Look at him as he passes his whip into his left hand,
chafes his numbed right fingers on his granite leg, and beats those
marble toes of his upon the foot-board. Ha, ha, ha! Who would exchange
this rapid hurry of the blood for yonder stagnant misery, though its
pace were twenty miles for one?
Better than the gig! No man in a gig could have such interest in the
milestones. No man in a gig could see, or feel, or think, like merry
users of their legs. How, as the wind sweeps on, upon these breezy
downs, it tracks its flight in darkening ripples on the grass, and
smoothest shadows on the hills! Look round and round upon this bare
bleak plain, and see even here, upon a winter's day, how beautiful
the shadows are! Alas! it is the nature of their kind to be so. The
loveliest things in life, Tom, are but shadows; and they come and go,
and change and fade away, as rapidly as these!
Another mile, and then begins a fall of snow, making the crow, who skims
away so close above the ground to shirk the wind, a blot of ink upon the
landscape. But though it drives and drifts against them as they walk,
stiffening on their skirts, and freezing in the lashes of their eyes,
they wouldn't have it fall more sparingly, no, not so much as by a
single flake, although they had to go a score of miles.
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