arts of peace, and civilization, and Christianity,--and on this
side--moving. You will also understand why that one word comprises, to
my thinking, all the discomforts short of absolute physical torture
that can be condensed into the human lot. Condensed, did I say? If it
were a condensed agony, I could endure it. One great, stunning,
overpowering blow is undoubtedly terrible, but you rally all your
fortitude to meet and resist it, and when it is over it is over and the
recuperative forces go to work; but a trouble that worries and baffles
and pricks and rasps you, that penetrates into all the ramifications of
your life, that fills you with profound disgust, and fires you with
irrepressible fury, and makes of you an Ishmaelite indeed, with your
hand against every man and every man's hand against you,--ah! that is
the _experimentum crucis_. Such is moving, in the country,--not an
act, but a process,--not a volition, but a fermentation.

We will say that the first of September is the time appointed for the
transit. The day approaches. It is the twenty-ninth of August. I
prepare to take hold of the matter in earnest. I am nipped in the bud
by learning that the woman who was to help about the carpets cannot
come, because her baby is taken with the croup. I have not a doubt of
it. I never knew a baby yet that did not go and have the croup, or the
colic, or the cholera infantum, just when it was imperatively necessary
that it should not have them. But there is no help for it. I shudder
and bravely gird myself for the work. I tug at the heavy, bulky,
unwieldy carpets, and am covered with dust and abomination. I think
carpets are the most untidy, unwholesome nuisances in the whole world.
It is impossible to be clean with them under your feet. You may sweep
your carpet twenty times and raise a dust on the twenty-first. I am
sure I heard long ago of some new fashion that was to be
introduced,--some Italian style, tiles, or mosaic-work, or something of