XVII.  THE HOTEL

Arriving in town (where my bachelor-rooms, long before this time, had received some other occupant), I established myself, for a day or two, in a certain, respectable hotel.  It was situated somewhat aloof from my former track in life; my present mood inclining me to avoid most of my old companions, from whom I was now sundered by other interests, and who would have been likely enough to amuse themselves at the expense of the amateur workingman.  The hotel-keeper put me into a back room of the third story of his spacious establishment.  The day was lowering, with occasional gusts of rain, and an ugly tempered east wind, which seemed to come right off the chill and melancholy sea, hardly mitigated by sweeping over the roofs, and amalgamating itself with the dusky element of city smoke.  All the effeminacy of past days had returned upon me at once.  Summer as it still was, I ordered a coal fire in the rusty grate, and was glad to find myself growing a little too warm with an artificial temperature.

My sensations were those of a traveller, long sojourning in remote regions, and at length sitting down again amid customs once familiar.  There was a newness and an oldness oddly combining themselves into one impression.  It made me acutely sensible how strange a piece of mosaic-work had lately been wrought into my life.  True, if you look at it in one way, it had been only a summer in the country.  But, considered in a profounder relation, it was part of another age, a different state of society, a segment of an existence peculiar in its aims and methods, a leaf of some mysterious volume interpolated into the current history which time was writing off.  At one moment, the very circumstances now surrounding me—­my coal fire and the dingy room in the bustling hotel—­appeared far off and intangible; the next instant Blithedale looked vague, as if it were at a distance both in time and space, and so shadowy that a question might be raised whether the whole affair had been anything more than the thoughts of a speculative man.  I had never before experienced a mood that so robbed the actual world of its solidity.  It nevertheless involved a charm, on which—­a devoted epicure of my own emotions—­I resolved to pause, and enjoy the moral sillabub until quite dissolved away.

Whatever had been my taste for solitude and natural scenery, yet the thick, foggy, stifled element of cities, the entangled life of many men together, sordid as it was, and empty of the beautiful, took quite as strenuous a hold upon my mind.  I felt as if there could never be enough of it.  Each characteristic sound was too suggestive to be passed over unnoticed.  Beneath and around me, I heard the stir of the hotel; the loud voices of guests, landlord, or bar-keeper; steps echoing on the staircase; the ringing of a bell, announcing arrivals or departures; the porter lumbering past my door with baggage, which he thumped down upon