ago recognized that unless they were my ideas from the dim days
before their birth they could never be mine, and it was only a waste
of time to wrestle with them. So when a friend declares he has a dandy
plot for me, I summon what patience I may and pretend to listen, while
planning a better succession of perennials for next year's garden, or
mentally reviewing the prospect of cutting three strokes off my golf
score.

[Illustration]

_The Twilight Veil_

New York! How few of us call it home! We have been sucked into it, as
into a whirlpool, and as we spin round and round on its mighty unrest
our hearts and fancies find repose in memory--the memory of an old New
England village, or a corn field and a split-rail fence and then the
level prairie, or cotton fields and the red handkerchiefs of the
negroes, or the vineyard slopes of Sicily, or the great white surf
beating up the cliffs of Connemara. It may be that the second and
third generations of immigrants, born on the East Side, are true New
Yorkers, just as a vanishing generation of elderly men and women on
Murray Hill and the Avenue are true New Yorkers. But the great
majority of New York's five millions cherish in their hearts either
the memory or the hope of some spot far away to which they give the
allegiance of home love. Ours is a curious city in that respect.
Perhaps, indeed, it is a fortunate one. Without such memory or such
hope, the flat-dwelling imposed on most New Yorkers by economic
necessity would be a deadly thing--or shall we say, a more deadly
thing?

If you desire a curious experience, go into a New York club like the
Yale or Harvard or Players' club, and collect a dozen men at random,
asking each for a little word-sketch of his childhood home. Seldom
enough will the scene of that sketch be in New York City, and you will
probably be surprised to find how infrequently it will be in any city.
A kind of urban consciousness gets complete possession of us after we
have lived long on Manhattan Island, and we are prone to forget what a
geographically tiny spot it is. We forget the country. It comes as a
surprise when we discover how many of our fellows were, like us,
country bred. We are still a nation, at bottom, of little white
dwelling houses, if not any longer of little white school houses. (I
know the phrase is little red school houses, only they never were red,
but white!) This is probab