fabulous and dreamlike quality, and time, strange million-visaged time, had been telescoped incredibly, so that weeks had passed by like a single day. He would awake out of this living dream and see the minutes, hours, and days, and all the acts and faces of the earth pass by him in their usual way. And instantly, when this happened, he would feel a bitter and intolerable loneliness—a loneliness so acrid, grey, and bitter that he could taste its sharp thin crust around the edges of his mouth like the taste and odour of weary burnt-out steel, like a depleted storage battery or a light that had gone dim, and he could feel it greyly and intolerably in his entrails, the conduits of his blood, and in all the substance of his body.
When this happened, he would feel an almost unbearable need to hear the voice and see the face again of someone he had known and at such a time as this he would go to see his Uncle Bascom, that strange and extraordinary man who, born like the others in the wilderness, the hills of home, had left these hills for ever.
Bascom now lived alone with his wife (for his four children were grown up and would have none of him) in a dingy section of one of the innumerable suburbs that form part of the terrific ganglia of Boston, and it was here that the boy would often go on Sundays.
After a long confusing journey that was made by subway, elevated, and street car, he would leave the chill and dismal street car at the foot of a hill on a long, wide, and frozen street lined with tall rows of wintry elms, with smoky wintry houses that had a look of solid, closed and mellow warmth, and with a savage frozen waste of tidal waters on the right—those New England waters that are so sparkling, fresh and glorious, like a tide of sapphires, in the springtime, and so grim and savage in their frozen desolation in the winter.
Then the street car would bang its draughty sliding doors together, grind harshly off with its cargo of people with pinched lips, thin red pointed noses, and cod-fish faces, and vanish, leaving him with the kind of loneliness and absence which a street car always leaves when it has gone, and he would turn away from the tracks along a dismal road or street that led into the district where his uncle had his house. And stolidly he would plunge forward against the grey and frozen desolation of that place to meet him.
And at length he would pause before his uncle’s little house, and as he struck the knocker, he was always glad to hear the approaching patter of his Aunt Louise’s feet, and cheered by the brightening glance of
