ung
night began to make itself felt. First he walked
through the streets, going softly and quietly along,
thinking thoughts that he tried to put into words. He
said that Helen White was a flame dancing in the air
and that he was a little tree without leaves standing
out sharply against the sky. Then he said that she was
a wind, a strong terrible wind, coming out of the
darkness of a stormy sea and that he was a boat left on
the shore of the sea by a fisherman.

That idea pleased the boy and he sauntered along
playing with it. He went into Main Street and sat on
the curbing before Wacker's tobacco store. For an hour
he lingered about listening to the talk of men, but it
did not interest him much and he slipped away. Then he
decided to get drunk and went into Willy's saloon and
bought a bottle of whiskey. Putting the bottle into his
pocket, he walked out of town, wanting to be alone to
think more thoughts and to drink the whiskey.

Tom got drunk sitting on a bank of new grass beside the
road about a mile north of town. Before him was a white
road and at his back an apple orchard in full bloom. He
took a drink out of the bottle and then lay down on the
grass. He thought of mornings in Winesburg and of how
the stones in the graveled driveway by Banker White's
house were wet with dew and glistened in the morning
light. He thought of the nights in the barn when it
rained and he lay awake hearing the drumming of the
raindrops and smelling the warm smell of horses and of
hay. Then he thought of a storm that had gone roaring
through Winesburg several days before and, his mind
going back, he relived the night he had spent on the
train with his grandmother when the two were coming
from Cincinnati. Sharply he remembered how strange it
had seemed to sit quietly in the coach and to feel the
power of the engine hurling the train along through the
night.

Tom got drunk in a very short time. He kept taking
drinks from the bottle as the thoughts visited him and
when his head began to reel got up and walked along the
road going away from Winesburg. There was a bridge on
the road that ran out of Winesburg north to Lake Erie
and the drunken boy made his way along the road to the
bridge. There he sat down. He tried to drink again, but
when he had taken the cork out of the bottle he became
ill and put it quickly back. His head was rocking back
and forth and so he sat on the stone approach to the
bridge and sighed. His head seemed