This discourse is becoming a bit dolorous. But the subject rather requires an andante treatment. The city's press agents will tell you quite another story about the lake--about the "city's playground" and how conducive it is to healthful sport and joyous recreation. But, on the other hand, there is this other side, so to speak, of the lake. For the lake belongs to those familiar things that surprise people into uncomfortable silences. One could as easily write about the sky in this vein, since the lake, like the sky, challenges the monotony of people's lives with another monotony--the monotony of nature that seems to engulf, obliterate, reduce to puny proportions the routine by which people live and which, fortunately, they delude themselves into admiring. There is also the question of beauty. This is a delicate issue to introduce into one's daily reading and the reader's pardon is solicited with proper humiliation. And yet, there is a question of beauty, of soul states and aesthetic nuances involved in the consideration of the lake. Beauty by one definition is the sensatory excitement stirred in people by the rhythm of line, the vibration of color, the play of motion and the surprise of idea. It is usually a saddening effect that beauty produces and perhaps this is because beauty is something like an illumination that while admirable in itself throws into pathetic evidence all the ugly and unbeautiful things of one's life. In this somewhat involved aesthetic principle there is probably another hint at the causes of the sadness people show when they look at the lake. * * * * * Today the lake wears its autumn aspect. Out of the train window one sees a wedge of geese flying south or occasionally a lone bird circling like an endless note over the water. The waves look cold and their symmetrical crisscross makes one think of the chill, lonely nights that beckon outside the coziness of one's home windows. On summer days the lake is sometimes like a huge lavender leaf veined with gold. Sometimes it becomes festive and wears the awning stripes of cloud and sun. Or it grows serene and reminds one of a superb domesticity--as it lies pointed like a grate, arched like a saucer or the back of a sleeping kitten. But today its autumn is a bit depressing. It no longer lures toward strange adventure. Instead its grayness seems to say to one, "Stay away--stay away. Hide away in warm houses and warm overcoats. Men are little things--puny things." It is when one leaves the city and goes to visit or to live in another place where there is no lake that the lake grows y alive in one's mind. One becomes thirsty for it and dreams of it. One remembers it then as something that was almost an essential part of life, like a third dimension. In some way one associates one's day dreams with the lake and falls into thinking that there is something unfinished, sterile about living with no lake at one's elbow.