There was a quality in them not to be apprehended by the sense of sight. It defied at first my limited powers of analysis. Something to which I was accustomed was not there; and something was there to which I was not accustomed. That to which I was not accustomed struck me soon as shimmering, shining, radiant. That it was not an outward radiance goes without saying. New York on that November day was as dreary and bleak a port as one could easily land at. A leaden sky cloaked the streets in a leaden, lifeless atmosphere. The tops of steeples and the roofs of the tall buildings were wreathed in a leaden mist. Patches of befouled snow on the ground, with the drifts of paper, rags, and refuse to which the New York eye is so inured that it doesn’t see them, lent to the side-streets through which we clattered an air of being so hopelessly sunk in dirt that it is no use trying to be any other way. Drays rumbled, motor-trucks honked, ferry-boats shrieked, tram-cars clanked, trains overhead crashed with a noise like that of the shell that had struck the _Assiniboia_, while our taxicab creaked and squeaked and spluttered like an old man putting on a speed he has long outlived. On the pavements a strange, strange motley of men and women—Hebrew, Slavic, Mongolian, negro, negroid—carried on trades as outlandish as themselves. Here and there an outlandish child shivered its way to an outlandish school. Only now and then one saw a Caucasian face, either clean, alert, superior, or brutalized and repulsive beyond anything to be seen among the yearning, industrious aliens. And yet to me all was lit by an inner light of which I couldn’t at first see the lamp. I caught the rays without detecting the source that emitted them. In and through and above this squalid New York, with its tumult, its filth, its seeming indifference to the individual, there was a celestial property born of the kingdom of heaven. It shone in the sky; it quivered in the air; it lay restfully on the hoary graveyards nestling at the feet of prodigious cubes, like eld at the base of Time. All faces glowed with it; all tasks translated it; all the clamor of feet and wheels and whistles sang it like a song. The name of it came to me with a cry of joy and a pang of grief simultaneously. It was peace. I was in a country that was not at war.