In the meantime I lay for long hours on the little bed in my room reading the last book I had got from the library or walked in a near-by park under the trees. Time ceased to exist and the days became night while the nights became days. Often I came back to my room at two in the morning, washed my shirt, underwear and socks at a washbowl in a corner, hung them out at my window facing the court to dry and lying down naked on my bed read by a gaslight until daylight had come. Marvelous days! Now I was marching with the conqueror Julius Cæsar over the vast domains of the mighty Roman Empire. What a life and how proud Julius and I were of his conquests and how often we spoke together of the doings of Cicero, Pompey, Cato and the others in Rome. Indeed Cæsar and I had become for the nonce the most intimate of friends and often enough we discussed the unworthiness of some of the other Romans, particularly of that Cicero. The man was no better than a dog, a literary hack, when all was said and done, and such fellows are never to be trusted. Often enough Cicero had talked with Cæsar and pretended to be Cæsar’s friend but, as Julius often pointed out to me, such fellows were wont to veer about with every wind that blew, “Writers are the greatest cowards in the world and my own greatest weakness is that I have a kind of hankering that way myself. Let a man but get into power and he will always find such scribbling fellows willing and anxious to sing his praises. They are the greatest cur dogs in the world,” he declared vehemently. And so I had become in fancy the friend of Cæsar and all day I marched beside him and at evening went with him and his men into their camp. The days and weeks passed. I sat by the window looking into the little brick-paved court and there were many other windows. As it was summer they were all open. Evening came, after a day of walking in dreams, and I had come into my room and taking off my coat had thrown myself down on my bed. When darkness came I did not light a light but lay quietly listening. I had stepped now out of the past and into the present and all about me were the voices of living people. The men and women in the rooms along the court did not laugh or sing often and indeed in the many times, during my life, I have lived, as I did then, lying like a little worm in the middle of the apple of modern life, I have never found that American men and women, except only the Negroes, laugh or sing much in their homes or at their work. It was evening and a street-car conductor had come home to his wife. They were silent in each other’s presence for a time, then they began to quarrel. Sometimes they fought and after that they made love. The love-making of the couples along the court aroused my own passions and I had bad dreams at night.