n
cold-storage sensibilities. He used often to go down to Fulton Market
before daylight and walk about among the stalls and shops, piled with
tons of food of all kinds. He would talk to the marketmen, and the
buyers and grocers, and come away feeling almost happy for a time.

Then, one day, with a sort of shock, he remembered a farmer he had
known back home in Winnebago. He knew the farmers for miles around,
naturally, in his business. This man had been a steady butter-and-egg
acquaintance, one of the wealthy farmers in that prosperous Wisconsin
farming community. For his family's sake he had moved into town, a
ruddy, rufous-bearded, clumping fellow, intelligent, kindly. They had
sold the farm with a fine profit and had taken a box-like house on
Franklin Street. He had nothing to do but enjoy himself. You saw him out
on the porch early, very early summer mornings.

You saw him ambling about the yard, poking at a weed here, a plant
there. A terrible loneliness was upon him; a loneliness for the soil he
had deserted. And slowly, resistlessly, the soil pulled at him with its
black strength and its green tendrils down, down, until he ceased to
struggle and lay there clasped gently to her breast, the mistress he had
thought to desert and who had him again at last, and forever.

"I don't know what ailed him," his widow had said, weeping. "He just
seemed to kind of pine away."

* * * * *

It was one morning in April--one soft, golden April morning--when this
memory had struck Hosey Brewster. He had been down at Fulton Market.
Something about the place--the dewy fresh vegetables, the crates of
eggs, the butter, the cheese--had brought such a surge of homesickness
over him as to amount to an actual nausea. Riding uptown in the Subway
he had caught a glimpse of himself in a slot-machine mirror. His face
was pale and somehow shrunken. He looked at his hands. The skin hung
loose where the little pads of fat had plumped them out.

"Gosh!" he said. "Gosh, I--"

He thought, then, of the red-faced farmer who used to come clumping into
the cold-storage warehouse in his big boots and his buffalo coat. A
great fear swept over him and left him weak and sick.

The chill grandeur of the studio-building foyer stabbed him. The
glittering lift made him dizzy, somehow, this morning. He shouldn't have
gone out without some breakfast perhaps. He walked down the flagged
corridor softly; turned the key ever so