And facts--cold, uncompromising, all powerful, unanswerable facts--should give him this mastering knowledge of Life. For him there should be no sentiment to deceive, no illusion to beguile, no fancy to lead astray. As resistlessly as the winter, with snowflake upon snowflake, had buried all the delightful vagaries of summer, so this man, in his passion for Knowledge, would have buried all the charming inconsistencies, the beautiful inaccuracies, the lovely pretenses of Life. The illusions, the sentiment, the fancies, the poetry of Life, he would have buried under the icy sameness of his facts, even as the flowers and grasses were hidden under winter's shroud of snow. But he could not. Under the snow, summer still lived. Under the cold facts of Life, the tender sentiments, the fond fancies, the dear illusions have strength even as the flowers and grasses. I do not know what it was that brought it about. It does not matter what it was. Perhaps it was the sight of some boys coasting down a little hill, on a side street, near where the man lived at this time: perhaps it was a group of children who, on their way home from school, were waging a merry snow fight: or, perhaps, it was the man's own effort to acquire Knowledge: or, it may be, that his brain was weary, that the way of Knowledge seemed over long, that the links in the golden chain were many and passed all too slowly through his hand--I do not know--but, whatever it was that did it, the man, as he sat before his fire that winter evening with a too solid and substantial book, slipped away from his grown up world of facts back into the no less real world of childhood, back into his Yesterdays--to a school day in his Yesterdays.