The sun was falling now in long bars and shafts of light between the buildings and the trees, and the windows of the house where the man had been fixing the roof were blazing as if in flames. The man had taken down his ladder and gone away. It was time the young woman was going home. And as she went, joining the procession of laborers, her heart was filled with longing--with longing and with hope. The boy of her Yesterdays lived only in those days that were gone. He had no place in the dreams of her womanhood. He was only the playmate of the little girl. Even as those years were gone the boy had gone out of her life. But somewhere, perhaps, that one who was to go with her through the old, old, open door was even then building for her a home--their home. Perhaps, some day, an all wise Mother Nature would tell her to leave the world that gave her no welcome--that could not recognize her womanhood--that made her heart rebel in humiliation and shame--and go to do her woman's work. Very carefully would she go when the time came, taking all the treasures of her womanhood. She would go very carefully that none of her treasures be lost. KNOWLEDGE The green of the pastures and the gold of the fields was buried so deeply under banks of snow that no one could say: "Here the cattle fed and the buttercups grew; there the grain was harvested; here the corn stood in shocks; there the daisies and meadow grass sheltered the nest of the bobo-link." As death calls alike the least and the greatest back to the dust from which they came, so winter laid over the varied and changing scenes of summer a cold, white, shroud of wearisome sameness. The birds were hundreds of miles away in their sunny southland haunts. The bees, the butterflies, and many of the tiny wood folk, were all snugly tucked in their winter beds, dreaming, perhaps, as they slept, of the sunshiny summer days. In the garden the wind had heaped a great drift high against the hedge on the boy's side, and, on the little girl's side, the cherry tree in the corner stood shivering in its nakedness with bare arms uplifted as though praying for mercy to the stinging cold wind. In the city the snow, as fast as it fell, was stained by soot and grime and lay in the streets a mass of filth. The breath of the laboring truck horses arose from their wide nostrils like clouds of steam and, in the icy air, covered their breasts and shoulders and sides with a coat of white frost. The newsboys and vendors of pencils and shoestrings shivered in nooks and corners and doorways and, as the people went with heads bent low before the freezing blast that swirled through the narrow canyons between the tall buildings, the snowy pavement squeaked loudly under their feet. And the man who had found something to do, from his Occupation, began to acquire Knowledge. In doing things, he began to know things.