inary night thoughts
above the town of Weissnichtwo; "Prometheus Bound" would have been
impossible. Only one with at least a dram of dizziness could have
conceived an "eagle-baffling mountain, black, wintry, dead, unmeasured."
In the days when we read Jules Verne, was not our chief pleasure found in
his marvelous way of suspending us with swimming senses over some fearful
abyss; wet and slippery crags maybe, and void and blackness before us and
below; and then just to give full measure of fright, a sound of running
water in the depths. Doesn't it raise the hair? Could a tinman have
written it?

But even so, I would like to feel at home on my own roof and have a
slippered familiarity with my slates and spouts. A chimney-sweep in the
old days doubtless had an ugly occupation, and the fear of a sooty death
must have been recurrent to him. But what a sable triumph was his when he
had cleared his awful tunnel and had emerged into daylight, blooming, as
Lamb would say, in his first tender nigritude! "I seem to remember," he
continues, "that a bad sweep was once left in a stack with his brush to
indicate which way the wind blew." After observing the tinman for a while,
I put on rubber shoes and slunk up to the ridgepole, the very watershed of
my sixty-foot kingdom, my legs slanting into the infinities of the North
and South. It sounds unexciting when written, but there I was, astride my
house, up among the vents and exhausts of my former cloistered life, my
head outspinning the weathercock. My Matterhorn had been climbed, "the
pikes of darkness named and stormed." Next winter when I sit below snug by
the fire and hear the wind funneling down the chimney, will not my peace
be deeper because I have known the heights where the tempest blows, and
the rain goes pattering, and the whirling tin cones go mad?

Right now, if I dared, I would climb to the roof again, and I would sit
with my feet over the edge and crane forward and do crazy things just
because I could. Then maybe my neighbors would mistake the point of my
philosophy and lock me up; would sympathize with my fancies as did Sir
Toby and Maria with Malvolio. If one is to escape bread and water in the
basement, one's opinions on such slight things as garters and roofs must
be kept dark. Be a freethinker, if you will, on the devil, the deep sea,
and the sunrise, but repress yourself in the trifles.

I like flat roofs. There is in my town a public library on the top story
of