howling wind as well. Imagination tried feebly to construct a happier state, lovelier conditions, a world nearer to the heart's desire. While waiting for midnight to strike, I said to myself, thinking of yesterday and to-morrow, with all the one had meant and the other might mean to me:
"Yesterday is now twenty-four hours away, but in a minute it will be only one minute away."
I treated the hidden to-morrow similarly. I imagined, the world being old and creaky, ill-fitting too, that a crack existed between the two days. Anyone who was thin enough might slip through! I, certainly, was thin enough. I slipped through.... I entered a region out of time, a region where everything came true. And the first thing I saw was a wondrous streaming vision of the wind, the wind that howled outside my filthy windows.... I saw the winds, changing colours as they rose and fell, attached to the trees, in tenuous ribands of gold and blue and scarlet as they swept to and fro.... I little dreamed that these fancies would appear fifteen years later in a book of my own, "The Education of Uncle Paul." That crack, at any rate, became for me, like the fiddle, a means of escape from unkind reality into a state of inner bliss and wonder "where everything came true."...
It was after twelve o'clock next day when Boyde returned--with a black eye, my one thick suit stained and soiled, and a long involved story that utterly confused me. There had been a fight; he had protected a woman; a false charge had been laid against him owing to misunderstanding, owing also to the fact that he had no money to tip the policeman, and he had spent the night in a cell at Jefferson Market police station. In the morning the magistrate had discharged him with many compliments upon his "gallantry and courage." It did not ring true. I knew the Tammany magistrates better than that. He contradicted himself too, in saying that a Mr. Beattie, a friend of his mother's, who occasionally gave
him a little money she sent from England, had bailed him
