It always struck me as
most disgusting, that, in going round the sun, we must be passing
continually over old roads, and yet we had no means of establishing an
acquaintance with them: they might as well be new for every trip. Those
chambers of ether, through which we are tearing along night and day,
(for _our_ train stops at no stations,) doubtless, if we could put
some mark upon them, must be old fellows perfectly liable to
recognition. I suppose, _they_ never have notice to quit. And yet,
for want of such a mark, though all our lives flying past them and
through them, we can never challenge them as known. The same thing
happens in the desert: one monotonous iteration of sand, sand, sand,
unless where some miserable fountain stagnates, forbids all approach to
familiarity: nothing is circumstantiated or differenced: travel it for
three generations, and you are no nearer to identification of its
parts: so that it amounts to travelling through an abstract idea. For
the desert, really I suspect the thing is hopeless: but, as regards our
planetary orbit, matters are mending: for the last six or seven years I
have heard of these fiery showers, but indeed I cannot say how much
earlier they were first noticed,[Footnote: Somewhere I have seen it
remarked, that if, on a public road, you meet a party of four women, it
is at least fifty to one that they are all laughing; whereas, if you
meet an equal party of my own unhappy sex, you may wager safely that
they are talking gravely, and that one of them is uttering the word
_money_.
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