to the remains of Sandy Duncan, aged eleven; once in September, 1895, penitentially alert and shamefast in the City “calaboose”; in a room of the Keeley Institute at Piedmont, North Carolina, June 7, 1896; on March 17, 1906, between Knoxville, Tennessee, and Altamont, at the conclusion of a seven weeks’journey to California.
How looked the home-earth then to Gant the Far-Wanderer? Light crept grayly, melting on the rocky river, the engine smoke streaked out on dawn like a cold breath, the hills were big, but nearer, nearer than he thought. And Altamont lay gray and withered in the hills, a bleak mean wintry dot. He stepped carefully down in squalid Toytown, noting that everything was low, near, and shrunken as he made his Gulliverian entry. He had a roof-and-gulley high conviction; with careful tucked-in elbows he weighted down the heated Toytown street-car, staring painfully at the dirty pasteboard pebbledash of the Pisgah Hotel, the brick and board cheap warehouses of Depot Street, the rusty clapboard flimsiness of the Florence (Railway Men’s) Hotel, quaking with beef-fed harlotry.
So small, so small, so small, he thought. I never believed it. Even the hills here. I’ll soon be sixty.
His sallow face, thin-flanked, was hang-dog and afraid. He stared wistful-sullenly down at the rattan seat as the car screeched round into the switch at the cut and stopped; the motorman, smoke— throated, slid the door back and entered with his handle. He closed the door and sat down yawning.
“Where you been, Mr. Gant?”
“California,” said Gant.
“Thought I hadn’t seen you,” said the motorman.
There was a warm electric smell and one of hot burnt steel.
But two months dead! But two months dead! Ah, Lord! So it’s come to this. Merciful God, this fearful, awful, and damnable climate. Death, death! Is it too late? A land of life, a flower land. How clear the green clear sea was. And all the fishes swimming there. Santa Catalina. Those in the East should always go West. How came I here? Down, down—always down, did I know where? Baltimore, Sydney—In God’s name,
