Chapter: SUMMER as it was, the east wind set poor Hepzibah's few remaining teeth
chattering in her head, as she and Clifford faced it, on their way up
Pyncheon Street, and towards the centre of the town.  Not merely was it
the shiver which this pitiless blast brought to her frame (although her
        feet and hands, especially, had never seemed so death-a-cold as now),
    but there was a moral sensation, mingling itself with the physical
    chill, and causing her to shake more in spirit than in body.  The
    world's broad, bleak atmosphere was all so comfortless! Such, indeed,
    is the impression which it makes on every new adventurer, even if he
    plunge into it while the warmest tide of life is bubbling through his
    veins.  What, then, must it have been to Hepzibah and Clifford,--so
    time-stricken as they were, yet so like children in their
    inexperience,--as they left the doorstep, and passed from beneath the
    wide shelter of the Pyncheon Elm! They were wandering all abroad, on
    precisely such a pilgrimage as a child often meditates, to the world's
    end, with perhaps a sixpence and a biscuit in his pocket.  In
    Hepzibah's mind, there was the wretched consciousness of being adrift.
    She had lost the faculty of self-guidance; but, in view of the
    difficulties around her, felt it hardly worth an effort to regain it,
    and was, moreover, incapable of making one.

    As they proceeded on their strange expedition, she now and then cast a
    look sidelong at Clifford, and could not but observe that he was
    possessed and swayed by a powerful excitement.  It was this, indeed,
    that gave him the control which he had at once, and so irresistibly,
    established over his movements.  It not a little resembled the
    exhilaration of wine.  Or, it might more fancifully be compared to a
    joyous piece of music, played with wild vivacity, but upon a disordered
    instrument.  As the cracked jarring note might always be heard, and as
    it jarred loudest amidst the loftiest exultation of the melody, so was
    there a continual quake through Clifford, causing him most to quiver
    while he wore a triumphant smile, and seemed almost under a necessity
    to skip in his gait.

    They met few people abroad, even on passing from the retired
    neighborhood of the House of the Seven Gables into what was ordinarily
    the more thronged and busier portion of the town.  Glistening
    sidewalks, with little pools of rain, here and there, along their
    unequal surface; umbrellas displayed ostentatiously in the
    shop-windows, as if the life of trade had concentrated itself in that
    one article; wet leaves of the horse-chestnut or elm-trees, torn off
    untimely by the blast and scattered along the public way; an unsightly,
    accumulation of mud in the middle of the street, which perversely grew
    the more unclean for its long and laborious washing,--these were the
    more definable points of a very sombre picture.  In the way of movement
    and human life, there was the hasty rattle of a cab or coach, its
    driver protected by a waterproof cap over his head and shoulders; the
    forlorn figure of an old man, who seemed to have crept out of some
    subterranean sewer, and was stooping along the kennel, and poking the
    wet rubbish with a stick, in quest of rusty nails; a merchant or two,
    at the door of the post-office, together with an editor and a
    miscellaneous politician, awaiting a dilatory mail; a few visages of
    retired sea-captains at the window of an insurance office, looking out
    vacantly at the vacant street, blaspheming at the weather, and fretting
    at the dearth as well of public news as local gossip.  What a
    treasure-trove to these venerable quidnuncs, could they have guessed
    the secret which Hepzibah and Clifford were carrying along with them!
    But their two figures attracted hardly so much notice as that of a
    young girl, who passed at the same instant, and happened to raise her
    skirt a trifle too high above her ankles.  Had it been a sunny and
    cheerful day, they could hardly have gone through the streets without
    making themselves obnoxious to remark.  Now, probably, they were felt
    to be in keeping with the dismal and bitter weather, and therefore did
    not stand out in strong relief, as if the sun were shining on them, but
    melted into the gray gloom and were forgotten as soon as gone.

    Poor Hepzibah! Could she have understood this fact, it would have
    brought her some little comfort; for, to all her other
    troubles,--strange to say!--there was added the womanish and
    old-maiden-like misery arising from a sense of unseemliness in her
    attire.  Thus, she was fain to shrink deeper into herself, as it were,
    as if in the hope of making people suppose that here was only a cloak
    and hood, threadbare and woefully faded, taking an airing in the midst
    of the storm, without any wearer!

