own. They are
denied a last golden flash across the sky. In October leaves should be
carried away, out over the plains, in a wind. They should go dancing
away.

Yesterday morning I arose at daybreak and went for a walk. There was a
heavy fog and I lost myself in it. I went down into the plains and
returned to the hills and everywhere the fog was as a wall before me.
Out of it trees sprang suddenly, grotesquely, as in a city street late
at night people come suddenly out of the darkness into the circle of
light under a street lamp. Above there was the light of day forcing
itself slowly into the fog. The fog moved slowly. The tops of trees
moved slowly. Under the trees the fog was dense, purple. It was like
smoke lying in the streets of a factory town.

An old man came up to me in the fog. I know him well. The people here
call him insane. "He is a little cracked," they say. He lives alone in a
little house buried deep in the forest and has a small dog he carries
always in his arms. On many mornings I have met him walking on the road
and he has told me of men and women who were his brothers and sisters,
his cousins, aunts, uncles, brothers-in-law. The notion has possession
of him. He cannot draw close to people near at hand so he gets hold of a
name out of a newspaper and his mind plays with it. One morning he told
me he was a cousin to the man named Cox who at the time when I write is
a candidate for the presidency. On another morning he told me that
Caruso the singer had married a woman who was his sister-in-law. "She is
my wife's sister," he said, holding the little dog closely. His gray
watery eyes looked appealingly up to me. He wanted me to believe. "My
wife was a sweet slim girl," he declared. "We lived together in a big
house and in the morning walked about arm in arm. Now her sister has
married Caruso the singer. He is of my family now." As some one had told
me the old man had never been married I went away wondering.

One morning in early September I came upon him sitting under a tree
beside a path near his house. The dog barked at me and then ran and
crept into his arms. At that time the Chicago newspapers were filled
with the story of a millionaire who had got into trouble with his wife
because of an intimacy with an actress. The old man told me the actress
was his sister. He is sixty years old and the actress whose story
appeared in the newspapers is twenty, but he spoke of their childhood
together. "You wou