g in it, the telephones tell the few, and
the newspapers tell the crowd, and the crowd gets on to the railroad;
and before he rises from his sleep, behold the crowd in his front yard;
and if he can get as far as his own front gate in the thing he is going
for, he must be--either a statesman? a hero? or a great genius? None of
these. Let him be a corporation--of ideas or of dollars; let him be some
complex, solid, crowded thing, would he do anything for himself, or for
anybody else, or for everybody else, in a world too crowded to tell the
truth without breaking something, or to find room for it, when it is
told, without breaking something.

This is the Crowd's World.

* * * * *

What I have written I have written.

I have been sitting and reading it. It is a mood. But there is an
implacable truth in it, I believe, that must be gotten out and used.

As I have been reading I have looked up. I see the quiet little mountain
through my window standing out there in the sun. It looks around the
world as if nothing had happened; and the bobolinks out in the great
meadow are all flying and singing in the same breath and rowing through
the air, thousands of them, miles of them. They do not stop a minute.

A moment ago while I was writing I heard the Child outside on the
piazza, four years old, going by my window back and forth, listening to
the crunch of her new shoes as if it were the music of the spheres. Why
should not I do as well? I thought. The Child is merely seeing her shoes
as they are with as many senses and as many thoughts and desires at once
as she can muster, and with all her might.

What if I were to see the world like the Child?

Yesterday I went to Robert's Meadow. I saw three small city boys, with
their splendid shining rubber boots and their beautiful bamboo poles.
They were on their way home. They had only the one trout between them,
and that had been fondled, examined, and poked over and bragged about
until it was fairly stiff and brown with those boys--looked as if it had
been stolen out of a dried-herring box. They put it reverently back,
when I saw it, into their big basket. I smiled a little as I walked on
and thought how they felt about it.

Then suddenly it was as if I had forgotten something. I turned and
looked back; saw those three boys--a little retinue to that solitary
fish--trudging down the road in the yellow sun. And I stood there and
wanted to be in it!