    As they went on, the feeling of indistinctness and unreality kept dimly
    hovering round about her, and so diffusing itself into her system that
    one of her hands was hardly palpable to the touch of the other.  Any
    certainty would have been preferable to this.  She whispered to
    herself, again and again, "Am I awake?--Am I awake?" and sometimes
    exposed her face to the chill spatter of the wind, for the sake of its
    rude assurance that she was.  Whether it was Clifford's purpose, or
    only chance, had led them thither, they now found themselves passing
    beneath the arched entrance of a large structure of gray stone.
    Within, there was a spacious breadth, and an airy height from floor to
    roof, now partially filled with smoke and steam, which eddied
    voluminously upward and formed a mimic cloud-region over their heads.
    A train of cars was just ready for a start; the locomotive was fretting
    and fuming, like a steed impatient for a headlong rush; and the bell
    rang out its hasty peal, so well expressing the brief summons which
    life vouchsafes to us in its hurried career.  Without question or
    delay,--with the irresistible decision, if not rather to be called
    recklessness, which had so strangely taken possession of him, and
    through him of Hepzibah,--Clifford impelled her towards the cars, and
    assisted her to enter.  The signal was given; the engine puffed forth
    its short, quick breaths; the train began its movement; and, along with
    a hundred other passengers, these two unwonted travellers sped onward
    like the wind.

    At last, therefore, and after so long estrangement from everything that
    the world acted or enjoyed, they had been drawn into the great current
    of human life, and were swept away with it, as by the suction of fate
    itself.

    Still haunted with the idea that not one of the past incidents,
    inclusive of Judge Pyncheon's visit, could be real, the recluse of the
    Seven Gables murmured in her brother's ear,--

    "Clifford! Clifford! Is not this a dream?"

    "A dream, Hepzibah!" repeated he, almost laughing in her face.  "On the
    contrary, I have never been awake before!"

    Meanwhile, looking from the window, they could see the world racing
    past them.  At one moment, they were rattling through a solitude; the
    next, a village had grown up around them; a few breaths more, and it
    had vanished, as if swallowed by an earthquake.  The spires of
    meeting-houses seemed set adrift from their foundations; the
    broad-based hills glided away.  Everything was unfixed from its
    age-long rest, and moving at whirlwind speed in a direction opposite to
    their own.

    Within the car there was the usual interior life of the railroad,
    offering little to the observation of other passengers, but full of
    novelty for this pair of strangely enfranchised prisoners.  It was
    novelty enough, indeed, that there were fifty human beings in close
    relation with them, under one long and narrow roof, and drawn onward by
    the same mighty influence that had taken their two selves into its
    grasp.  It seemed marvellous how all these people could remain so
    quietly in their seats, while so much noisy strength was at work in
    their behalf.  Some, with tickets in their hats (long travellers these,
            before whom lay a hundred miles of railroad), had plunged into the
    English scenery and adventures of pamphlet novels, and were keeping
    company with dukes and earls.  Others, whose briefer span forbade their
    devoting themselves to studies so abstruse, beguiled the little tedium
    of the way with penny-papers.  A party of girls, and one young man, on
    opposite sides of the car, found huge amusement in a game of ball.
    They tossed it to and fro, with peals of laughter that might be
    measured by mile-lengths; for, faster than the nimble ball could fly,
    the merry players fled unconsciously along, leaving the trail of their
    mirth afar behind, and ending their game under another sky than had
    witnessed its commencement.  Boys, with apples, cakes, candy, and rolls
    of variously tinctured lozenges,--merchandise that reminded Hepzibah of
    her deserted shop,--appeared at each momentary stopping-place, doing up
    their business in a hurry, or breaking it short off, lest the market
    should ravish them away with it.  New people continually entered.  Old
    acquaintances--for such they soon grew to be, in this rapid current of
    affairs--continually departed.  Here and there, amid the rumble and the
    tumult, sat one asleep.  Sleep; sport; business; graver or lighter
    study; and the common and inevitable movement onward! It was life
    itself!

