{"id":"01KG8AKFKTJKZQSJZ83D76461H","cid":"bafkreibcjrlr56sdbqcdsndsfnaztrguaoz3vqtuymartihryxpwpcsj6m","type":"chunk","properties":{"end_line":7314,"extracted_at":"2026-01-30T20:48:05.594Z","extracted_by":"structure-extraction-lambda","label":"Chunk 4","source_file":"01KG89J1DKC9HHJRKY25JZBEXW","start_line":7265,"text":"ere his crazy errand could be done; and even then, Old Huckleberry\r\nwould be found long surfeited with clover, since, doubtless, being dead\r\nmany a summer, he must be buried beneath it. And many years after, in a\r\nfar different part of the town, and in far less winsome weather too,\r\npassing with his bundle of flags through Red-Cross street, towards\r\nBarbican, in a fog so dense that the dimmed and massed blocks of\r\nhouses, exaggerated by the loom, seemed shadowy ranges on ranges of\r\nmidnight hills, he heard a confused pastoral sort of sounds—tramplings,\r\nlowings, halloos—and was suddenly called to by a voice to head off\r\ncertain cattle, bound to Smithfield, bewildered and unruly in the fog.\r\nNext instant he saw the white face—white as an orange-blossom—of a\r\nblack-bodied steer, in advance of the drove, gleaming ghost-like\r\nthrough the vapors; and presently, forgetting his limp, with rapid\r\nshout and gesture, he was more eager, even than the troubled farmers,\r\ntheir owners, in driving the riotous cattle back into Barbican.\r\nMonomaniac reminiscences were in him—“To the right, to the right!” he\r\nshouted, as, arrived at the street corner, the farmers beat the drove\r\nto the left, towards Smithfield: “To the right! you are driving them\r\nback to the pastures—to the right! that way lies the barn-yard!”\r\n“Barn-yard?” cried a voice; “you are dreaming, old man.” And so,\r\nIsrael, now an old man, was bewitched by the mirage of vapors; he had\r\ndreamed himself home into the mists of the Housatonic mountains; ruddy\r\nboy on the upland pastures again. But how different the flat,\r\napathetic, dead, London fog now seemed from those agile mists which,\r\ngoat-like, climbed the purple peaks, or in routed armies of phantoms,\r\nbroke down, pell-mell, dispersed in flight upon the plain, leaving the\r\ncattle-boy loftily alone, clear-cut as a balloon against the sky.\r\n\r\nIn 1817 he once more endured extremity; this second peace again\r\ndrifting its discharged soldiers on London, so that all kinds of labor\r\nwere overstocked. Beggars, too, lighted on the walks like locusts.\r\nTimber-toed cripples stilted along, numerous as French peasants in\r\n_sabots_. And, as thirty years before, on all sides, the exile had\r\nheard the supplicatory cry, not addressed to him, “An honorable scar,\r\nyour honor, received at Bunker Hill, or Saratoga, or Trenton, fighting\r\nfor his most gracious Majesty, King George!” so now, in presence of the\r\nstill surviving Israel, our Wandering Jew, the amended cry was anew\r\ntaken up, by a succeeding generation of unfortunates, “An honorable\r\nscar, your honor, received at Corunna, or at Waterloo, or at\r\nTrafalgar!” Yet not a few of these petitioners had never been outside\r\nof the London smoke; a sort of crafty aristocracy in their way, who,\r\nwithout having endangered their own persons much if anything, reaped no\r\ninsignificant share both of the glory and profit of the bloody battles\r\nthey claimed; while some of the genuine working heroes, too brave to\r\nbeg, too cut-up to work, and too poor to live, laid down quietly in\r\ncorners and died. And here it may be noted, as a fact nationally\r\ncharacteristic, that however desperately reduced at times, even to the\r\nsewers, Israel, the American, never sunk below the mud, to actual\r\nbeggary.\r\n\r","title":"Chunk 4"},"relationships":[{"peer":"01KG8AJJRWNYCFCKFX5G6XWAGY","peer_type":"chapter","predicate":"in"},{"peer":"01KG89J1DKC9HHJRKY25JZBEXW","peer_type":"file","predicate":"extractedFrom"},{"peer":"01KG89HMDZKNY753EZE1CJ8HZW","peer_type":"collection","predicate":"collection"},{"peer":"01KG8AKFM04N0Q040N33MVFAJ8","peer_type":"chunk","predicate":"prev"},{"peer":"01KG8AKG6A2VWVY9BH579ANXGP","peer_type":"chunk","predicate":"next"}],"ver":2,"created_at":"2026-01-30T20:48:05.754Z","ts":"2026-01-30T20:48:18.909Z","edited_by":{"method":"manual","user_id":"01KFF0H3YRP9ZSM033AM0QJ47H"}}