Christopher Newman twisted one end of his mustache a while, in silence, and at last he made answer.  “One day, a couple of months ago, something very curious happened to me.  I had come on to New York on some important business; it was rather a long story—­a question of getting ahead of another party, in a certain particular way, in the stock-market.  This other party had once played me a very mean trick.  I owed him a grudge, I felt awfully savage at the time, and I vowed that, when I got a chance, I would, figuratively speaking, put his nose out of joint.  There was a matter of some sixty thousand dollars at stake.  If I put it out of his way, it was a blow the fellow would feel, and he really deserved no quarter.  I jumped into a hack and went about my business, and it was in this hack—­this immortal, historical hack—­that the curious thing I speak of occurred.  It was a hack like any other, only a trifle dirtier, with a greasy line along the top of the drab cushions, as if it had been used for a great many Irish funerals.  It is possible I took a nap; I had been traveling all night, and though I was excited with my errand, I felt the want of sleep.  At all events I woke up suddenly, from a sleep or from a kind of a reverie, with the most extraordinary feeling in the world—­a mortal disgust for the thing I was going to do.  It came upon me like that!” and he snapped his fingers—­“as abruptly as an old wound that begins to ache.  I couldn’t tell the meaning of it; I only felt that I loathed the whole business and wanted to wash my hands of it.  The idea of losing that sixty thousand dollars, of letting it utterly slide and scuttle and never hearing of it again, seemed the sweetest thing in the world.  And all this took place quite independently of my will, and I sat watching it as if it were a play at the theatre.  I could feel it going on inside of me.  You may depend upon it that there are things going on inside of us that we understand mighty little about.”

“Jupiter! you make my flesh creep!” cried Tristram.  “And while you sat in your hack, watching the play, as you call it, the other man marched in and bagged your sixty thousand dollars?”

“I have not the least idea.  I hope so, poor devil! but I never found out.  We pulled up in front of the place I was going to in Wall Street, but I sat still in the carriage, and at last the driver scrambled down off his seat to see whether his carriage had not turned into a hearse.  I couldn’t have got out, any more than if I had been a corpse.  What was the matter with me?  Momentary idiocy, you’ll say.  What I wanted to get out of was Wall Street.  I told the man to drive down to the Brooklyn ferry and to cross over.  When we were over, I told him to drive me out into the country.  As I had told him originally to drive for dear life down town, I suppose he thought me insane.  Perhaps I was, but in that case I am insane still.  I spent the morning looking at the first green leaves