A day or two later I am in the city, just before Christmas, when the stores are rushed and jammed with shoppers. It is late afternoon and yellow lights flood out of great glass windows and crowded doors. There is a tinkling of bells, cups, and tambourines, a tooting of horns through the general confused roaring of the streets. Just as I pass a huge department store, I hear an odd, disassociated center of pipings and cries. I can connect it with none of the turmoil around me. I stand and listen. There, across the street, like a theatrical backdrop, is an abandoned brownstone building, four or five stories high, with a grimy, ponderous façade. It is covered with ledges and its dark, empty windows reflect the pond-dark evening skies ... every now and then a white cloud moves across them with disembodied calm. On the ledges are hundreds of starlings, pushing, crowding, hopping, flying up against the windows, perched all along the heavy front of the building--dingy birds, with their lost Christmas cries. There they are, adapted almost domestically to man’s world, tough in a way that a purple finch or a veery cannot be, but still a race apart. Then I am back down the street again with my own tribe that teems with general might and inner purposes of its own, going and returning--out continually--representatives of a force of mind that can gauge the mechanics of the universe, and in animal power overrunning the earth. I see in these shoppers an evolutionary line of vision never satisfied, a history of cities, ledges of light running to unknown futures. The world is in the hands of these omnipresent and familiar beings, the young and the old, black-haired, brown, yellow, or gray, in the indefinite shapes and interchanges of their lives--the human race hurrying through its own lighted ways. And if I shouted: “Stop! Look away from yourselves. Consider the starlings!” with what sort of mild madness would I be credited? _January_ _Exposure_