his lungs, and exhaled it in a long sigh.
And then he stopped abruptly, and was standing very still, listening;
listening to this sigh, to the echo of it still within his consciousness,
as if testing it. He shook his head disapprovingly. "Gee," he said; "hope
I'm not getting discontented again!"

As if in response, another gentle gust came down the street; he caught
it as it came and drew it deep within him. His chest swelled, his eyes
brightened. And then suddenly he tensed; he rose a-tip-toe, heels close
together, his head went back; his hands stole to his armpits, and his
elbows began to wave up and down.

"Good Lord!" he ejaculated, catching himself up sharply; "here goes that
darned flapping again!"

He looked up and down the street, assuming a negligent attitude. His
forehead was red. "Nope," he said. No one had seen him. "_She_ saw me
this morning," he thought, and the red of his forehead came down to his
cheeks. "It's getting worse; a regular habit. Let me see--two, three; it
began three weeks ago----"

He shook his head perplexedly and resumed his way toward the Elevated
station.

"It may have been all right when I was a boy," he said to himself as he
swung along. "But now!

"Let me see. I was fourteen, the first time."

A picture rose before his eyes. It had happened in a far western land--a
land that now remained in his memory as a pool of gold beneath a
turquoise sky. He was lying there in the wild oats, upon his back, and
above him in the sky a hawk circled free. He watched it long thus,
relaxed in a sort of droning somnolence; then suddenly, to a particularly
fine spiral of the bird in the air, something like a convulsion had shot
through his body, and he had found himself erect, head back and chest
forward, his arms flapping----

"'Twas the day before I ran away with the circus," he soliloquized in the
midst of the throng milling up the Elevated station stairs. "And later,
when I had come back from the circus, I took that long bum on
brake-beams. And when I had come back from that, a little later I went
off in the forecastle of the 'Tropic Bird' to Tahiti. And each time that
flapping business came first. Every time I've done something wild and
foolish, I've flapped first like this. First I'd flap, then I'd feel like
doing something, I wouldn't know what, then I'd do it--and it would be
something foolish----"

The train slid up to the platform; he boarded it and by some miracle
found on the be