Chapter: FROM the inertness, or what we may term the vegetative character, of
his ordinary mood, Clifford would perhaps have been content to spend
one day after another, interminably,--or, at least, throughout the
summer-time,--in just the kind of life described in the preceding
pages.  Fancying, however, that it might be for his benefit
occasionally to diversify the scene, Phoebe sometimes suggested that he
should look out upon the life of the street.  For this purpose, they
used to mount the staircase together, to the second story of the house,
     where, at the termination of a wide entry, there was an arched window,
     of uncommonly large dimensions, shaded by a pair of curtains.  It
     opened above the porch, where there had formerly been a balcony, the
     balustrade of which had long since gone to decay, and been removed.  At
     this arched window, throwing it open, but keeping himself in
     comparative obscurity by means of the curtain, Clifford had an
     opportunity of witnessing such a portion of the great world's movement
     as might be supposed to roll through one of the retired streets of a
     not very populous city.  But he and Phoebe made a sight as well worth
     seeing as any that the city could exhibit.  The pale, gray, childish,
     aged, melancholy, yet often simply cheerful, and sometimes delicately
     intelligent aspect of Clifford, peering from behind the faded crimson
     of the curtain,--watching the monotony of every-day occurrences with a
     kind of inconsequential interest and earnestness, and, at every petty
     throb of his sensibility, turning for sympathy to the eyes of the
     bright young girl!

     If once he were fairly seated at the window, even Pyncheon Street would
     hardly be so dull and lonely but that, somewhere or other along its
     extent, Clifford might discover matter to occupy his eye, and
     titillate, if not engross, his observation.  Things familiar to the
     youngest child that had begun its outlook at existence seemed strange
     to him.  A cab; an omnibus, with its populous interior, dropping here
     and there a passenger, and picking up another, and thus typifying that
     vast rolling vehicle, the world, the end of whose journey is everywhere
     and nowhere; these objects he followed eagerly with his eyes, but
     forgot them before the dust raised by the horses and wheels had settled
     along their track.  As regarded novelties (among which cabs and
             omnibuses were to be reckoned), his mind appeared to have lost its
     proper gripe and retentiveness.  Twice or thrice, for example, during
     the sunny hours of the day, a water-cart went along by the Pyncheon
     House, leaving a broad wake of moistened earth, instead of the white
     dust that had risen at a lady's lightest footfall; it was like a summer
     shower, which the city authorities had caught and tamed, and compelled
     it into the commonest routine of their convenience.  With the
     water-cart Clifford could never grow familiar; it always affected him
     with just the same surprise as at first.  His mind took an apparently
     sharp impression from it, but lost the recollection of this
     perambulatory shower, before its next reappearance, as completely as
     did the street itself, along which the heat so quickly strewed white
     dust again.  It was the same with the railroad.  Clifford could hear
     the obstreperous howl of the steam-devil, and, by leaning a little way
     from the arched window, could catch a glimpse of the trains of cars,
     flashing a brief transit across the extremity of the street.  The idea
     of terrible energy thus forced upon him was new at every recurrence,
     and seemed to affect him as disagreeably, and with almost as much
     surprise, the hundredth time as the first.

     Nothing gives a sadder sense of decay than this loss or suspension of
     the power to deal with unaccustomed things, and to keep up with the
     swiftness of the passing moment.  It can merely be a suspended
     animation; for, were the power actually to perish, there would be
     little use of immortality.  We are less than ghosts, for the time
     being, whenever this calamity befalls us.