    Clifford's naturally poignant sympathies were all aroused.  He caught
    the color of what was passing about him, and threw it back more vividly
    than he received it, but mixed, nevertheless, with a lurid and
    portentous hue.  Hepzibah, on the other hand, felt herself more apart
    from human kind than even in the seclusion which she had just quitted.

    "You are not happy, Hepzibah!" said Clifford apart, in a tone of
    approach.  "You are thinking of that dismal old house, and of Cousin
    Jaffrey"--here came the quake through him,--"and of Cousin Jaffrey
    sitting there, all by himself! Take my advice,--follow my example,--and
    let such things slip aside.  Here we are, in the world, Hepzibah!--in
    the midst of life!--in the throng of our fellow beings! Let you and I
    be happy! As happy as that youth and those pretty girls, at their game
    of ball!"

    "Happy--" thought Hepzibah, bitterly conscious, at the word, of her
    dull and heavy heart, with the frozen pain in it,--"happy.  He is mad
    already; and, if I could once feel myself broad awake, I should go mad
    too!"

    If a fixed idea be madness, she was perhaps not remote from it.  Fast
    and far as they had rattled and clattered along the iron track, they
    might just as well, as regarded Hepzibah's mental images, have been
    passing up and down Pyncheon Street.  With miles and miles of varied
    scenery between, there was no scene for her save the seven old
    gable-peaks, with their moss, and the tuft of weeds in one of the
    angles, and the shop-window, and a customer shaking the door, and
    compelling the little bell to jingle fiercely, but without disturbing
    Judge Pyncheon! This one old house was everywhere! It transported its
    great, lumbering bulk with more than railroad speed, and set itself
    phlegmatically down on whatever spot she glanced at.  The quality of
    Hepzibah's mind was too unmalleable to take new impressions so readily
    as Clifford's.  He had a winged nature; she was rather of the vegetable
    kind, and could hardly be kept long alive, if drawn up by the roots.
    Thus it happened that the relation heretofore existing between her
    brother and herself was changed.  At home, she was his guardian; here,
    Clifford had become hers, and seemed to comprehend whatever belonged to
    their new position with a singular rapidity of intelligence.  He had
    been startled into manhood and intellectual vigor; or, at least, into a
    condition that resembled them, though it might be both diseased and
    transitory.

    The conductor now applied for their tickets; and Clifford, who had made
    himself the purse-bearer, put a bank-note into his hand, as he had
    observed others do.

    "For the lady and yourself?" asked the conductor.  "And how far?"

    "As far as that will carry us," said Clifford.  "It is no great matter.
    We are riding for pleasure merely."

    "You choose a strange day for it, sir!" remarked a gimlet-eyed old
    gentleman on the other side of the car, looking at Clifford and his
    companion, as if curious to make them out.  "The best chance of
    pleasure, in an easterly rain, I take it, is in a man's own house, with
    a nice little fire in the chimney."

    "I cannot precisely agree with you," said Clifford, courteously bowing
    to the old gentleman, and at once taking up the clew of conversation
    which the latter had proffered.  "It had just occurred to me, on the
    contrary, that this admirable invention of the railroad--with the vast
    and inevitable improvements to be looked for, both as to speed and
    convenience--is destined to do away with those stale ideas of home and
    fireside, and substitute something better."

    "In the name of common-sense," asked the old gentleman rather testily,
    "what can be better for a man than his own parlor and chimney-corner?"

