I'd go on back to my room and take off my shoes for to ease my aching feet; but whilst taking off your shoes is good for your feet it don't help the ache in your soul none. I'd set at the window and look out on them millions and millions of lights, all winking and blinking at me like hostile bright eyes, and away down below me in the street I could hear old automobile horns blatting like lost ghosts, and every now and then there'd rise up to my ears a sort of a rumble and a roar, like as if New York City was having indigestion pains; and I'll say it positively was lonesome. I could shut my eyes and see my own home-town with the shade trees leaning down towards the sidewalks like they was interested in what went on underneath them, and I could hear the voices of the neighbors, both white and black, calling back and forth to one another and I could seem to smell frying cat-fish spitting in the skillet at old Uncle Isom Woolfolk's hot snack-stand down back of the Market House, and I also could smell that damp, soothing kind of a smell which it rolls in off the river on a warm night and then--oh, my Blessed Maker!--something would hurt me like having the misery in your side. That's the way it was very frequent at the outsetting. But pretty soon I gets acquainted with a couple of colored boys which works in the apartment house next door to ours--not West Indians but regulation colored boys, one being from Macon, Georgia, and one from Memphis, Tennessee--and they takes to escorting me round with 'em at night, mainly in what the white folks calls the Harlem Black Belt. Fussing back and forth, thuslike, I makes yet more acquaintances and then--_bam_!--all at once there's a quick change in me and I ain't so choked up with lonesomeness like I was. All of a sudden my having lived heretofore always down in Kentucky has become to me just a kind of a far-off dream and it's almost like as if I had been a New York residenter for years past. 'Specially does I feel so when I goes up to the Pastime Club; which I joins it by invitation about a month ago and is now already being talked of for one of the honory offices at the next annual election which will come along in about five or six weeks from now.