s, mother." I was growing impatient, I wished she would go, for now
it was nearly time for the train.

"Have you ever played other games like that? I mean where you leave
yourself and look back--and see your own body behind you."

"Yes--in bed in Brooklyn when I was quite little."

"Where did you go from your bed?"

"I went to the end of the garden. I heard drunken sailors and dockers
shouting in that vile saloon below." This was not true. What I had
really done was to lie in bed and whisper, "_Suppose_ I were out
there"--which is very different. I was too young then to have learned
the real trick. But now I was so proud of it that I honestly thought I
had always known how. "It was a game I had with the harbor," I said.

"With the harbor." I felt her hand slowly tighten on mine. Then all at
once as we heard the first low grumble of the freight train coming, my
mother's hold grew tighter and tighter. "Open your eyes." I opened them
quickly, for her voice was sharp and stern. She held me until the sound
was gone.

"Do you hear it any longer?" she asked quietly at last.

"No," I whispered. My breath still came fast.

"Neither do I." There was another silence. "Let's go and sit by the
window," she said.

And there she talked to me of the stars. How great they were and how
very quiet. She said that the greatest men in the world were almost
always quiet like that. They never let their hands get cold.

Often after that in the evenings just before I went to bed we had these
talks about the stars. And not only in the mountains. On sparkling
frosty winter nights we watched them over the harbor. And the things she
said about them were so utterly absorbing that I would never think to
look down, would barely hear the toots and the puffings and grinding of
wheels from that infernal region below. For always when she spoke of
the stars my mother spoke of great men too, the men who had done the
"finest" things--a few in the clash and jar of life like Washington and
Lincoln, but most of them more quietly, by preaching, writing, painting,
composing, sermons, books, pictures and music so "fine" that all the
best people on earth had known about them and loved them.

As I grew older she read to me more and more about these men. And
sometimes I would feel deeply content as though I had found what I
wanted. But more often I would feel myself swell up big inside of me,
restless, worrying, groping for something. I didn't know what I