nd half a dozen of
them had been so clearly designed by the Poor Boy's imagination that he
could see them, every line of their faces, every detail of their
clothes. He knew every intonation of their voices. When he talked with
them, he did not have to make up their answers--they just came. And
better, other people, at first dim figureheads, were becoming clearer
and more vivid all the time, so it seemed sure that before long he would
know even the dogs of his settlement by sight.

The greatest difficulty in the game that he was playing lay in the
imperfection of his memory. As he built each house in the village he saw
it as plainly as I see the pages on which I am writing, but leaving it
to go at the next house he had to return again and again to fix the
image of the first. For instance, he got the whole village built, and
lying in his bed that night could only remember with real distinction
the commission house, the library, and one dwelling house, far down the
main street. The rest was vague--houses--white houses--not high--not
crowded, but all blurred and without detail, as if seen through tears.

He built the village, parts of it, four or five times before it became a
definite thing to him. Before he could stop, let us say, before the
Browns' house and take pleasure in the trim of their front door, before
he could see the heliotrope growing in the snow-white jardiniere in the
living-room window, before he knew that Mrs. Brown made cookies every
Friday, and that if you went round to the kitchen door and were very
hungry and polite she gave them away while they were still hot and
crisp.

It was precisely to call on Mrs. Brown that the Poor Boy had been so
eager to leave his own house. Realities began for him at the bottom of
the cliff. The road to the village crossed the glade in the pine
woods--the snow was packed and icy with much travel, with the sliding of
runners and the semicircular marks of horses' hoofs. As the Poor Boy
sped along on his skis, he met people in sleighs and was overtaken and
passed by others. They were his people--his alone. He had cheerful words
for all of them, and they for him. They were hazy--a little--to the
eye, but here and there he caught a face clearly and did not forget it
again--a baby in a blue-and-white blanket coat, that had bright red
cheeks and that smiled and showed two brand-new teeth; a boy with bare
hands and red knuckles (the Poor Boy sent him a pair of warm mittens
from