     Clifford was indeed the most inveterate of conservatives.  All the
     antique fashions of the street were dear to him; even such as were
     characterized by a rudeness that would naturally have annoyed his
     fastidious senses.  He loved the old rumbling and jolting carts, the
     former track of which he still found in his long-buried remembrance, as
     the observer of to-day finds the wheel-tracks of ancient vehicles in
     Herculaneum.  The butcher's cart, with its snowy canopy, was an
     acceptable object; so was the fish-cart, heralded by its horn; so,
     likewise, was the countryman's cart of vegetables, plodding from door
     to door, with long pauses of the patient horse, while his owner drove a
     trade in turnips, carrots, summer-squashes, string-beans, green peas,
     and new potatoes, with half the housewives of the neighborhood.  The
     baker's cart, with the harsh music of its bells, had a pleasant effect
     on Clifford, because, as few things else did, it jingled the very
     dissonance of yore.  One afternoon a scissor-grinder chanced to set his
     wheel a-going under the Pyncheon Elm, and just in front of the arched
     window.   Children came running with their mothers' scissors, or the
     carving-knife, or the paternal razor, or anything else that lacked an
     edge (except, indeed, poor Clifford's wits), that the grinder might
     apply the article to his magic wheel, and give it back as good as new.
     Round went the busily revolving machinery, kept in motion by the
     scissor-grinder's foot, and wore away the hard steel against the hard
     stone, whence issued an intense and spiteful prolongation of a hiss as
     fierce as those emitted by Satan and his compeers in Pandemonium,
     though squeezed into smaller compass.  It was an ugly, little, venomous
     serpent of a noise, as ever did petty violence to human ears.  But
     Clifford listened with rapturous delight.  The sound, however
     disagreeable, had very brisk life in it, and, together with the circle
     of curious children watching the revolutions of the wheel, appeared to
     give him a more vivid sense of active, bustling, and sunshiny existence
     than he had attained in almost any other way.  Nevertheless, its charm
     lay chiefly in the past; for the scissor-grinder's wheel had hissed in
     his childish ears.

     He sometimes made doleful complaint that there were no stage-coaches
     nowadays.  And he asked in an injured tone what had become of all those
     old square-topped chaises, with wings sticking out on either side, that
     used to be drawn by a plough-horse, and driven by a farmer's wife and
     daughter, peddling whortle-berries and blackberries about the town.
     Their disappearance made him doubt, he said, whether the berries had
     not left off growing in the broad pastures and along the shady country
     lanes.

     But anything that appealed to the sense of beauty, in however humble a
     way, did not require to be recommended by these old associations.  This
     was observable when one of those Italian boys (who are rather a modern
             feature of our streets) came along with his barrel-organ, and stopped
     under the wide and cool shadows of the elm.  With his quick
     professional eye he took note of the two faces watching him from the
     arched window, and, opening his instrument, began to scatter its
     melodies abroad.  He had a monkey on his shoulder, dressed in a
     Highland plaid; and, to complete the sum of splendid attractions
     wherewith he presented himself to the public, there was a company of
     little figures, whose sphere and habitation was in the mahogany case of
     his organ, and whose principle of life was the music which the Italian
     made it his business to grind out.  In all their variety of
     occupation,--the cobbler, the blacksmith, the soldier, the lady with
     her fan, the toper with his bottle, the milk-maid sitting by her
     cow--this fortunate little society might truly be said to enjoy a
     harmonious existence, and to make life literally a dance.  The Italian
     turned a crank; and, behold! every one of these small individuals
     started into the most curious vivacity.  The cobbler wrought upon a
     shoe; the blacksmith hammered his iron, the soldier waved his
     glittering blade; the lady raised a tiny breeze with her fan; the jolly
     toper swigged lustily at his bottle; a scholar opened his book with
     eager thirst for knowledge, and turned his head to and fro along the
     page; the milkmaid energetically drained her cow; and a miser counted
     gold into his strong-box,--all at the same turning of a crank.  Yes;
     and, moved by the self-same impulse, a lover saluted his mistress on
     her lips! Possibly some cynic, at once merry and bitter, had desired to
     signify, in this pantomimic scene, that we mortals, whatever our
     business or amusement,--however serious, however trifling,--all dance
     to one identical tune, and, in spite of our ridiculous activity, bring
     nothing finally to pass.  For the most remarkable aspect of the affair
     was, that, at the cessation of the music, everybody was petrified at
     once, from the most extravagant life into a dead torpor.  Neither was
     the cobbler's shoe finished, nor the blacksmith's iron shaped out; nor
     was there a drop less of brandy in the toper's bottle, nor a drop more
     of milk in the milkmaid's pail, nor one additional coin in the miser's
     strong-box, nor was the scholar a page deeper in his book.  All were
     precisely in the same condition as before they made themselves so
     ridiculous by their haste to toil, to enjoy, to accumulate gold, and to
     become wise.  Saddest of all, moreover, the lover was none the happier
     for the maiden's granted kiss! But, rather than swallow this last too
     acrid ingredient, we reject the whole moral of the show.

