midnight
The season has advanced rapidly during my progress from Dublin to the Avenue ; and by the time I reach the famous old tavern , not far from the station , it is a Sunday morning of early summer , and the yellow sunlight falls upon a body of good comrades who are grooming a marvelous number of piebald steeds about the stable-doors . By token of these beasts -- which always look so much more like works of art than of nature -- I know that there is to be a circus somewhere very soon ; and the gay bills pasted all over the stable-front tell me that there are to be two performances at the Port on the morrow . The grooms talk nothing and joke nothing but horse at their labor ; and their life seems such a low , ignorant , happy life , that the secret nomad lurking in every respectable and stationary personality stirs within me and struggles to strike hands of fellowship with them . They lead a sort of pastoral existence in our age of railroads ; they wander over the continent with their great caravan , and everywhere pursue the summer from South to North and from North to South again ; in the mild forenoons they groom their herds , and in the afternoons they doze under their wagons , indifferent to the tumult of the crowd within and without the mighty canvas near them , -- doze face downwards on the bruised , sweet-smelling grass ; and in the starry midnight rise and strike their tents , and set forth again over the still country roads , to take the next village on the morrow with the blaze and splendor of their `` Grand Entree . '' The triumphal chariot in which the musicians are borne at the head of the procession is composed , as I perceive by the bills , of four colossal gilt swans , set tail to tail , with lifted wings and curving necks ; but the chariot , as I behold it beside the stable , is mysteriously draped in white canvas , through which its gilding glitters only here and there . And does it move thus shrouded in the company 's wanderings from place to place , and is the precious spottiness of the piebalds then hidden under envious drapery ? O happy grooms , -- not clean as to shirts , nor especially neat in your conversation , but displaying a Wealth of art in India-ink upon your manly chests and the swelling muscles of your arms , and speaking in every movement your freedom from all conventional gyves and shackles , _ `` seid umschlungen ! ''