One dreadful quarter-hour with Mr. Guilfogle and he might be free.
He grinned to himself as he admitted that this was like
seeing Europe after merely swimming the mid-winter Atlantic.

Well, he had nine minutes more, by his two-dollar watch; nine
minutes of vagabondage. He gazed across at a Greek restaurant
with signs in real Greek letters like "ruins at--well, at Aythens."
A Chinese chop-suey den with a red-and-yellow carved dragon,
and at an upper window a squat Chinaman who might easily
be carrying a _kris_, "or whatever them Chink knives are," as he
observed for the hundredth time he had taken this journey.
A rotisserie, before whose upright fender of scarlet coals whole
ducks were happily roasting to a shiny brown. In a furrier's
window were Siberian foxes' skins (Siberia! huts of "awful
brave convicks"; the steely Northern Sea; guards in blouses,
just as he'd seen them at an Academy of Music play) and a polar
bear (meaning, to him, the Northern Lights, the long hike,
and the _igloo_ at night). And the florists! There were orchids
that (though he only half knew it, and that all inarticulately)
whispered to him of jungles where, in the hot hush, he saw the
slumbering python and--"What was it in that poem, that,
Mandalay, thing? _was_ it about jungles? Anyway:


"'Them garlicky smells,
And the sunshine and the palms and the bells.'"


He had to hurry back to the office. He stopped only to pat the
head of a florist's delivery horse that looked wistfully at him