During the summer day the beaches are lively and the vari-colored bathing suits and parasols offer little carnival panels at the ends of the east running streets. As you pass them on the north side bus or on the south side I. C., the sun, the swarm of bathers smeared like bits of brightly colored paint across the yellow sand and the obliterating sweep of water remind you of the modernist artists whose pictures are usually lithographic blurs. * * * * * Yet winter and summer, even when the thousands upon thousands of bathers cover the sand like a shower of confetti and when there are shouts and circus excitements along the beach, people who look at the lake seem always to become sad. One wonders why. Perhaps it is because the inanimate sweep of the water, its hugeness and silence, make one forget the petty things and the greedy trifles which form the routine of one's day. And when one forgets these things one remembers, alas, something they pleasantly obscured by their presence. A dream, perhaps, buried long ago. A hope, an emotion successfully interred under the amiable rubbish the days have piled up. Then, too, there is the question, "Where you going?" And an answer to it that seems to come out of the long reaches of water--"Come with me--somewhere--nowhere." These thoughts play in people's minds without words. They are almost more a part of the lake than of their thinking, as if they were, in fact, lake thoughts. Another reason why people grow sad when they look at the water of the lake is perhaps that the lake offers them an escape from the tawdry, nagging little responsibilities of the day that go with being a citizen and a breadwinner. Not that it invites to suicide. Quite the reverse; it invites to living. To doing something that has a sweep to it; that has a swagger to it. To setting sail for strange ports where strange adventures wait. So, as the I. C. trains rush their thousands to work and home again the citizens and breadwinners let their imaginations gallop toward a faraway horizon. And these imaginations came galloping back again and the breadwinners are saddened--by a memory. Yes, they were for a moment rovers, egad! swashbucklers, gentlemen and ladies of fortune free of the rigamarole burdens that keep them on the I. C. treadmill. And now they are again passengers. Going to work. Going home to go to work again tomorrow. It is easy to think that this is the secret of the sad little grimace the lake brings to the eyes of the train riders. * * * * *