glimpses from the window, of river, lake and forest, all touched with "spring's delightful weather." Shelley filled my head and heart. I saw dawn in a vale of the Indian Caucasus, I saw Panthea, Asia, fleeting dryads and troops of happy fauns. Out of New York City into this primæval wilderness produced intoxication. No more cities of dreadful night for me! The repressed, unrealized yearnings of many painful months burst forth in a kind of rapture. Riches can never taste the treasures of relief and change provided by the law of contrast. To be free to go everywhere is tantamount to going nowhere, to be able to do everything is to do nothing. Without school, holidays could have no meaning. The intensity of escape, with all the gorgeous emotions it involves, is hardly possible to the big bank-balances.
I thought of the overheated Sun offices, and saw cool, silent woods; of thronged canyon-streets between cliffs of buildings, and saw lonely gorges where the deer stole down to drink in quiet pools; of Mrs. Bernstein's room, and saw green glades of beauty, a ceiling of blue sky, walls of hemlock, spruce and cedar. The May sunlight made the whole world sing, as the train rushed through the wilderness of the Ontario Highlands. It woke a kind of lyrical delight in me. "The day seemed one sent from beyond the skies, that shed to earth, above the sun, a light of Paradise." Paxton, with his puzzling matches, found me absent-minded and irresponsive to his "ouch! ouch!" and R.M., suffering from a bad "hang-over" headache, thought me unsympathetic toward his disreputable joint.
More clearly than the matches, or the profit and loss figures of the joint, I remember the three bullets lying on the palm of the engineer's fat open hand. His solemn gravity depressed R.M. It infected me a little too. Why in the world should he be so serious? "If we fail, boys," said the engineer laconically, as he looked down with grim significance at the three bullets, "I for one--shall not return." He put a bullet in his pocket, he handed
one to R.M., the third he passed to me. "Is it a deal?"
