brasses, of opulent saloons—a token of joy and splendour in dark waters, a hint of love and the velvet belly upon dark tides—and the sight of all these things, the fusion of all these odours by the sprite of May is freighted with unspeakable memories, with unutterable intuitions for the youth: he does not know what he would utter, but glory, love, power, wealth, flight, and movement and the sight of new earth in the morning, and the living corporeal fulfilment of all his ecstasy is in his wish and his conviction.
Certainly, these things can be found in New England, but perhaps the person who finds this buried joy the most is this lonely visitor—and particularly the boy from the South, for in the heart of the Southerner alone, perhaps, is this true and secret knowledge of the North: it is there in his dreams and his childhood premonition, it is there like the dark Helen, and no matter what he sees to cheat it, he will always believe in it, he will always return to it. Certainly, this was true of the gnarled and miserly old man who now sat not far from all this glory in his dingy State Street office, for Bascom Pentland, although the stranger on seeing him might have said, “There goes the very image of a hard-bitten old Down-Easter,” had come, as lonely and wretched a youth as ever lived, from the earth of Old Catawba, he had known and felt these things and, in spite of his frequent bitter attacks on the people, the climate, the life, New England was the place to which he had returned to live, and for which he felt the most affection.
Now, ruminant and lost, he stared across the archway of his hands. In a moment, with what was only an apparent irrelevance, with what was really a part of the coherent past, a light plucked from dark adyts of the brain, he said: “Who knoweth the spirit of man that goeth upward, and the spirit of the beast that goeth downward to the earth?”
He was silent and thoughtful for a moment; then he added sadly: “I am an old man. I have lived a long time. I have seen so many things. Sometimes everything seems so long ago.”
Then his eye went back into the wilderness, the lost earth, the buried men.
Presently he said: “I hope you will come out on Sunday. O, by all means! By all means! I believe your aunt is expecting you. Yes, sir, I believe she said something to that effect. Or perhaps she intends to pay a visit to one of her children. I do not know, I have not the remotest—not the faintest idea, of what she proposes to do,” he howled. “Of course,” he said impatiently
