"I get up in the morning, and I catch bugs, and I study them, and I dry them--and I go to bed. I get up in the morning, and I catch bugs, and I study them, and I dry them--and I go to bed. I get up _every_ morning, and I do the same damn thing, over and over and over and over, day in, day out, day in, day out. Nothing else.... No drinks, no lights, no girls, no sprees, no cards, no gang, no risks, no jobs, no bulls, no anything! God! I could say my prayers to Broadway, anywhere from the Battery up to Columbus Circle! I want it all so hard I could point my nose like a lost dog and howl for it! "... There is a Dutchman got a restaurant down on Eighth Avenue, and I dream at nights about the hotdog-and-kraut, and the ham-and that they give you there, and the jane that slings it. Hips on her like a horse, she has, and an arm that shoves your eats under your nose in a way you've got to respect. I smell those eats in my sleep. I want some more Childs' bucks. I want to see the electrics winking on the roofs. I want to smell wet asphalt and see the taxis whizzing by in the rain. I want to see a seven-foot Mick cop with a back like a piano-box and a paw like a ham and a foot like a submarine with stove-polish on it. I want to see the subway in the rush hour and the dips and mollbuzzers going through the crowd like kids in a berry patch. I want to see a ninety-story building going up, and the wops crawling on it like ants. I want to see the breadline, and the panhandlers, and the bums in Union Square. I want a bellyful of the happy dust the old town hands out--the whole dope and all there is of it! My God! I want everything I haven't got!" He looked at me, wildly. He was trembling violently, and sweat poured down his face. "Parson," he rasped, "I've bucked this thing for fair, but I've got to go back and see it and smell it and taste it and feel it and know it all again, or I'll go crazy. You're all of you so good down here you're too much for me. _I'm home-sick for hell_. It--it comes over me like fire over the damned. You don't fool yourself that folks who know what it is to be damned can stay on in heaven without freezing, do you? Well, they can't. I can't help it! I can't! I've got to go--this time I've got to go!" I sat and stared at him. Oh, what was it Paul had said we were to pray for, at such a time as this? "_And for me, that speech may be given to me ... that I may open my mouth with confidence_..." But the words wouldn't come. "I've got to go! I've got to go, and try myself out!" he gritted. "You--understand your risks," I managed to say through stiff lips. I had always, in my secret heart, been more or less afraid of this. Always had I feared that the rulers of the world of darkness, swooping down and catching him unaware, might win the long fight in the end.