    "These things have not the merit which many good people attribute to
    them," replied Clifford.  "They may be said, in few and pithy words, to
    have ill served a poor purpose.  My impression is, that our wonderfully
    increased and still increasing facilities of locomotion are destined to
    bring us around again to the nomadic state.  You are aware, my dear
    sir,--you must have observed it in your own experience,--that all human
    progress is in a circle; or, to use a more accurate and beautiful
    figure, in an ascending spiral curve.  While we fancy ourselves going
    straight forward, and attaining, at every step, an entirely new
    position of affairs, we do actually return to something long ago tried
    and abandoned, but which we now find etherealized, refined, and
    perfected to its ideal.  The past is but a coarse and sensual prophecy
    of the present and the future.  To apply this truth to the topic now
    under discussion.  In the early epochs of our race, men dwelt in
    temporary huts, of bowers of branches, as easily constructed as a
    bird's-nest, and which they built,--if it should be called building,
    when such sweet homes of a summer solstice rather grew than were made
    with hands,--which Nature, we will say, assisted them to rear where
    fruit abounded, where fish and game were plentiful, or, most
    especially, where the sense of beauty was to be gratified by a lovelier
    shade than elsewhere, and a more exquisite arrangement of lake, wood,
    and hill.  This life possessed a charm which, ever since man quitted
    it, has vanished from existence.  And it typified something better than
    itself.  It had its drawbacks; such as hunger and thirst, inclement
    weather, hot sunshine, and weary and foot-blistering marches over
    barren and ugly tracts, that lay between the sites desirable for their
    fertility and beauty.  But in our ascending spiral, we escape all this.
    These railroads--could but the whistle be made musical, and the rumble
    and the jar got rid of--are positively the greatest blessing that the
    ages have wrought out for us.  They give us wings; they annihilate the
    toil and dust of pilgrimage; they spiritualize travel! Transition being
    so facile, what can be any man's inducement to tarry in one spot? Why,
    therefore, should he build a more cumbrous habitation than can readily
    be carried off with him? Why should he make himself a prisoner for life
    in brick, and stone, and old worm-eaten timber, when he may just as
    easily dwell, in one sense, nowhere,--in a better sense, wherever the
    fit and beautiful shall offer him a home?"

    Clifford's countenance glowed, as he divulged this theory; a youthful
    character shone out from within, converting the wrinkles and pallid
    duskiness of age into an almost transparent mask.  The merry girls let
    their ball drop upon the floor, and gazed at him.  They said to
    themselves, perhaps, that, before his hair was gray and the crow's-feet
    tracked his temples, this now decaying man must have stamped the
    impress of his features on many a woman's heart.  But, alas! no woman's
    eye had seen his face while it was beautiful.

    "I should scarcely call it an improved state of things," observed
    Clifford's new acquaintance, "to live everywhere and nowhere!"

    "Would you not?" exclaimed Clifford, with singular energy.  "It is as
    clear to me as sunshine,--were there any in the sky,--that the greatest
    possible stumbling-blocks in the path of human happiness and
    improvement are these heaps of bricks and stones, consolidated with
    mortar, or hewn timber, fastened together with spike-nails, which men
    painfully contrive for their own torment, and call them house and home!
    The soul needs air; a wide sweep and frequent change of it.  Morbid
    influences, in a thousand-fold variety, gather about hearths, and
    pollute the life of households.  There is no such unwholesome
    atmosphere as that of an old home, rendered poisonous by one's defunct
    forefathers and relatives.  I speak of what I know.  There is a certain
    house within my familiar recollection,--one of those peaked-gable
    (there are seven of them), projecting-storied edifices, such as you
    occasionally see in our older towns,--a rusty, crazy, creaky,
    dry-rotted, dingy, dark, and miserable old dungeon, with an arched
    window over the porch, and a little shop-door on one side, and a great,
    melancholy elm before it!  Now, sir, whenever my thoughts recur to this
    seven-gabled mansion (the fact is so very curious that I must needs
            mention it), immediately I have a vision or image of an elderly man, of
    remarkably stern countenance, sitting in an oaken elbow-chair, dead,
    stone-dead, with an ugly flow of blood upon his shirt-bosom! Dead, but
    with open eyes! He taints the whole house, as I remember it.  I could
    never flourish there, nor be happy, nor do nor enjoy what God meant me
    to do and enjoy."

    His face darkened, and seemed to contract, and shrivel itself up, and
    wither into age.

    "Never, sir!" he repeated.  "I could never draw cheerful breath there!"

