st of our musings, just before we turned out the lights,
it occurred to me quite suddenly that, since he had finished his story,
it was quite possible that we should not see him again.

CHAPTER XII

THE VISION FROM THE KILLS[A]

For a long time that night I lay watching the gem-like glitter of the
lights that fringed the eastern horizon. A strong north wind shook the
house, sweeping the clouds before it with a contemptuous energy that had
in it a promise of frost on the morrow. As the stars rose it was as
though the lights of the city themselves were rising into the clear sky,
emblems of the vast and serene power that had sent them forth. High
above the level constellations soared the two great beacons of the
Metropolitan and Woolworth towers, like the masthead lights of some
enormous vessel, while away northward, almost hidden by the swinging
limbs of our elm, the occulting flash on the Times Building added a
disquieting element to the otherwise peaceful scene. For me at least the
glamour, the mystery and the beauty of that amazing city had never worn
thin. For me, after a day in her roaring streets, after a scramble in
her lotteries, there ever comes a recrudescence of that wonder with
which I beheld my first view of her from the Jersey shore. The cynical
American says, I know not with what truth, that the alien, clutching his
bundle and gazing with anxious, frightened eyes toward the mountainous
masonry of Manhattan, catching sight of the green sunlit image of
Liberty with her benign unfaltering regard, holds his breath and feels
within his bosom a fierce but short-lived ecstasy of joy. For one brief
instant (I still quote the cynical American) faith and hope flame in his
heart and the future lies before him as a shining pathway of industry
and peace.

For me, however, the impression that New York had made was neither so
unpractical nor so evanescent. For me there was reserved a certain
_fear_ of those multitudes and those heaven-kissing towers, an
apprehension that even a species of victory after defeat had not
sufficed to dethrone. Call it perhaps awe, mingled with homage to the
indomitable spirit of the race, rather than fear.

This I felt, and every visit to the heart of the city quickened it,
stirring my imagination to some fresh effort, and revealing some new
phase of the exhaustless energy of America.

It was only natural that in the course of my musings it should strike me
as strange that Mr. C