apple-growing, I finished the Bellflower to the very core, and said to
Horace as I reluctantly tossed aside the stem and three seeds:

"Surely this has been one of the rare moments of life."



CHAPTER IX


I GO TO THE CITY.

"Surely man is a wonderfull, vaine, divers and wavering subject:
It is very hard to * ground and directly constant and uniforme
judgement upon him."

Though I live most of the time in the country, as I love best to do,
sometimes I go to the city and find there much that is strange and
amusing. I like to watch the inward flow of the human tide in the
morning, and the ebb at evening, and sometimes in the slack tide of noon
I drift in one of the eddies where the restless life of the city pauses
a moment to refresh itself. One of the eddies I like best of all is near
the corner of Madison Square, where the flood of Twenty-third Street
swirls around the bulkhead of the Metropolitan tower to meet the
transverse currents of Madison Avenue. Here, of a bright morning when
Down-at-Heels is generously warming himself on the park benches, and Old
Defeat watches Young Hurry striding by, one has a royal choice of
refreshment: a "red-hot" enfolded in a bun from the dingy sausage wagon
at the curb, or a plum for a penny from the Italian with the trundle
cart, or news of the world in lurid gulps from the noon edition of the