    "I should think not," said the old gentleman, eyeing Clifford
    earnestly, and rather apprehensively.  "I should conceive not, sir,
    with that notion in your head!"

    "Surely not," continued Clifford; "and it were a relief to me if that
    house could be torn down, or burnt up, and so the earth be rid of it,
    and grass be sown abundantly over its foundation.  Not that I should
    ever visit its site again! for, sir, the farther I get away from it,
    the more does the joy, the lightsome freshness, the heart-leap, the
    intellectual dance, the youth, in short,--yes, my youth, my youth!--the
    more does it come back to me.  No longer ago than this morning, I was
    old.  I remember looking in the glass, and wondering at my own gray
    hair, and the wrinkles, many and deep, right across my brow, and the
    furrows down my cheeks, and the prodigious trampling of crow's-feet
    about my temples! It was too soon! I could not bear it! Age had no
    right to come! I had not lived!  But now do I look old? If so, my
    aspect belies me strangely; for--a great weight being off my mind--I
    feel in the very heyday of my youth, with the world and my best days
    before me!"

    "I trust you may find it so," said the old gentleman, who seemed rather
    embarrassed, and desirous of avoiding the observation which Clifford's
    wild talk drew on them both.  "You have my best wishes for it."

    "For Heaven's sake, dear Clifford, be quiet!" whispered his sister.
    "They think you mad."

    "Be quiet yourself, Hepzibah!" returned her brother.  "No matter what
    they think! I am not mad.  For the first time in thirty years my
    thoughts gush up and find words ready for them.  I must talk, and I
    will!"

    He turned again towards the old gentleman, and renewed the conversation.

    "Yes, my dear sir," said he, "it is my firm belief and hope that these
    terms of roof and hearth-stone, which have so long been held to embody
    something sacred, are soon to pass out of men's daily use, and be
    forgotten.  Just imagine, for a moment, how much of human evil will
    crumble away, with this one change! What we call real estate--the solid
    ground to build a house on--is the broad foundation on which nearly all
    the guilt of this world rests.  A man will commit almost any wrong,--he
    will heap up an immense pile of wickedness, as hard as granite, and
    which will weigh as heavily upon his soul, to eternal ages,--only to
    build a great, gloomy, dark-chambered mansion, for himself to die in,
    and for his posterity to be miserable in.  He lays his own dead corpse
    beneath the underpinning, as one may say, and hangs his frowning
    picture on the wall, and, after thus converting himself into an evil
    destiny, expects his remotest great-grandchildren to be happy there.  I
    do not speak wildly.  I have just such a house in my mind's eye!"

    "Then, sir," said the old gentleman, getting anxious to drop the
    subject, "you are not to blame for leaving it."

    "Within the lifetime of the child already born," Clifford went on, "all
    this will be done away.  The world is growing too ethereal and
    spiritual to bear these enormities a great while longer.  To me,
    though, for a considerable period of time, I have lived chiefly in
    retirement, and know less of such things than most men,--even to me,
    the harbingers of a better era are unmistakable.  Mesmerism, now! Will
    that effect nothing, think you, towards purging away the grossness out
    of human life?"

    "All a humbug!" growled the old gentleman.

    "These rapping spirits, that little Phoebe told us of, the other day,"
    said Clifford,--"what are these but the messengers of the spiritual
    world, knocking at the door of substance? And it shall be flung wide
    open!"

    "A humbug, again!" cried the old gentleman, growing more and more testy
    at these glimpses of Clifford's metaphysics.  "I should like to rap
    with a good stick on the empty pates of the dolts who circulate such
    nonsense!"

    "Then there is electricity,--the demon, the angel, the mighty physical
    power, the all-pervading intelligence!" exclaimed Clifford.  "Is that a
    humbug, too?  Is it a fact--or have I dreamt it--that, by means of
    electricity, the world of matter has become a great nerve, vibrating
    thousands of miles in a breathless point of time? Rather, the round
    globe is a vast head, a brain, instinct with intelligence!  Or, shall
    we say, it is itself a thought, nothing but thought, and no longer the
    substance which we deemed it!"

