The newspaper man watched him. As he stood looking after him some one tapped him on the shoulder. He turned. "Specs" McLaughlin of the detective bureau. "Specs" rubbed his chin contemplatively and smiled. "Know that guy?" "Who?" "No; just bumped into him. How come?" "You might have got a story out of him," "Specs" grinned. "That's George Cook. Just let out of the Joliet pen this morning. Served fourteen years. Quite a yarn at the time. For killing a pal in the Wellington hotel over some dame. I guess that was before your time, though. He just landed in town this noon." The detective rubbered into the moving crowd. "I'm sort of keeping an eye on him," he said, and hurried on. GRASS FIGURES You will sometimes notice when you sit on the back porch after dinner that there are other back porches with people on them. And when you sit on the front steps, that there are other front steps similarly occupied. In the park when you lie down on the grass you will see there are others lying on the grass. And when you look out of your window you can observe other people looking out of their windows. In the streets when you walk casually and have time to look around you will see others walking casually and looking around, too. And in the theater or church or where you work there are always the inevitable others, always reflecting yourself. You might get to thinking about this as the newspaper reporter did. The newspaper reporter got an idea one day that the city was nothing more nor less than a vast, broken mirror giving him back garbled images of himself. The newspaper reporter was trying to write fiction stories on the side and he thought: "If I can figure out something for a background, some idea or something that will explain about people, and then have the plot of the story sort of prove this general idea by a specific incident, that would be the way to work it." Thus, when the reporter had figured it out that the city was a mirror reflecting himself, he grew excited. That was the kind of idea he had always been looking for. But at night in his bedroom when he started to write he hit a snag. He had thought he held in his mind the secret of the city. Yet when he came to write about it the secret slipped away and left him with nothing. He sat looking out of his bedroom window, noticing that the telephone poles in the dark alley looked like huge, inverted music notes. Then he thought: "It doesn't do any good to get an idea that doesn't tell you anything. Just figuring out that the city is a mirror that reflects me all the time doesn't give me the secret of streets and crowds. Because the question then arises: 'Who am I that the mirror reflects, and what am I? What in Sam Hill is my motif?'" * * * * *