     The monkey, meanwhile, with a thick tail curling out into preposterous
     prolixity from beneath his tartans, took his station at the Italian's
     feet.  He turned a wrinkled and abominable little visage to every
     passer-by, and to the circle of children that soon gathered round, and
     to Hepzibah's shop-door, and upward to the arched window, whence Phoebe
     and Clifford were looking down.  Every moment, also, he took off his
     Highland bonnet, and performed a bow and scrape.  Sometimes, moreover,
     he made personal application to individuals, holding out his small
     black palm, and otherwise plainly signifying his excessive desire for
     whatever filthy lucre might happen to be in anybody's pocket.  The mean
     and low, yet strangely man-like expression of his wilted countenance;
     the prying and crafty glance, that showed him ready to gripe at every
     miserable advantage; his enormous tail (too enormous to be decently
             concealed under his gabardine), and the deviltry of nature which it
     betokened,--take this monkey just as he was, in short, and you could
     desire no better image of the Mammon of copper coin, symbolizing the
     grossest form of the love of money.  Neither was there any possibility
     of satisfying the covetous little devil.  Phoebe threw down a whole
     handful of cents, which he picked up with joyless eagerness, handed
     them over to the Italian for safekeeping, and immediately recommenced a
     series of pantomimic petitions for more.

     Doubtless, more than one New-Englander--or, let him be of what country
     he might, it is as likely to be the case--passed by, and threw a look
     at the monkey, and went on, without imagining how nearly his own moral
     condition was here exemplified.  Clifford, however, was a being of
     another order.  He had taken childish delight in the music, and smiled,
     too, at the figures which it set in motion.  But, after looking awhile
     at the long-tailed imp, he was so shocked by his horrible ugliness,
     spiritual as well as physical, that he actually began to shed tears; a
     weakness which men of merely delicate endowments, and destitute of the
     fiercer, deeper, and more tragic power of laughter, can hardly avoid,
     when the worst and meanest aspect of life happens to be presented to
     them.

     Pyncheon Street was sometimes enlivened by spectacles of more imposing
     pretensions than the above, and which brought the multitude along with
     them.  With a shivering repugnance at the idea of personal contact with
     the world, a powerful impulse still seized on Clifford, whenever the
     rush and roar of the human tide grew strongly audible to him.  This was
     made evident, one day, when a political procession, with hundreds of
     flaunting banners, and drums, fifes, clarions, and cymbals,
     reverberating between the rows of buildings, marched all through town,
     and trailed its length of trampling footsteps, and most infrequent
     uproar, past the ordinarily quiet House of the Seven Gables.  As a mere
     object of sight, nothing is more deficient in picturesque features than
     a procession seen in its passage through narrow streets.  The spectator
     feels it to be fool's play, when he can distinguish the tedious
     commonplace of each man's visage, with the perspiration and weary
     self-importance on it, and the very cut of his pantaloons, and the
     stiffness or laxity of his shirt-collar, and the dust on the back of
     his black coat.  In order to become majestic, it should be viewed from
     some vantage point, as it rolls its slow and long array through the
     centre of a wide plain, or the stateliest public square of a city; for
     then, by its remoteness, it melts all the petty personalities, of which
     it is made up, into one broad mass of existence,--one great life,--one
     collected body of mankind, with a vast, homogeneous spirit animating
     it.  But, on the other hand, if an impressible person, standing alone
     over the brink of one of these processions, should behold it, not in
     its atoms, but in its aggregate,--as a mighty river of life, massive in
     its tide, and black with mystery, and, out of its depths, calling to
     the kindred depth within him,--then the contiguity would add to the
     effect.  It might so fascinate him that he would hardly be restrained
     from plunging into the surging stream of human sympathies.

     So it proved with Clifford.  He shuddered; he grew pale; he threw an
     appealing look at Hepzibah and Phoebe, who were with him at the window.
     They comprehended nothing of his emotions, and supposed him merely
     disturbed by the unaccustomed tumult.  At last, with tremulous limbs,
     he started up, set his foot on the window-sill, and in an instant more
     would have been in the unguarded balcony.  As it was, the whole
     procession might have seen him, a wild, haggard figure, his gray locks
     floating in the wind that waved their banners; a lonely being,
     estranged from his race, but now feeling himself man again, by virtue
     of the irrepressible instinct that possessed him.  Had Clifford
     attained the balcony, he would probably have leaped into the street;
     but whether impelled by the species of terror that sometimes urges its
     victim over the very precipice which he shrinks from, or by a natural
     magnetism, tending towards the great centre of humanity, it were not
     easy to decide.  Both impulses might have wrought on him at once.

