and making again for the open country. Some there may be who will
feel that I am exaggerating my sensations and impressions, but they do
not know of my memories of a former life, nor of how, many years ago,
I left the city quite defeated, glad indeed that I was escaping, and
thinking (as I have related elsewhere) that I should never again set
foot upon a paved street. These things went deep with me. Only the other
day, when a friend asked me how old I was, I responded instantly--our
unpremeditated words are usually truest--with the date of my arrival at
this farm.

"Then you are only ten years old!" he exclaimed with a laugh, thinking I
was joking.

"Well," I said, "I am counting only the years worth living."

No; I existed, but I never really lived until I was reborn, that
wonderful summer here among these hills.

I said I felt afraid in the streets of Kilburn, but it was no physical
fear. Who could be safer in a city than the man who has not a penny in
his pockets? It was rather a strange, deep, spiritual shrinking. There
seemed something so irresistible about this life of the city, so utterly
overpowering. I had a sense of being smaller than I had previously
felt myself, that in some way my personality, all that was strong or
interesting or original about me, was being smudged over, rubbed out.
In the country I had in some measure come to command life, but here,
it seemed to me, life was commanding me and crushing me down. It is a
difficult thing to describe: I never felt just that way before.

I stopped at last on the main street of Kilburn in the very heart of
the town. I stopped because it seemed necessary to me, like a man in a
flood, to touch bottom, to get hold upon something immovable and stable.
It was just at that hour of evening when the stores and shops are
pouring forth their rivulets of humanity to join the vast flood of the
streets. I stepped quickly aside into a niche near the corner of an
immense building of brick and steel and glass, and there I stood with my
back to the wall, and I watched the restless, whirling, torrential tide
of the streets. I felt again, as I had not felt it before in years,
the mysterious urge of the city--the sense of unending, overpowering
movement.

There was another strange, indeed uncanny, sensation that began to creep
over me as I stood there. Though hundreds upon hundreds of men and women
were passing me every minute, not one of them seemed to see me. Most
of them