river, there was a terrific detonation—the deafening bang and flare of a gigantic rocket that whizzed up into the air in a small hurtling point of light, and exploded, illuminating heaven with a constellation of enchanted falling stars. There was a long-drawn “Oh-h!” of excitement, eagerness, and expectant joy from the crowd gathered on the lawn, the same from the people gathered on the porch, who quickly scrambled into chairs; and instantly from all the people there was utter silence, a thrilled and fascinated attentiveness, broken now and then by gasps of wonder, joy, surprise and rapture, as one giant rocket followed another in unending series, in constantly growing magnificence, until the whole universe of night was blooming with flowers of fire, alive with constellations of enchanted stars—green, red, and yellow, blue and violet and gold—that burst softly in the night with spreading glory, falling slowly to the earth like some great parachuted blossom, and cracking, puffing, bursting softly, to flower, spread, again develop in great blooms of star-enchanted fire.
Everything had the same familiar quality of America that he had always remembered and known as a child. It brought back to him again the quiet voices of people on their summer porches, the street-car grinding to a halt on the corner of the hill above his father’s house, his father’s voice in darkness on the porch, and the red lifted flare of his cigar, and those Thursday nights in summer when his father took him on the street-car to the little park along the river three miles away, where there were outdoor moving-pictures on an island; later, fireworks and across the river the great flare, the receding thunder of a train. Now, curiously, that whole memory came back to him with all its vivid and unutterable poignancy: he could remember the little artificial lake there at the park—that lake just three feet deep that had seemed so vast and thrilling to him, and the boat-house with lake-water lapping at the piers, the clank of oarlocks and the dull bump and dry knocking of the boats together as they collided in the darkness, and the people, gathered there in darkness, with their dim faces upturned to the great silver dance and flicker of the moving-picture screen which was set on a little island on the lake—an island that was dense with trees and foliage, and that had seemed to him as mysterious and illimitable as the jungle. And opposite the island, on the shore, looking over the heads of the people in the boats, the greater part of the audience sat on wooden benches, all thirsty, silent, and insatiate, the petals of five hundred dim white faces all lifted to the flickering magic of the screen.