     But his companions, affrighted by his gesture,--which was that of a man
     hurried away in spite of himself,--seized Clifford's garment and held
     him back.  Hepzibah shrieked.  Phoebe, to whom all extravagance was a
     horror, burst into sobs and tears.

     "Clifford, Clifford! are you crazy?" cried his sister.

     "I hardly know, Hepzibah," said Clifford, drawing a long breath.  "Fear
     nothing,--it is over now,--but had I taken that plunge, and survived
     it, methinks it would have made me another man!"

     Possibly, in some sense, Clifford may have been right.  He needed a
     shock; or perhaps he required to take a deep, deep plunge into the
     ocean of human life, and to sink down and be covered by its
     profoundness, and then to emerge, sobered, invigorated, restored to the
     world and to himself.  Perhaps again, he required nothing less than the
     great final remedy--death!

     A similar yearning to renew the broken links of brotherhood with his
     kind sometimes showed itself in a milder form; and once it was made
     beautiful by the religion that lay even deeper than itself.  In the
     incident now to be sketched, there was a touching recognition, on
     Clifford's part, of God's care and love towards him,--towards this
     poor, forsaken man, who, if any mortal could, might have been pardoned
     for regarding himself as thrown aside, forgotten, and left to be the
     sport of some fiend, whose playfulness was an ecstasy of mischief.

     It was the Sabbath morning; one of those bright, calm Sabbaths, with
     its own hallowed atmosphere, when Heaven seems to diffuse itself over
     the earth's face in a solemn smile, no less sweet than solemn.  On such
     a Sabbath morn, were we pure enough to be its medium, we should be
     conscious of the earth's natural worship ascending through our frames,
     on whatever spot of ground we stood.  The church-bells, with various
     tones, but all in harmony, were calling out and responding to one
     another,--"It is the Sabbath!--The Sabbath!--Yea; the Sabbath!"--and
     over the whole city the bells scattered the blessed sounds, now slowly,
     now with livelier joy, now one bell alone, now all the bells together,
     crying earnestly,--"It is the Sabbath!"--and flinging their accents
     afar off, to melt into the air and pervade it with the holy word.  The
     air with God's sweetest and tenderest sunshine in it, was meet for
     mankind to breathe into their hearts, and send it forth again as the
     utterance of prayer.

     Clifford sat at the window with Hepzibah, watching the neighbors as
     they stepped into the street.  All of them, however unspiritual on
     other days, were transfigured by the Sabbath influence; so that their
     very garments--whether it were an old man's decent coat well brushed
     for the thousandth time, or a little boy's first sack and trousers
     finished yesterday by his mother's needle--had somewhat of the quality
     of ascension-robes.  Forth, likewise, from the portal of the old house
     stepped Phoebe, putting up her small green sunshade, and throwing
     upward a glance and smile of parting kindness to the faces at the
     arched window.  In her aspect there was a familiar gladness, and a
     holiness that you could play with, and yet reverence it as much as
     ever.  She was like a prayer, offered up in the homeliest beauty of
     one's mother-tongue.  Fresh was Phoebe, moreover, and airy and sweet in
     her apparel; as if nothing that she wore--neither her gown, nor her
     small straw bonnet, nor her little kerchief, any more than her snowy
     stockings--had ever been put on before; or, if worn, were all the
     fresher for it, and with a fragrance as if they had lain among the
     rosebuds.

     The girl waved her hand to Hepzibah and Clifford, and went up the
     street; a religion in herself, warm, simple, true, with a substance
     that could walk on earth, and a spirit that was capable of heaven.

     "Hepzibah," asked Clifford, after watching Phoebe to the corner, "do
     you never go to church?"

     "No, Clifford!" she replied,--"not these many, many years!"

     "Were I to be there," he rejoined, "it seems to me that I could pray
     once more, when so many human souls were praying all around me!"

