be of
service to me. And now in my great loneliness I wanted to find not the
hotel, but Mr. Wemple, for I knew that with him I could talk on terms
of friendship, however frail. From the horse-car jogging up Broadway I
watched for the corner where the policeman told me the hotel had been;
I reached it and saw a tall building adorned by many golden signs,
inviting me not to the comfort of bed and board but to the purchase of
linens and hosiery. It was growing late. The part of the town through
which I was passing had put out its lights and gone home to bed, so I
had to abandon hope of finding Mr. Wemple, and turned into the first
hotel I saw, an imposing place with a broad window in which sat a
solemn, silent row of men gazing vacantly into the street.

Here at last I ended my journey, weary and lonely, without even Mr.
Wemple to welcome me to the city where I had cast my fortunes. Before
long I joined the solemn line and sat watching the street, and Broadway
below Union Square at night, even in those times, was not an enlivening
scene. My conquest was forgotten; my mind wandered back to the valley
at home. Here I sat listlessly, in a hot, narrow canyon through which
swept a thin, sluggish stream of life; above me was just a patch of
sky; before me was a tall cliff of steel and stone, pierced by
numberless dead windows. As I sat in the glare of electric lights, in
smoke-charged air, my ears ringing with the harsh medley of the street,
I fancied myself on the barn-bridge again. The moon would be rising
over the ridges and the valley would lie at my feet with its checkered
fields of brown and gray rolling away to the mountains, and the music
of the valley would be no harsh clatter of bells and hoofs; I should
hear the wind in the trees, the rustle of the ripening grain, the
whippoorwill calling from the elm by the creek, and the restless
bleating of sheep in the meadow. Thinking of these things, I asked
myself if the life I had left was not far better than the one I had
chosen; if the highest reward for my coming years of labor would not be
the right to return to it. But for pride I could have abandoned all my
mighty plans at that moment and gone back, even, as the Professor had
said, to doze like the very dogs. I dared not. My parents' joy at my
return might over-balance the loss of their high hopes for my fame, and
had they alone been in my thoughts I should have taken the night train
home. But I could not g