“And in the South Station, furthermore, there are people from the wide world around. Actors and authors and artists are to be seen coming in and going out and sitting waiting in the waiting-rooms. Some mightily fine and curious persons have sat waiting in those waiting-rooms, as well as dingy Italians with strings of beads around their necks. “And in the South Station there are so many, many people, that, once in a long while, one can meet with some of those tiny things that one has waited for for centuries. In among a multitude of faces there may be a young face with lines of worn and vivid life in it, and with alert and much-used eyes, and with soft dull hair above it. In a flash one recognizes it, and in a flash it is gone. It is a face that means beautiful things and one has known it and its divineness a long, long time. And here in the South Station in Boston came the one gold glimpse of it. “And I have seen in the South Station a strange scene: that of a mild Jew man bearing the brunt of caring for his large family of small children, while their child-weary mother was allowed for once in her life to rest completely, sitting with her eyes closed and her hands folded. She might well rest tranquil in the thought that in giving birth to that small Hebraic army she had done her share of this dubious world’s penance. “And in the South Station, as much as anywhere, one feels the air of Boston. “The air of Boston, too, is wonderful--and ’tis not free for all to breathe. ’Tis for the anointed--the others must content them with the untinted, unscented air that blows wild from mountain-tops and north seas. But for me, I have eyes wherewith to see--and since the air of Boston has color, I can see it. And I have ears wherewith to hear--and since the air of Boston has musical vibrations, I can hear it. And I have sensibility--wherefore all that is pungent in the air of Boston, and all that is fine, and all that is art, and all that is beautiful, and all that is true, and all that is benign, and particularly all that is very cool and all that is bitterly contemptuous--are not wholly lost upon me. “If all the persons who go to and fro at the South Station were heroes and breathed the air there and left their dim shadows behind them--as they do--I presume the South Station would be hallowed ground. They all are not heroes, but they breathe the air and leave their dim shadows, whatever they may be, and ever after the air of the South Station is tinctured. And since more than a half of these people are of Boston, the air is tinctured therewith. “If you are civilized and conventional you may know and breathe this air. If you are not--well, at least you may stand and contemplate it. And always one can bide one’s time. “My contemplation of it has interested me.