As I had nothing by which to tell the time, I was obliged to wait till a clock struck. I hoped it was eleven at least, but when the sound came over the trees it was only nine. Only nine, and I could do nothing before one! Nothing before one, and nowhere to go! Nowhere to go, and no food to eat, and not a drop to drink! Doubtless I could have found water; but water made me sick. With four hours to wait, I thought again of the dark river with its velvety current, running below Greeley’s Slip. Aimlessly I drifted toward it—that is, I drifted toward Columbus Circle, whence I could drift farther still through squalid, fetid, dimly lighted streets down to the water’s edge. The night was so hot that the thought of the plunge began to appeal to me. After all, it would be an easy, pleasant way of stepping out. But I didn’t do it. The unknown beyond the river once more drove me back. Besides, the adventure I had planned was not without its fascination. I wanted to see what it held in store. If it held nothing—well, then, Greeley’s Slip would still be accessible in the morning. So I skulked back into the depths of the Park again. Those who went as twos began to disappear, and the lonely shadows to steal along more furtively. Now and then one of them approached me or hung in the distance suggestively. It was not like any of the encounters that take place in daylight. It was more as if these dark ghosts had floated up from some evil spirit land, into which before morning they would float down again. But twelve o’clock struck at last, and I took midnight as a call. It was a call to leave the great human division in which I had hitherto been classed, and become a criminal. Once I had done this thing, I should never be able to go back. The angel with the flaming sword would guard that way, and I could never regain even such status as that which I was abandoning. If my head had not been swimming I might at the last minute have felt a qualm at that, but my mind had lost the faculty of deconcentration. It was fixed on the thing before me in such a way that I couldn’t get it off. For this reason I went, on leaving the Park, directly to the street and number where my thoughts were. I was surprised by the emptiness and silence of the thoroughfares. Not till then had I remembered that at this season of the year most of the houses would be closed. Closed they were, looking dark and blank and forbidding. I happened to know that the house to which I was bound was not closed; and though the fact that there were so few to pass in the streets rendered me more conspicuous, it also made me the less subject to observation. Indeed, there were no observers at all when I approached the black spot made by the vacant lot. There was nothing but myself and the blackness. Not a light in the house! Hardly a light in any of the houses roundabout! Not a footfall on the pavements! If ever there was a good opportunity to do what I had come for, it was mine.