streets, the tainted furnace-fumes of city breath, the air was clean and fresh, and marvellously sweet, and the great earth waited, and was still enormously, and one always knew that it was there.
The engine panted for a moment with a hoarse, metallic resonance, in the baggage-car someone threw mail-bags and thick bundles of evening papers off onto the platform, there was the swinging signal of a brakesman’s lantern, the tolling of the engine bell, thick, hose-like jets of steam blew out of her, the terrific pistons moved like elbows, caught, bore down, the terrific flanges spun for a moment, the short, squat funnel belched explosive thunders of hot smoke, the train rolled past with a slow, protesting creak of ties, a hard-pressed rumble of the heavy coaches, and was on her way again.
Then the train was gone, and there was nothing but the rails, the earth, the moon, the river, and strong silence—and the haunting and immortal visage of America by night. It was there, and it was there for ever, and he had always known it, and it abode there and was still, and there was something in his heart he could not utter. The rails swept northward towards the dark, and in the moon the rails were like two living strands of burning silver, and between the rails the heavy ballast rock was white as lunar marble, and the brown wooden ties were resinous and dry and very still.
Sheer beside the tracks, the low banks of the ballast-fill sloped to the edges of the mighty river. And the river blazed there in the great blank radiance of the moon, cool waters gently lapped small gluts and pockets of the shore, and in the great wink of the moon the river blazed more brightly than elves’gold. And farther off, where darkness met it, the light was broken into scallop-shells of gold; it swam and shimmered in a billion winks of fire like a school of herrings on the water, and beyond all that there was just the dark, the cool-flowing mystery of velvet-hearted night, the silent, soundless surge and coolness of the strange, the grand, the haunting, the unceasing river.
Far, far away in darkness, on the other shore—more than a mile away—the river met the fringes of the land, but where the river ended, or the land began, was hard to say. There was just there a greater darkness, perhaps just by a shade, a deeper, dark intensity of night—a dark, perhaps, a shade less lucent, smooth, and fluid, by an indefinable degree more solid.
Yet there were lights there—there were lights—a bracelet of a few, hard lights
