David walked with the picture of Mr. Devitt’s shop. He loved it.... A long low dirty room behind the bike-store. He went in. It smelt of leather and glue and oil, of rubber and sweat. That smell left him. A gas jet burned in the piping that cut down crooked from the crumbled plaster. The dim noise of the place seemed almost to stop his pores. He looked at the gray refuse through the dirty window and did not like where he was. He went to work. His hands worked. His mind took on a leisurely gait with the room, took along with it the way of his hands. He liked where he was. His mind and his hands were clear of the room, moving with it. It was fun. When he tired, he stopped.... A city man. He was going to the city. A city man had looked at him and known he was going to the city! “I wonder--will I ever be a New Yorker.” Tom Rennard laughed. “Soon enough. Too soon.” “I was born in Boston!” Tom looked at him: “You are not like Boston,” he said. “--old Boston, perhaps:--a Boston that was really a field compressed, a gathering place of fields and of field-folks: a Boston I dream of--where Thoreau came.” Still David was elate, not understanding. His legs and his arms were very free. He felt, walking beside this clear quick man, a cloudiness about himself. He had a distant sense of a David Markand: his legs exhaled a smell of rubber and grease, his shoulders pushed along like a slow hill rising to the horizon, his head moved faintly like a tree. If this distant sense came nearer he would laugh. He felt he was not a city man, even though he was born in Boston. He stopped. He stooped and pulled a clump of dripping moss with his two hands. He threw it away. He turned his muddy palms toward Tom. “Look,” he said. “Yes--I understand.” David wiped his hands on his trouser seat. Tom laughed. “I don’t understand,” said David. Then he blushed. They walked in silence. David found that walking so in silence beside this man he could think: his mind took form: he felt he could direct it. He said to himself: “I must think ... about the city.... That is important. I am going there soon. I don’t know what to think.... What do I know?” He said aloud: “What was it you said you understood?” “How you feel--a little.” “Why?” “I also came to New York, a first time--once.” “Tell me about it,” said David.... * * * * * A faint trail lagged over root and moss through trees to a grove of locusts--a wide clearing with splotches of gold on blue grass. A girl stood before a tree-stump. It was round and quite smoothly cut. On it, at the height of her waist, was a clay model--reddish rich clay--and the crude hint coming out of a mother with a child.