no spring. That lovely transition period in which all is soft, both in air and in colours, did not exist in that American year. The summer burst fiercely over the city and scorched it in a few days. It grilled the pavements; it grilled the houses; it multiplied and magnified the noises of horse and elevated cars, of street-hawkers and yelling children—and these noises in turn seemed to accentuate the heat. Every morning I took the Sixth Avenue elevated train at Twenty-Third Street, and all the way to the Battery there was hardly a tree or a blade of grass to meet the tired eye, to sooth the over-wrought nerves, nothing but ugly buildings—ugly and dirty. And as the train whizzed along, the glimpses I had of the people inside these buildings were even more disheartening than the ugliness and dirtiness of the buildings themselves.
And this was my America, the country of the promised land. It seemed to me then as if my golden dream had turned into a hideous nightmare of fact—a nightmare which threatened to engulf me and cast me into that unrecognizable mass continually forming by the failures of life. That I did not sink down into it was, because, in spite of the hideous reality, I remained a dreamer, and those who live in dreams are rarely quelled by reality. In that fearful, hot, New York summer I began to dream another dream which made the heat more tolerable. Daily, as
