Have you ever seen a dish of small birds all lying on their backs on the dish and with feet in the air, all roasted stiff but brown and savory? Rice birds I think they called them. Or snails or baked eggs? The old man raked slowly. It took him all day to finish the small lawn. But it was autumn and the leaves had fallen thickly. The bird bath was full of leaves. It was a sentimental picture. But after all why? The leaves must fall into every corner. If they fall into the bird bath that is all there is to it. Still it calls many things to the mind that are not evoked by the twingling of waves on a lake shore in August. Clark had taken a job as clerk at Pocono, and she was a Quakeress. They got to know each other very, very well. And this girl in the steamer chair, it was the cattle men who attracted her. Let her go then, he said tying the cord with a piece of gauze twisted into a rope. When you bathe the baby for the first time do not put him into a tub but sponge him off carefully before the fire with castile soap and warm water. Be careful not to get the soap into his eyes. Is it nitrate of silver they use for a baby's eyes? I could not tell whether it was a baby or a doll the little girl was coddling. The Italians' babies are often so very small. They dress them up so grotesquely too. It must be a rigid custom with them. Nothing at all. All at once it seemed that every ill word he had ever heard spoken struck his ear at the same moment. What a horrible roar it made. But there were other things, too many to record. Corners of rooms sacred to so many deeds. Here he had said so and so, done so and so. On that picnic he had dared to be happy. All the older women had watched him. With one girl under each arm he had let his spirit go. They had been closer than anything he could now imagine. CHAPTER XIV [Illustration] Particles of falling stars, coming to nothing. The air pits them, eating out the softer parts. Sometimes one strikes the earth or falls flaming into Lake Michigan with a great hiss and roar. And if the lawless mob that rules Ireland with its orderly courts and still more orderly minds will not desist it must be crushed by England. So that to realize the futility of American men intent upon that virtue to be found in literature, literature, that is, of the traditional sort as known in France and Prussia--to realize how each serious American writer in turn flares up for a moment and fizzles out, burnt out by the air leaving no literary monument, no Arc de Triomphe behind him, no India subdued--To realize this it is necessary to go back to the T'ang dynasty where responsibility rested solely on the heads of the poets--_etc., etc_... Or better still why not seek in Aleppo or Jerusalem for the strain to save us. America is lost. Ah Christ, Ah Christ that night should come so soon.