ang at half-past four.

I cannot recall a more virginal morning than that snowy twilight before
the dawn. No description that I have ever read--not even the daybreak in
"Prince Otto," or Pippa's dawn boiling in pure gold over the rim of
night--would be just to that exquisite growth of colour in the eastern
sky. The violet star faded to forget-me-not and then to silver and at
last closed his weary eye; the flat Long Island prairie gradually lost
its fairy-tale air of mystery and dream; the close ceiling of the night
receded into infinite space as the sun waved his radiant arms over the
horizon.

But this was after I had left the house. The sun did not raise his head
from the pillow until I was in the train. The Nut Brown Maid was still
nested in her warm white bed as I took her up some tea and toast just
before departing.

The walk to the station, over the crisply frozen snow, was delicious.
Marathon is famous for its avenue of great elms, which were casting deep
blue shadows in the strange light--waning moon and waxing day. The air
was very chill--only just above zero--and the smoking car seemed very
cold and dismal. I huddled my overcoat about me and tried to smoke and
read the paper. But in that stale, fetid odour of last night's tobacco
and this morning's wet arctics the smoker was but a dismal place. The
exaltation of the dawn dropped suddenly into a kind of shivering nausea.

I changed to another car and threw away the war news. Just then the sun
came gloriously over the edge of the fields and set the snow afire. As
we rounded the long curve beyond Woodside I could see the morning light
shining upon the Metropolitan Tower, and when we glided into the
basement of the Pennsylvania Station my heart was already attuned to the
thrill of that glorious place. Perhaps it can never have the fascination
for me that the old dingy London terminals have--King's Cross,
Paddington, or Saint Pancras, with their delicious English bookstalls
and those porters in corduroy--but the Pennsylvania is a wonderful place
after all, a marble palace of romance and a gallant place to roam about.
It seems like a stable without horses, though, for where are the trains?
No chance to ramble about the platforms (as in London) to watch the Duke
of Abercorn or the Lord Claude Hamilton, or other of those green or blue
English locomotives with lordly names, being groomed for the run.

In the early morning the Pennsylvania Station catches in its
hi