the shore, there was an enormous field of tomatoes, and while Jimmy was helping himself to the Hub cash under Kay's eyes in the city, I helped myself to half a dozen of the farmer's ripe tomatoes. The Hub, however, of set purpose, formed no part of my thoughts, my reveries and dreams being of a very different, and far more interesting, kind....
A night in the woods, though distance made it more difficult, comforted me even more than the Lake expeditions. I kept the woods usually for Saturday night, when the next day left me free as well.
A pine forest beyond Rosedale was my favourite haunt, for it was (in those days) quite deserted and several miles from the nearest farm, and in the heart of it lay a secluded little lake with reedy shores and deep blue water. Here I lay and communed, the world of hotels, insurance, even of Methodists, very far away. The hum of the city could not reach me, though its glare was faintly visible in the sky. There were no signs of men; no sounds of human life; not even a dog's bark--nothing but a sighing wind and lapping water and a sort of earth-murmur under the trees, and I used to think that God, whatever He was, or the great spiritual forces that I believed lay behind all phenomena, and perhaps were the moving life of the elements themselves, must be nearer to one's consciousness in places like this than among the bustling of men in the towns and houses. As the material world faded away among the shadows, I felt dimly the real spiritual world behind shining through ... I meditated on the meaning of these dreams till the veil over outer things seemed very thin; diving down into my inner consciousness as deeply as I could till a stream of tremendous yearning for the realities that lay beyond appearances poured out of me into the night.... The hours passed with magical swiftness, and my dreaming usually ended in sleep, for I often woke in the chilly time just before the dawn, lying sideways on the pine needles, and saw the trees outlined sharply against the Eastern sky, and
the lake water still and clear, and heard the dawn-wind
