ranges on ranges of midnight hills, he heard a confused pastoral sort of sounds—­tramplings, lowings, halloos—­and was suddenly called to by a voice to head off certain cattle, bound to Smithfield, bewildered and unruly in the fog.  Next instant he saw the white face—­white as an orange-blossom—­of a black-bodied steer, in advance of the drove, gleaming ghost-like through the vapors; and presently, forgetting his limp, with rapid shout and gesture, he was more eager, even than the troubled farmers, their owners, in driving the riotous cattle back into Barbican.  Monomaniac reminiscences were in him—­“To the right, to the right!” he shouted, as, arrived at the street corner, the farmers beat the drove to the left, towards Smithfield:  “To the right! you are driving them back to the pastures—­to the right! that way lies the barn-yard!” “Barn-yard?” cried a voice; “you are dreaming, old man.”  And so, Israel, now an old man, was bewitched by the mirage of vapors; he had dreamed himself home into the mists of the Housatonic mountains; ruddy boy on the upland pastures again.  But how different the flat, apathetic, dead, London fog now seemed from those agile mists which, goat-like, climbed the purple peaks, or in routed armies of phantoms, broke down, pell-mell, dispersed in flight upon the plain, leaving the cattle-boy loftily alone, clear-cut as a balloon against the sky.

In 1817 he once more endured extremity; this second peace again drifting its discharged soldiers on London, so that all kinds of labor were overstocked.  Beggars, too, lighted on the walks like locusts.  Timber-toed cripples stilted along, numerous as French peasants in sabots.  And, as thirty years before, on all sides, the exile had heard the supplicatory cry, not addressed to him, “An honorable scar, your honor, received at Bunker Hill, or Saratoga, or Trenton, fighting for his most gracious Majesty, King George!” so now, in presence of the still surviving Israel, our Wandering Jew, the amended cry was anew taken up, by a succeeding generation of unfortunates, “An honorable scar, your honor, received at Corunna, or at Waterloo, or at Trafalgar!” Yet not a few of these petitioners had never been outside of the London smoke; a sort of crafty aristocracy in their way, who, without having endangered their own persons much if anything, reaped no insignificant share both of the glory and profit of the bloody battles they claimed; while some of the genuine working heroes, too brave to beg, too cut-up to work, and too poor to live, laid down quietly in corners and died.  And here it may be noted, as a fact nationally characteristic, that however desperately reduced at times, even to the sewers, Israel, the American, never sunk below the mud, to actual beggary.