     She looked into Clifford's face, and beheld there a soft natural
     effusion; for his heart gushed out, as it were, and ran over at his
     eyes, in delightful reverence for God, and kindly affection for his
     human brethren.  The emotion communicated itself to Hepzibah.  She
     yearned to take him by the hand, and go and kneel down, they two
     together,--both so long separate from the world, and, as she now
     recognized, scarcely friends with Him above,--to kneel down among the
     people, and be reconciled to God and man at once.

     "Dear brother," said she earnestly, "let us go! We belong nowhere.  We
     have not a foot of space in any church to kneel upon; but let us go to
     some place of worship, even if we stand in the broad aisle.  Poor and
     forsaken as we are, some pew-door will be opened to us!"

     So Hepzibah and her brother made themselves, ready--as ready as they
     could in the best of their old-fashioned garments, which had hung on
     pegs, or been laid away in trunks, so long that the dampness and mouldy
     smell of the past was on them,--made themselves ready, in their faded
     bettermost, to go to church.  They descended the staircase
     together,--gaunt, sallow Hepzibah, and pale, emaciated, age-stricken
     Clifford! They pulled open the front door, and stepped across the
     threshold, and felt, both of them, as if they were standing in the
     presence of the whole world, and with mankind's great and terrible eye
     on them alone.  The eye of their Father seemed to be withdrawn, and
     gave them no encouragement.  The warm sunny air of the street made them
     shiver.   Their hearts quaked within them at the idea of taking one
     step farther.

     "It cannot be, Hepzibah!--it is too late," said Clifford with deep
     sadness.  "We are ghosts! We have no right among human beings,--no
     right anywhere but in this old house, which has a curse on it, and
     which, therefore, we are doomed to haunt! And, besides," he continued,
     with a fastidious sensibility, inalienably characteristic of the man,
     "it would not be fit nor beautiful to go! It is an ugly thought that I
     should be frightful to my fellow-beings, and that children would cling
     to their mothers' gowns at sight of me!"

     They shrank back into the dusky passage-way, and closed the door.  But,
     going up the staircase again, they found the whole interior of the
     house tenfold more dismal, and the air closer and heavier, for the
     glimpse and breath of freedom which they had just snatched.  They could
     not flee; their jailer had but left the door ajar in mockery, and stood
     behind it to watch them stealing out.  At the threshold, they felt his
     pitiless gripe upon them.  For, what other dungeon is so dark as one's
     own heart! What jailer so inexorable as one's self!

     But it would be no fair picture of Clifford's state of mind were we to
     represent him as continually or prevailingly wretched.  On the
     contrary, there was no other man in the city, we are bold to affirm, of
     so much as half his years, who enjoyed so many lightsome and griefless
     moments as himself.  He had no burden of care upon him; there were none
     of those questions and contingencies with the future to be settled
     which wear away all other lives, and render them not worth having by
     the very process of providing for their support.  In this respect he
     was a child,--a child for the whole term of his existence, be it long
     or short.  Indeed, his life seemed to be standing still at a period
     little in advance of childhood, and to cluster all his reminiscences
     about that epoch; just as, after the torpor of a heavy blow, the
     sufferer's reviving consciousness goes back to a moment considerably
     behind the accident that stupefied him.  He sometimes told Phoebe and
     Hepzibah his dreams, in which he invariably played the part of a child,
     or a very young man.  So vivid were they, in his relation of them, that
     he once held a dispute with his sister as to the particular figure or
     print of a chintz morning-dress which he had seen their mother wear, in
     the dream of the preceding night.  Hepzibah, piquing herself on a
     woman's accuracy in such matters, held it to be slightly different from
     what Clifford described; but, producing the very gown from an old
     trunk, it proved to be identical with his remembrance of it.  Had
     Clifford, every time that he emerged out of dreams so lifelike,
     undergone the torture of transformation from a boy into an old and
     broken man, the daily recurrence of the shock would have been too much
     to bear.  It would have caused an acute agony to thrill from the
     morning twilight, all the day through, until bedtime; and even then
     would have mingled a dull, inscrutable pain and pallid hue of
     misfortune with the visionary bloom and adolescence of his slumber.
     But the nightly moonshine interwove itself with the morning mist, and
     enveloped him as in a robe, which he hugged about his person, and
     seldom let realities pierce through; he was not often quite awake, but
     slept open-eyed, and perhaps fancied himself most dreaming then.

