📝 您未登录，登录后完成练习可保存成绩、查看最佳记录。
总字符
0
正确字符
0
错误字符
0
错误率
0.00%
耗时(秒)
0
速度 WPM
0
0 / 68
1Commerce is unexpectedly confident and serene, alert, adventurous, and unwearied. It is very natural in its methods
2withal, far more so than many fantastic enterprises and sentimental experiments, and hence its singular success. I am
3refreshed and expanded when the freight train rattles past me, and I smell the stores which go dispensing their odors
4all the way from Long Wharf to Lake Champlain, reminding me of foreign parts, of coral reefs, and Indian oceans, and
5tropical climes, and the extent of the globe. I feel more like a citizen of the world at the sight of the palm-leaf
6which will cover so many flaxen New England heads the next summer, the Manilla hemp and cocoa-nut husks, the old junk,
7gunny bags, scrap iron, and rusty nails. This car-load of torn sails is more legible and interesting now than if they
8should be wrought into paper and printed books. Who can write so graphically the history of the storms they have
9weathered as these rents have done? They are proof-sheets which need no correction. Here goes lumber from the Maine
10woods, which did not go out to sea in the last freshet, risen four dollars on the thousand because of what did go out or
11was split up; pine, spruce, cedar,--first, second, third, and fourth qualities, so lately all of one quality, to wave
12over the bear, and moose, and caribou. Next rolls Thomaston lime, a prime lot, which will get far among the hills before
13it gets slacked. These rags in bales, of all hues and qualities, the lowest condition to which cotton and linen descend,
14the final result of dress,--of patterns which are now no longer cried up, unless it be in Milwaukie, as those splendid
15articles, English, French, or American prints, ginghams, muslins, &c., gathered from all quarters both of fashion and
16poverty, going to become paper of one color or a few shades only, on which forsooth will be written tales of real life,
17high and low, and founded on fact! This closed car smells of salt fish, the strong New England and commercial scent,
18reminding me of the Grand Banks and the fisheries. Who has not seen a salt fish, thoroughly cured for this world, so
19that nothing can spoil it, and putting the perseverance of the saints to the blush? with which you may sweep or pave the
20streets, and split your kindlings, and the teamster shelter himself and his lading against sun wind and rain behind
21it,--and the trader, as a Concord trader once did, hang it up by his door for a sign when he commences business, until
22at last his oldest customer cannot tell surely whether it be animal, vegetable, or mineral, and yet it shall be as pure
23as a snowflake, and if it be put into a pot and boiled, will come out an excellent dun fish for a Saturday's dinner.
24Next Spanish hides, with the tails still preserving their twist and the angle of elevation they had when the oxen that
25wore them were careering over the pampas of the Spanish main,--a type of all obstinacy, and evincing how almost hopeless
26and incurable are all constitutional vices. I confess, that practically speaking, when I have learned a man's real
27disposition, I have no hopes of changing it for the better or worse in this state of existence. As the Orientals say, "A
28cur's tail may be warmed, and pressed, and bound round with ligatures, and after a twelve years' labor bestowed upon it,
29still it will retain its natural form." The only effectual cure for such inveteracies as these tails exhibit is to make
30glue of them, which I believe is what is usually done with them, and then they will stay put and stick. Here is a
31hogshead of molasses or of brandy directed to John Smith, Cuttingsville, Vermont, some trader among the Green Mountains,
32who imports for the farmers near his clearing, and now perchance stands over his bulk-head and thinks of the last
33arrivals on the coast, how they may affect the price for him, telling his customers this moment, as he has told them
34twenty times before this morning, that he expects some by the next train of prime quality. It is advertised in the
35Cuttingsville Times. While these things go up other things come down. Warned by the whizzing sound, I look up from my
36book and see some tall pine, hewn on far northern hills, which has winged its way over the Green Mountains and the
37Connecticut, shot like an arrow through the township within ten minutes, and scarce another eye beholds it; going "to be
38the mast Of some great ammiral." And hark! here comes the cattle-train bearing the cattle of a thousand hills,
39sheepcots, stables, and cow-yards in the air, drovers with their sticks, and shepherd boys in the midst of their flocks,
40all but the mountain pastures, whirled along like leaves blown from the mountains by the September gales. The air is
41filled with the bleating of calves and sheep, and the hustling of oxen, as if a pastoral valley were going by. When the
42old bell-wether at the head rattles his bell, the mountains do indeed skip like rams and the little hills like lambs. A
43car-load of drovers, too, in the midst, on a level with their droves now, their vocation gone, but still clinging to
44their useless sticks as their badge of office. But their dogs, where are they? It is a stampede to them; they are quite
45thrown out; they have lost the scent. Methinks I hear them barking behind the Peterboro' Hills, or panting up the
46western slope of the Green Mountains. They will not be in at the death. Their vocation, too, is gone. Their fidelity and
47sagacity are below par now. They will slink back to their kennels in disgrace, or perchance run wild and strike a league
48with the wolf and the fox. So is your pastoral life whirled past and away. But the bell rings, and I must get off the
49track and let the cars go by;-- What's the railroad to me? I never go to see Where it ends. It fills a few hollows, And
50makes banks for the swallows, It sets the sand a-blowing, And the blackberries a-growing, but I cross it like a
51cart-path in the woods. I will not have my eyes put out and my ears spoiled by its smoke and steam and hissing. Now that
52the cars are gone by and all the restless world with them, and the fishes in the pond no longer feel their rumbling, I
53am more alone than ever. For the rest of the long afternoon, perhaps, my meditations are interrupted only by the faint
54rattle of a carriage or team along the distant highway. Sometimes, on Sundays, I heard the bells, the Lincoln, Acton,
55Bedford, or Concord bell, when the wind was favorable, a faint, sweet, and, as it were, natural melody, worth importing
56into the wilderness. At a sufficient distance over the woods this sound acquires a certain vibratory hum, as if the pine
57needles in the horizon were the strings of a harp which it swept. All sound heard at the greatest possible distance
58produces one and the same effect, a vibration of the universal lyre, just as the intervening atmosphere makes a distant
59ridge of earth interesting to our eyes by the azure tint it imparts to it. There came to me in this case a melody which
60the air had strained, and which had conversed with every leaf and needle of the wood, that portion of the sound which
61the elements had taken up and modulated and echoed from vale to vale. The echo is, to some extent, an original sound,
62and therein is the magic and charm of it. It is not merely a repetition of what was worth repeating in the bell, but
63partly the voice of the wood; the same trivial words and notes sung by a wood-nymph. At evening, the distant lowing of
64some cow in the horizon beyond the woods sounded sweet and melodious, and at first I would mistake it for the voices of
65certain minstrels by whom I was sometimes serenaded, who might be straying over hill and dale; but soon I was not
66unpleasantly disappointed when it was prolonged into the cheap and natural music of the cow. I do not mean to be
67satirical, but to express my appreciation of those youths' singing, when I state that I perceived clearly that it was
68akin to the music of the cow, and they were at length one articulation of Nature.
🎉 全部完成！共 68 行