roadside churchyard a sexton was toiling at a grave, the titlarks had bobbed and curtsied on the newly-turned mould, desperate in their freezing hunger;--and from all this he augured that such a winter was threatening as would make the country no desirable place to live in for some months to come. Still, he was not sorry he was returning to it. In his new lust for freedom a veritable loathing for the gilded fetters of town-life was a first condition, and he would have no knowledge of passions that could only take breath in a vitiated atmosphere. If he must sin, he would sin in the woods; and of his wavering human soul “let the forest judge.” It had been a desolate road he came by--black and gloomy with frost, and enlivened by but few passing vehicles. One of these--a post-chaise--there had been, going on monotonously before him at a distance ahead. Its steady progression (he could not tell why) annoyed and worried him. It was always there, a yellow blot in the perspective of highway; whipping down and up the hollows, swinging rhythmically in its straps, endlessly speeding on and holding him, as it were, in its wake. Once or twice he had been moved to cut past and outrun it; but the bitter push of wind in his front and an apathy bred of cold would dissuade him from the effort, and in the end he would always find himself jogging sombrely along in its rear. It was a satisfaction to him, as he came within sight of the inn at which he was to dismount, to see this persistent vehicle, its occupants and cattle refreshed, moving off on its further journey; for so, he comforted himself, he should resume his own way by and by unvexed of that aggravating accompaniment. This was all childish, of course; but so it was that it was always his habit to be impatient of anything that embarrassed his free forward outlook; and to be kept walking behind a pedestrian in the street he would regard as almost a personal affront.