But I was
impatient to get on (as men will be who cannot see their arm's-length
into the future), and at midnight I started again for Washington.
My recollections of that journey are the reverse of roseate. The
atmosphere of the cars--windows hermetic, and stoves red-hot--made one
look back regretfully on the milder _inferno_ of the passage-boat; the
acrid apple-odor was more pungently nauseating; and the abomination of
expectoration less carefully dissembled. Besides this, I was afflicted
by another nuisance, purely private and personal.
Whether there be any such thing as love at first sight or no, is a
question--grave or gay, as you choose to discuss it--but, that
instinctive antipathies exist, is most certain. I was the victim of one
of such that night. Waiting for change in the ticket-office, my eye
lighted on a dark man, of African appearance, standing unpleasantly
near, and for a second or two I could not get rid of a horrible
fascination, compelling me to stare. I say "dark man" advisedly, for it
would have been hard to guess at his original color, unless his cast of
feature had not given a line. Now, I have seen Irish squatters in their
cabins, London outcasts in their penny lodgings, and beggars of Southern
Europe in their nameless dens; but the conviction flashed upon me (and
it has never since passed away), that I was then gazing on a dirtier
specimen of healthy humanity than I had ever yet foregathered with.
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