me as the
soughing of wind on the desert or the wash of waves on a distant shore.
Here I find a book of my own among the dead. I read its inscription
curiously. I must have written it--when I was alive aeons ago, and far
from here. But why did I? For see the unread, the shelved, the
numbered, the buried books!
Let me out to the street! Dust we are, not books, and unto dust, good
fertile soil, not paper and ink, we shall return. No more writing for
me--but breathing and eating and jostling with the good earthy people
outside, laughing and loving and dying with them!
The sweet wind in Copley Square! The sweet smell of gasoline! The
sweet scream of electric horns!
And how sweet--how fat and alive and friendly the old colored hack
driver, standing there by the stone post! He has a number on his cap; he
is catalogued somewhere, but not in the library. Thank heaven he is no
book, but just a good black human being. I rush up and shake hands
with him. He nearly falls into his cab with astonishment; but I must get
hold of life again, and he looks so real and removed from letters!
"Uncle!" I whisper, close in his ear, "have ye got it? Quick--
"'Cross me twice wid de raabbit foot-- Dar's steppin' at de doo'! Cross
me twice wid de raabbit foot-- Dar's creakin' on de floo'!'"
He makes the passes, and I turn down Boylston Street, a living thing
once more with face toward--the hills of Hingham.
It is five o'clock, and a winter evening, and all the street pours forth to
meet me--some of them coming with me bound for Hingham, surely, as
all of them are bound for a hill somewhere and a home.
I love the city at this winter hour. This home-hurrying crowd--its
excitement of escape! its eagerness and expectancy! its camaraderie!
The arc-lights overhead glow and splutter with the joy they see on the
faces beneath them.
It is nearly half-past five as I turn into Winter Street. Now the very
stores are closing. Work has ceased. Drays and automobiles are gone.
The two-wheeled fruit man is going from his stand at the Subway
entrance. The street is filled from wall to wall with men and women,
young women and young men, fresher, more eager, more excited, more
joyous even than the lesser crowd of shoppers down Boylston Street.
They don't notice me particularly. No one notices any one particularly,
for the lights overhead see us all, and we all understand as we cross and
dodge and lockstep and bump and jostle through this deep narrow place
of closing doors toward home. Then the last rush at the station, that
nightly baptism into human brotherhood as we plunge into the crowd
and are carried through the gates and into our train--which is speeding
far out through the dark before I begin to come to myself--find myself
leaving the others, separating, individualizing, taking on definite shape
and my own being. The train is grinding in at my station, and I drop out
along the track in the dark alone.
I gather my bundles and hug them to me, feeling not the bread and
bananas, but only the sense of possession, as I step off down the track.
Here is my automobile. Two miles of back-country road lie before me.
I drive slowly, the stars overhead, but not far away, and very close
about me the deep darkness of the woods--and silence and space and
shapes invisible, and voices inaudible as yet to my city-dinned ears and
staring eyes. But sight returns, and hearing, till soon my very fingers,
feeling far into the dark, begin to see and hear.
And now I near the hill: these are my woods; this is my gravel bank;
that my meadow, my wall, my postbox, and up yonder among the trees
shines my light. They are expecting me, She, and the boys, and the dog,
and the blazing fire, the very trees up there, and the watching stars.
How the car takes the hill--as if up were down, and wheels were wings,
and just as if the boys and the dog and the dinner and the fire were all
waiting for it! As they are, of course, it and me. I open up the throttle, I
jam the shrieking whistle, and rip around the bend in the middle of the
hill,--puppy yelping down to meet me. The noise we make as the lights
flash on, as the big door rolls back, and we come to our nightly
standstill inside the boy-filled barn! They drag me from the
wheel--puppy yanking at my trouser leg; they pounce upon my bundles;
they hustle me toward the house, where,
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