the tip
of my tongue.

And this is the thing my brother means, the thing he has done for me,
solitary. I keep saying it over to myself. I lie still and try to take
it in--to feel the touch of the hands of his hands. Does any one say
this thing he is doing is done for money--that it is not done for
comradeship or love? Could money have thought of it or dared it or
desired it? Could all the money in the world ever pay him for it? This
paper-ticket I give him--for this berth I lie in--does it pay him for
it? Do I think to pay my fare to the infinite?--I--a parasite of a
great roar in a city? These seven nights in the hollow of his hand he
has held me and let me look upon the heaped-up stillness in heaven--of
clouds. I have visited with the middle of the sea.

And now with a thought, have I furnished my hot plain and smoke
forever.

I have not time to dream. I spell out each night, before I sleep, some
vast new far-off love, this new daily sense of mutual service, this
whole round world to measure one's being against. Crowds wait on me in
silence. I tip nations with a nickel. Who would believe it? I lie in
my berth and laugh at the bigness of my heart.

When I go out on the meadow at high noon and in the great sleepy sunny
silence there I stand and watch that long imperious train go by
putting together the White Mountains and New York, it is no longer as
it was at first, a mere train by itself to me,--a flash of parlor cars
between a great city and a sky up on Mt. Washington. When it swings up
between my two little mountains its huge banner of steam and smoke, it
is the beckoning of The Other Trains, the whole starful, creeping
through the Alps (that moment), stealing up the Andes, roaring through
the sun or pounding through the dark on the under sides of the world.

In the great silence on the meadow after the train rolls by, it would
be hard to be lonely for a minute, not to stand still, not to share in
spirit around the earth a few of the big, happy things--the far unseen
peoples in the sun, the streets, the domes and towers, the statesmen,
and poets, but always between and above and beneath the streets and
the domes and the towers, and the statesmen and poets--always the
engineers,--I keep seeing them--these men who dip up the world in
their hands, who sweep up life ... long, narrow, little towns of
souls, and bowl them through the Days and Nights.

In this huge, bottomless, speechless, modern world--one would r