    "If you mean the telegraph," said the old gentleman, glancing his eye
    toward its wire, alongside the rail-track, "it is an excellent
    thing,--that is, of course, if the speculators in cotton and politics
    don't get possession of it.  A great thing, indeed, sir, particularly
    as regards the detection of bank-robbers and murderers."

    "I don't quite like it, in that point of view," replied Clifford.  "A
    bank-robber, and what you call a murderer, likewise, has his rights,
    which men of enlightened humanity and conscience should regard in so
    much the more liberal spirit, because the bulk of society is prone to
    controvert their existence.  An almost spiritual medium, like the
    electric telegraph, should be consecrated to high, deep, joyful, and
    holy missions.  Lovers, day by, day--hour by hour, if so often moved to
    do it,--might send their heart-throbs from Maine to Florida, with some
    such words as these 'I love you forever!'--'My heart runs over with
    love!'--'I love you more than I can!' and, again, at the next message
    'I have lived an hour longer, and love you twice as much!' Or, when a
    good man has departed, his distant friend should be conscious of an
    electric thrill, as from the world of happy spirits, telling him 'Your
    dear friend is in bliss!' Or, to an absent husband, should come tidings
    thus 'An immortal being, of whom you are the father, has this moment
    come from God!' and immediately its little voice would seem to have
    reached so far, and to be echoing in his heart.  But for these poor
    rogues, the bank-robbers,--who, after all, are about as honest as nine
    people in ten, except that they disregard certain formalities, and
    prefer to transact business at midnight rather than 'Change-hours,--and
    for these murderers, as you phrase it, who are often excusable in the
    motives of their deed, and deserve to be ranked among public
    benefactors, if we consider only its result,--for unfortunate
    individuals like these, I really cannot applaud the enlistment of an
    immaterial and miraculous power in the universal world-hunt at their
    heels!"

    "You can't, hey?" cried the old gentleman, with a hard look.

    "Positively, no!" answered Clifford.  "It puts them too miserably at
    disadvantage.  For example, sir, in a dark, low, cross-beamed, panelled
    room of an old house, let us suppose a dead man, sitting in an
    arm-chair, with a blood-stain on his shirt-bosom,--and let us add to
    our hypothesis another man, issuing from the house, which he feels to
    be over-filled with the dead man's presence,--and let us lastly imagine
    him fleeing, Heaven knows whither, at the speed of a hurricane, by
    railroad! Now, sir, if the fugitive alight in some distant town, and
    find all the people babbling about that self-same dead man, whom he has
    fled so far to avoid the sight and thought of, will you not allow that
    his natural rights have been infringed? He has been deprived of his
    city of refuge, and, in my humble opinion, has suffered infinite wrong!"

    "You are a strange man; Sir!" said the old gentleman, bringing his
    gimlet-eye to a point on Clifford, as if determined to bore right into
    him.  "I can't see through you!"

    "No, I'll be bound you can't!" cried Clifford, laughing.  "And yet, my
    dear sir, I am as transparent as the water of Maule's well!  But come,
    Hepzibah! We have flown far enough for once.  Let us alight, as the
    birds do, and perch ourselves on the nearest twig, and consult wither
    we shall fly next!"

    Just then, as it happened, the train reached a solitary way-station.
    Taking advantage of the brief pause, Clifford left the car, and drew
    Hepzibah along with him.  A moment afterwards, the train--with all the
    life of its interior, amid which Clifford had made himself so
    conspicuous an object--was gliding away in the distance, and rapidly
    lessening to a point which, in another moment, vanished.  The world had
    fled away from these two wanderers.  They gazed drearily about them.
    At a little distance stood a wooden church, black with age, and in a
    dismal state of ruin and decay, with broken windows, a great rift
    through the main body of the edifice, and a rafter dangling from the
    top of the square tower.  Farther off was a farm-house, in the old
    style, as venerably black as the church, with a roof sloping downward
    from the three-story peak, to within a man's height of the ground.  It
    seemed uninhabited.  There were the relics of a wood-pile, indeed, near
    the door, but with grass sprouting up among the chips and scattered
    logs.  The small rain-drops came down aslant; the wind was not
    turbulent, but sullen, and full of chilly moisture.

