entrance. The street is filled from wall to wall with men and women,
young women and young men, fresher, more eager, more excited, more
joyous even than the lesser crowd of shoppers down Boylston Street.
They don't notice me particularly. No one notices any one
particularly, for the lights overhead see us all, and we all understand
as we cross and dodge and lockstep and bump and jostle through this
deep narrow place of closing doors toward home. Then the last rush at
the station, that nightly baptism into human brotherhood as we plunge
into the crowd and are carried through the gates and into our
train--which is speeding far out through the dark before I begin to
come to myself--find myself leaving the others, separating,
individualizing, taking on definite shape and my own being. The train
is grinding in at my station, and I drop out along the track in the
dark alone.

I gather my bundles and hug them to me, feeling not the bread and
bananas, but only the sense of possession, as I step off down the
track. Here is my automobile. Two miles of back-country road lie
before me. I drive slowly, the stars overhead, but not far away, and
very close about me the deep darkness of the woods--and silence and
space and shapes invisible, and voices inaudible as yet to my
city-dinned ears and staring eyes. But sight returns, and hearing,
till soon my very fingers, feeling far into the dark, begin to see and
hear.

And now I near the hill: these are my woods; this is my gravel bank;
that my meadow, my wall, my postbox, and up yonder among the trees
shines my light. They are expecting me, She, and the boys, and the
dog, and the blazing fire, the very trees up there, and the watching
stars.