III.
He noticed how still the most of them were. A few of them stepped a
little out of the line, and stamped to shake off the cold; but all the
rest remained motionless, shrinking into themselves, and closer together.
They might have been their own dismal ghosts, they were so still, with no
more need of defence from the cold than the dead have.
He observed now that not one among them had a fur overcoat on; and at a
second glance he saw that there was not an overcoat of any kind among
them. He made his reflection that if any of them were impostors, and not
true men, with real hunger, and if they were alive to feel that stiff,
wholesome, Christmas-week cold, they were justly punished for their
deceit.
He was interested by the celerity, the simultaneity of his impressions,
his reflections. It occurred to him that his abnormal alertness must be
something like that of a drowning person, or a person in mortal peril,
and being perfectly safe and well, he was obscurely flattered by the
fact.
To test his condition further he took note of the fine mass of the great
dry-goods store on the hither corner, blocking itself out of the
blue-black night, and of the Gothic beauty of the church beyond, so near
that the coffle of captives might have issued from its sculptured portal,
after vain prayer.
Fragments of conjecture, of speculation, drifted through his mind.
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