The sentences rang through John Webster like great bells ringing. He sat upright on the park bench. Had the listless fellows sitting about him on other benches heard the words? For just a moment he thought the words might be running like living things through the streets of his town, stopping people on the streets, making people look up from their work in offices and factories. “One had better go a little slow and not get oneself out of hand,” he told himself. He began trying to think along another road. Across a little stretch of grass and a roadway before him there was a store with trays of fruit, oranges, apples, grapefruit, and pears arranged on the sidewalk and now a wagon stopped at the store door and began to unload other things. He looked long and hard at the wagon and at the store front. His mind slipped off at a new tangent. There he was, himself, John Webster, sitting on that bench in a park in the very heart of a town in the state of Wisconsin. It was fall and nearly time for frost to come, but there was still new life in the grass. How green the grass was in the little park! The trees were alive too. Soon now they would flame with color and then sleep for a period. To all the world of living green things there would come the flame of evening and then the night of winter. Out before the world of animal life the fruits of the earth would be poured. Out of the ground they would come, off trees and bushes, out of the seas, lakes, and rivers, the things that were to maintain animal life during the period when the world of vegetable life slept the sweet sleep of winter. It was a thing to think about too. Everywhere, all about him must be men and women who lived altogether unaware of such things. To tell the truth he had himself been, all his life, unaware. He had just eaten food, stuffed it into his body through his mouth. There had been no joy. He had not really tasted things, smelled things. How filled with fragrant suggestive smells life might be! It must have come about that as men and women went out of the fields and hills to live in cities, as factories grew and as the railroads and steamboats came to pass the fruits of the earth back and forth a kind of dreadful unawareness must have grown in people. Not touching things with their hands people lost the sense of them. That was it, perhaps. John Webster remembered that, when he was a boy, such matters were differently arranged. He lived in the town and knew nothing much of country life, but at that time town and country were more closely wed.