I stepped round the house to the open ocean of light that broke on soft shores of leaf and line, solemnizing, magnifying. It was like a glimpse into something which, afterward and afterward, is going to be. The definiteness of its premonitory message was startling. As when on seeing once that something had happened on my birthday, 1500, I felt as if I had heard from a kind of twin-time, so now I understood that this night was the birthday of far-off, immortal moments of my own, yet to be lived ... so friendly near we are to the immeasurable kindred. And there, from the shadow of the flowering currant bush, which just now is out of flower and fallen in meditative quiet--a man arose. My sharp fear, as savage a thing as if the world were ten thousand years younger, or as if I were a ptarmigan and he a cougar--was only momentary. For the cougar began to apologize and I recognized him. "Why," I said, "Peter." "Yes'm," said he, "I couldn't help being here--for a little while." "Neither could I, Peter," I told him. These were remarkable admissions of ours, for a large part of evening in the village is an uninhabitable part of day and, no matter in what splendour of sky it comes, is a thing to be shut outside experience. If we relate being wakened by something that goes bang, we begin it, "In the middle of the night, about twelve o'clock;" and, "They have a light in their house 'most every night till midnight," is a bit of sharp criticism not lightly to be lived down. But now it was as if Peter were a part of the time itself, and outlaw too, if the evening was outlaw. "I'm glad I saw you," Peter said--as if we were here met by chance in the usual manner. "I wanted to see you and tell you: I'm going away--to be gone right along." "Why," I said again, "Peter!" "You'd go too," he said simply. "I should want to go," I told him, "but I doubt if I would go. Where are you going?" "They want to put in a cannery at Marl. It'd be a branch. I'd run it myself." I did not miss the implication of the conditional mood. And _Marl_. What wonderful names they give to some of the towns of this world. That word makes a picture all of white cornices and white wings of buildings and bright façades. I dare say from the railroad track the real town of Marl shows an unpainted livery barn and a blue barber shop, but the name sounds like the name of a chapter of travel, beginning: To-day we drove to Marl to see the queen. Or the cataract. Or the porch of the morning. "Why are you going, Peter?" I drove in the peg for him. "I guess you know," he said. "It's all Miggy with me." I knew that he wanted before all else to tell somebody, to talk to somebody, to have somebody know. "Tell me, Peter," I said.