     Thus, lingering always so near his childhood, he had sympathies with
     children, and kept his heart the fresher thereby, like a reservoir into
     which rivulets were pouring not far from the fountain-head.  Though
     prevented, by a subtile sense of propriety, from desiring to associate
     with them, he loved few things better than to look out of the arched
     window and see a little girl driving her hoop along the sidewalk, or
     schoolboys at a game of ball.  Their voices, also, were very pleasant
     to him, heard at a distance, all swarming and intermingling together as
     flies do in a sunny room.

     Clifford would, doubtless, have been glad to share their sports.  One
     afternoon he was seized with an irresistible desire to blow
     soap-bubbles; an amusement, as Hepzibah told Phoebe apart, that had
     been a favorite one with her brother when they were both children.
     Behold him, therefore, at the arched window, with an earthen pipe in
     his mouth! Behold him, with his gray hair, and a wan, unreal smile over
     his countenance, where still hovered a beautiful grace, which his worst
     enemy must have acknowledged to be spiritual and immortal, since it had
     survived so long!  Behold him, scattering airy spheres abroad from the
     window into the street! Little impalpable worlds were those
     soap-bubbles, with the big world depicted, in hues bright as
     imagination, on the nothing of their surface.  It was curious to see
     how the passers-by regarded these brilliant fantasies, as they came
     floating down, and made the dull atmosphere imaginative about them.
     Some stopped to gaze, and perhaps, carried a pleasant recollection of
     the bubbles onward as far as the street-corner; some looked angrily
     upward, as if poor Clifford wronged them by setting an image of beauty
     afloat so near their dusty pathway.  A great many put out their fingers
     or their walking-sticks to touch, withal; and were perversely
     gratified, no doubt, when the bubble, with all its pictured earth and
     sky scene, vanished as if it had never been.

     At length, just as an elderly gentleman of very dignified presence
     happened to be passing, a large bubble sailed majestically down, and
     burst right against his nose! He looked up,--at first with a stern,
     keen glance, which penetrated at once into the obscurity behind the
     arched window,--then with a smile which might be conceived as diffusing
     a dog-day sultriness for the space of several yards about him.

     "Aha, Cousin Clifford!" cried Judge Pyncheon.  "What! Still blowing
     soap-bubbles!"

     The tone seemed as if meant to be kind and soothing, but yet had a
     bitterness of sarcasm in it.  As for Clifford, an absolute palsy of
     fear came over him.  Apart from any definite cause of dread which his
     past experience might have given him, he felt that native and original
     horror of the excellent Judge which is proper to a weak, delicate, and
     apprehensive character in the presence of massive strength.  Strength
     is incomprehensible by weakness, and, therefore, the more terrible.
     There is no greater bugbear than a strong-willed relative in the circle
     of his own connections.

 The Arched Window: Clifford seemed content to spend one day after another interminably in the way previously described, but Phoebe often would suggest that he should look to life outside of the house. Clifford was the most inveterate of conservatives. All antique fashions were dear to him. One afternoon a scissor-grinder stops by Pyncheon Street in front of the arched window. Children come running with their mothers' scissors for sharpening. The disagreeable sound annoys everyone but Clifford, who listens with rapturous delight, for the sound had a brisk life and was a reminder of the past. Clifford would lament that there were no stagecoaches nowadays. Only those things that Clifford found beautiful did not need the association of the past. Often Italian boys with barrel-organs would be on Pyncheon Street. They would grind the organs and out would pop little figures, such as a scholar with his book, a miser with his gold, and two lovers kissing. The lovers' kiss was the saddest of these when it ended. Clifford became sad when the organ-grinder would stop, and others could not comprehend his emotions. He went into a tumult, and Hepzibah and Phoebe thought that he went mad. Clifford needed a shock to return to human life; perhaps he even required the great final remedy of death. Clifford mentions to Hepzibah that he could pray again if he went to church, if only because he would have others around him praying. They prepare to go to church, but Clifford relents. He claims that they are ghosts who have no right among human beings, doomed to haunt their house. However, this is not a fair picture of his existence, for Clifford spent most of his time with a childlike lack of grief. One afternoon Clifford was blowing soap bubbles when Judge Pyncheon passes by the house. He makes a sarcastic comment about Clifford still blowing soap bubbles. A palsy of fear overcomes Clifford, as he felt the original horror of the judge proper to a weak character in the presence of such strength.

