hrough easy gradations, ceased. I saw some
lights in the rain outside. How should I know it was New York? We had
even changed climates since we started. The passengers of my early days
in the train had passed away. There was nothing to show. More, I felt
no exultation--which should have been the first of warnings. Merely we
got to a railway station one night, and a negro insisted that I should
get out and stop out. This was N' Yark, he said.

It was night, I repeat; there was a row of cabs in a dolorous rain. I
saw a man in a shiny cape under the nearest lamp, and beyond him a
vista of reflections from vacant stones, which to me always, more than
bleak hills or the empty round of the sea, is desolation. There were no
spacious portals. There was no figure of Liberty, haughty but
welcoming. There was rain, and cabs that waited without hope. There was
exactly what you find at the end of a twopenny journey when your only
luggage is an evening paper, an umbrella, and that tired feeling. Not
knowing where to go, and little caring, I followed the crowd, and so
found myself in a large well-lighted hall. Having no business there--it
was a barren place--I pushed on, and came suddenly to the rim of the
world.

Before me was the immensity of dark celestial space in which wandered
hosts of uncharted stars; and below my feet was the abyss of old night.
Just behind me was a woman telling her husband that they had forgotten
Jimmy's boots, and couldn't go back now, for the ferry was just coming.

Jimmy's boots! Now, when you are a released soul, ascending the night,
and the earth below is a bright silver ball, not so very big, and some
other viewless soul behind you, still with thoughts absent on worldly
trifles, mutters concerning boots when in the Milky Way, you will know
how I felt. Here was the ultimate empty dark in which the sun could
never shine. The sun had not merely left the place. It had never been
there. It was a remote star, one of myriads in the constellations at
large, the definite groups which occulted in the void before me.
Looking at those swiftly moving systems, I watched for the flash of
impact; but no great light of collision broke. The groups of lights
passed and repassed noiselessly.

Then one constellation presently detached itself, and its orbit
evidently would intersect our foothold. It came nearer out of the
night, till I could see plainly that it appeared to be a long section
of a well-lighted street, say