feeding with eyes that held yet the vast moon-meadows of the night and the cool green width of the earth. They were like men in a zoo; he gazed at them, looking for all the little particular markings of the town, the fine mapping upon their limbs and faces of their own little cosmos. And the great hunger for voyages rose up in him—to come always, as now at dawn, into strange cities, striding in among them, and sitting with them unknown, like a god in exile, stored with the enormous vision of the earth.
The counterman yawned and turned the crackling pages of a morning paper. That was strange.
Cars clanked by, beginning to work through the town. Merchants lowered their awnings; he left them as their day began.
An hour later he was riding for the sea. Eighty miles away lay the sea and Laura. She slept unwitting of the devouring wheels that brought him to her. He looked at the aqueous blue sky whitened with little clouds, and at the land wooded with pines and indefinable tokens of the marshes and bright salt.
The train drew under the boat-shed at Newport News. The terrific locomotive, as beautiful as any ship, breathed with unlaborious fatigue at the rail-head. There, by lapping water, she came to rest, like a completed destiny.
The little boat lay waiting at the dock. Within a few minutes he had left the hot murky smell of the shed and was cruising out into the blue water of the Roads. A great light wind swept over the water, making a singing noise through the tackle of the little boat, making a music and a glory in his heart. He drove along the little decks at a bounding stride, lunging past the staring people, with wild noises in his throat. The lean destroyers, the bright mad camouflage of the freighters and the transports, the lazy red whirl of a propeller, half-submerged, and the light winey sparkle of the waves fused to a single radiance and filled him with glory. He cried back into the throat of the enormous wind, and his eyes were wet.
Upon the decks of the boats, clean little figures in white moved about; under the bulging counter of a huge Frenchman young naked men were swimming. They come from France, he thought, and it is strange that they should be here.
O, the wonder, the magic and the loss! His life was like a great wave breaking
