CHAPTER I.

I was greatly fatigued, and a feeling of irresistible drowsiness had begun to creep over my senses, when my flagging energies were suddenly aroused by the appearance of a town which, though I had not before observed it, now seemed quite close at hand. Tall and graceful spires, glistening domes, and high-rearing chimneys, from which poured plentiful volumes of smoke, betokened a place of thrift and business importance. I therefore began to enter one of its residence streets with the pleasant mental exhilaration which the pedestrian feels when he opens his eyes and ears to the sights and sounds of a strange city.

But I had not gone far before I was compelled to acknowledge to myself that the city belied in some unaccountable respects the smart appearance which it had borne from a distance. The men whom I began to meet, although seemingly full of a kind of jaded activity, bore strange marks of carelessness, not to say positive disorder in their attire. Their untrimmed beards showed a great lack of taste and neatness. Their collars and cuffs were soiled and wrinkled, and their neckties, fastened about their necks in all sorts of ungainly knots, were very much awry. All had a deeply preoccupied air, and I noticed that many of them had a finger or hand clumsily wrapped in rags of a mottled and dingy hue, as if they had met with untoward accidents, such as burns, cuts, or bruises. The odour of arnica pervaded the atmosphere.

But I soon began to perceive that the most perplexing feature of this universal disorder, or I might say dilapidation of attire, was the total absence of buttons from garments of every description. It was as if some greedy speculator or anaconda-like Trust had suddenly made a corner of the entire product of buttons and put them so far beyond the reach of his kind that man had been compelled to supply the place of these indispensable little articles with all sorts of mechanical makeshifts. Pins, strings, hooks, and I observed in some instances, shingle nails, held together the textile frame-work which invested every man I saw.

When I had become somewhat accustomed to this oddity, although inwardly much wondering what should cause it, I began to observe that the residences themselves although substantial in structure and ornamental in design, bore the same marks of surprising carelessness that I saw in their owners. The fine stone and marble doorsteps were strangely littered and untidy. Curious utensils for such places such as coffee-pots and dishpans, stood in the front windows of the various rooms. The parlours, which I could plainly see through the carelessly left open windows, were in a state of great disorder. Dust and confusion seemed to reign unmolested, and the curtains were clumsily fastened as if by unskilful hands.

These visible signs of a slatternly kind of housekeeping seemed to multiply as I advanced, but my attention to them soon began to be somewhat distracted by my sense of smell. Mysterious and inscrutable odours, defying all my powers of analysis, emanated from these residences. From one it was like burnt rags, from another it seemed to be grease in some stage of decomposition, from another the odour was that of musty and decaying food, while from still others there proceeded an indescribable mixture of all these.

More and more puzzled by the strange sights and smells to which my senses had grown more acute as I proceeded, I soon found that they were, after all, almost wholly driven from my mind by an infinitely sharper sense of the utter joylessness of the place. In spite of the hurrying crowds of men who jostled one another upon the streets, I began to be conscious of an overpowering sense of desolation such as I had never before known. An unaccountable gloom, which seemed to cover the whole town like a funeral pall, began to settle upon my hitherto buoyant spirits. It was as if the sun were not merely obscured by a passing cloud, but had been wholly withdrawn from the heavens, leaving the earth to be lighted only by some murky and baleful star. I recalled the fact that though many of the irregularities of apparel which I had noticed were in a high degree ludicrous, I had not seen the ghost of a smile upon the face or heard anything approaching a jest from the lips of a human being since I entered the town. I attempted to arouse myself and shake off the deadly chill that was beginning to envelope me, and as I did so I unconsciously muttered, “One would think it were the town of Hamelin from which the Pied Piper had just drawn away all the children.”

No sooner had these words passed my lips than, like an electric shock, I remembered that I had not only not seen a child but I had not seen a woman since I entered the town. This dizzying fact was so astounding to me that I stopped in sheer and sudden fright and leaned against a tree near at hand in order to assure myself that it was true. Step by step, with minutest accuracy, I went over in my mind the ground which I had trodden. I recalled the anxious, hurrying figures of men, whose oddities of raiment no longer tempted me to smile, but not the face of a woman could I conjure up in the retrospect, nor even the glimpse of a woman’s garment. I had not, with a weakness which I think the angels forgive, turned on the streets to look after a woman’s beautiful figure. I surely had not seen a woman on those unswept doorsteps, I had not caught a glimpse of a woman in those dust-ridden parlours. Even the blooming faces and joyous, sparkling chatter of school-girls had been wholly absent from the streets which I had traversed.

With a sigh I thought of the still younger girls, the unspeakably innocent little ones of three and four years of age whose charming prattle I tried to persuade myself that I had surely heard about some doorstep. But no, I never failed to notice these darlings, and my memory told me with unfailing accuracy that I had seen only men. Men, no one but men, bald, angular men, and these in their bold loneliness appearing to be robbed of all the graces and sweetness of immortal beings!

My speculations as to the meaning of the strange state of things which I had observed in the town into which I had fallen, had hitherto been only those prompted by a dignified and philosophical curiosity. But the shock which I experienced on discovering the utter absence of woman from my environment had now made them positively painful. I stood still and shivered in the street. Surely I had gotten into an uncanny place, from which the sweetness and beauty of woman and the innocence of children had been banished! I could bear the suspense no longer. Casting my hitherto dignified deportment to the winds I ran recklessly after a man who had emerged from a drug store at some distance in front of me and seized him almost rudely by the arm.

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