It was perhaps a couple of hours later when I woke again, disturbed this time not by noise, but by the sudden absence of it. One winter’s night the inhabitants of Niagara, similarly, woke up because, ice having formed, the thunder of the falls had ceased. I listened a moment, then went out. The rain had ceased, the clouds were gone, in a clear sky the three-quarter moon shone brightly. The rain-washed air seemed perfumed beyond belief. Nor did the old moon merely “look round her when the heavens were bare,” she sprawled fantastically at full length, as it were, in her magnificent blue-black bed of naked space. I went out to a clear spot among the trees. Far away rose a soft murmur. The air hummed and shook with the roar of distant rapids, so calm and still the night was. No bird, no animal cried. The earth herself, it seemed, stopped turning in that wonderful stillness. Those few minutes painted a picture that memory must always keep.... Three months later the first week in October found us in New York again. The bullets were forgotten and, of course, unmentioned, and five months of glorious wasted time lay safely behind us. CHAPTER XXVIII If it is impossible to recapture the boyish moods of those early days, it is also difficult not to import into these notes the point of view and feelings that belong to later life. Surely, but gradually, the scale of time changes with the years, and with it the range and quality of the emotions: to-day, a year seems a very brief period; the few months spent in the woods after our Gold Fields fiasco seemed both an eternity, yet far too brief. A faint flavour of childhood’s immense scale, when twelve months was an immeasurable stretch of time, still clung to them, perhaps. But the magnet of New York drew us. Any idea of returning to England until I had made good was far from me. We arrived in the detested city late in October, with livings to earn, and with less money than when we had first come two years before. We took separate rooms this time, for I had learned my lesson about sharing beds and clothes and scanty earnings. It was to be each man for himself. Paxton disappeared immediately; only occasionally did I hear his “Ouch, Ouch!” again; M. found a bed in Harlem and started to teach boxing; I took quarters in East 21st Street, on the top floor of a cheap but cleanish house, and arranged for breakfast and dinner in a neighbouring boarding-house at $2.50 a week.