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.