'me' who was sitting
there in the hot June dusk, looking down on the
lively streets, was the same person who only a
few days before had no other excitement in life
than making Jack's coffee or ironing Norman's
shirts back in the hills of Arizona.

"I wasn't homesick or lonesome in the least,
but I had such a queer, untied, set-adrift
sensation, like the man must have had who wrote
that hymn, 'Lo, on a narrow neck of land,
'Twixt two unbounded seas I stand.' The
yesterdays are one sea, and the to-morrows
another, and me, waiting between them, just a
scrap of humanity--a stranger in a strange
city--wondering and wondering and wondering
what the next day would bring.

"Then I began to be almost afraid of what I'd
undertaken, and all of a sudden grew so cold
and depressed that I wished I was back in my
own little room in Lone-Rock. The shutters of
the back window had been closed all this time,
and when I got up to light the gas and write to
Jack of my safe arrival, I opened them to see
what kind of an outlook I was to have from that
window. You can imagine my surprise when I
found that it gave me a glimpse of the river.
Such a wide, full, sweeping river, with just
enough of a young moon over it to define its
banks, and remind me of the beautiful silvery
Potomac that I used to watch from my window at
Warwick Hall.

"A big steamboat came gliding around the bend,
with a deep musical whistle that sent the same
kind of an echo booming along the water, and
there were lights twinkling from every deck and
from the wharves along shore to which it was
headed. Somehow it made me think of a song that
we used to sing at the Wigwam, and that Holland
always sang wrong, for some unaccountable
reason insisting on saying 'shining' instead of
'margin.'

"'At the _shining_ of the river, lay we every burden down.'

"The wide silvery tracks that the crescent moon
and the wharf lights made reassured me, and I
stopped worrying about the future, and laid my
burden of apprehension and depression right
down, and just sat and enjoyed the sight.
Presently I saw a litt