een behind
the great clock face of the city--an always unknown troupe of rascally
mummers for whom the police are continually combing and setting large
dragnets.

In the evening men light their tobacco and read the little wooden
phrases of the press that squeal and mumble the sagas of the
lawbreakers. Women come from the washing of dishes and eating of food
and pick up the crumpled pages.... A scavenger digging for the disgusts
and abnormalities of life, is the press. A yellow journal of lies,
idiocies, filth. Ignoring the wholesome, splendid things of life--the
fine, edifying beat of the tick-tock. Yet they read, glancing dully at
headlines, devouring monotonously the luridness beneath headlines. They
read with an irritation and a vague wonder. Tick, say the streets, and
tock, say the houses; and within them men and women tick. To work and
home again. Home again and to work. New shoes grow old. New seasons
vanish. Years grind. Life sinks slowly away with a tick-tock on its
lips.

Yet each evening comes the ragged twopenny minstrel--a blear-eyed,
croaking minstrel, and the good folk give him ear. No pretty words in
rhythms from his tongue. No mystic cadences quaver in his voice. Yet he
comes squealing out his song of an endless "Extra! All about the
mysteries and the torments of life. All about the raptures, lusts, and
adventures that the day has spilled. Read 'em and weep! Read 'em and
laugh! Here's the latest, hot off the presses, from dreamers and
lawbreakers. Extra!"

Thus the city sits, baffled by itself, looking out upon a tick-tock of
windows and reading with a wonder in its thought, "Who are these
people?..."

CHAPTER II

At ten o'clock the courts of the city crowd up. The important gentlemen
who devote themselves to sending people to jail and to preventing them
from being sent to jail, appear with fat books under their arms and
brief-cases in their hands. They have slept well and eaten well and have
arrived at their tasks with clear heads containing arguments. These are
arguments vastly more important than poems that writers make or
histories that dreamers invent. For they are arrangements of words which
function in the absence of God. God is not exactly absent, to be sure,
since the memory of Him lingers in the hearts of men. But it is a vague
memory and at times unreliable. It would appear that He was on earth
only for a short interval and failed to make any decided impression.

Therefore, at