    Clifford shivered from head to foot.  The wild effervescence of his
    mood--which had so readily supplied thoughts, fantasies, and a strange
    aptitude of words, and impelled him to talk from the mere necessity of
    giving vent to this bubbling-up gush of ideas had entirely subsided.  A
    powerful excitement had given him energy and vivacity.  Its operation
    over, he forthwith began to sink.

    "You must take the lead now, Hepzibah!" murmured he, with a torpid and
    reluctant utterance.  "Do with me as you will!" She knelt down upon the
    platform where they were standing and lifted her clasped hands to the
    sky.  The dull, gray weight of clouds made it invisible; but it was no
    hour for disbelief,--no juncture this to question that there was a sky
    above, and an Almighty Father looking from it!

    "O God!"--ejaculated poor, gaunt Hepzibah,--then paused a moment, to
    consider what her prayer should be,--"O God,--our Father,--are we not
    thy children? Have mercy on us!"

 Hepzibah and Clifford are as inexperienced as children as they step out of the yard of the House of the Seven Gables. Clifford looks almost drunk with excitement. Hardly anyone notices Clifford and Hepzibah passing by. Hepzibah continues to feel as though she is walking in a dream. Clifford pulls Hepzibah toward a line of railway cars. He feels as though he has never been awake before. Inside the train, the two elderly Pyncheons are surrounded by 50 completely unfamiliar people. Clifford feels full of life. Hepzibah is fretful. Clifford comments that Hepzibah is still thinking about Judge Pyncheon. But she shouldn't - she should join Clifford in the world and be happy! Hepzibah thinks Clifford has gone insane. The train conductor stops and asks how far Clifford and Hepzibah are going. Clifford says they're traveling for pleasure and want to go as far as they can. A fellow passenger speaks up. The narrator calls him "gimlet-eyed," which means sharp-eyed or piercing. He says Clifford and Hepzibah have chosen a bad day for their excursion. On a day as stormy as this one, it's better to stay home. Clifford says home isn't actually as great as people say it is. He thinks the whole trajectory of humankind has been moving toward the present and the future and away from the past. Homes represent the past, and trains represent the future. Soon we will just keep moving all the time like nomads. The gimlet-eyed man tells Clifford that it would be awful "to live everywhere and nowhere!" . Clifford thinks that would be the best thing that could happen to humanity. Clifford remembers "a certain house within familiar recollection" . This house is huge, melancholy, and dark. There is a dead man sitting in it who taints the whole house. Clifford has never been able to be happy there, thanks to the "dead" man "with open eyes." The gimlet-eyed man is starting to look rather afraid of Clifford. Clifford says it would be a relief to him if his whole house burned down. Clifford exclaims that this morning he was old, but now he feels young again! The gimlet-eyed man definitely looks embarrassed. Hepzibah tells Clifford to be quiet - everyone thinks he's insane. Clifford turns back to the gimlet-eyed man. Clifford tells the gimlet-eyed man that all of the worst sins committed by humankind are over property. The gimlet-eyed man tells Clifford he's sure he is right. Clifford suggests that hypnosis will help solve some of the world's troubles. He's also excited about "rapping spirits" - i.e., spirits who are supposed to speak up during seances. The gimlet-eyed man thinks this is all nonsense. The gimlet-eyed man does like the telegraph machine, though. Clifford approves of the telegraph machine when it carries messages of love across the country. But he doesn't think it should be used to catch bank robbers or murderers, since it puts them so much at a disadvantage. He gives an example: if a man is running away from a house where there is a corpse sitting up in a chair, would it be fair to have the news of that corpse waiting for him in the next town? The gimlet-eyed man is confused: he "can't see through " . The train stops at a small station and Clifford and Hepzibah quickly get off. All of Clifford's sudden energy is draining out of him. He tells Hepzibah to figure out what to do next. Hepzibah prays to God to help them.

