valises, in a bedroom that smelled like the inside of a rusty stove. Good enough," he said. "The proprietor says it 'ain't been slep' in' since his wife died in it.") He piloted them across town to the lights of "the Rialto," and went through the crowds with his hat on the back of his head, laughing and talking like a city boy taking his gaping country cousins around the "fair." And he gave to the expedition an air of adventurous dare-devilry, of youthful self-sufficiency and hope, that kept Don and Conroy in a continual flutter of excitement despite the bewilderment of their strange surroundings, that would, otherwise, have disheartened them.
To Donald, indeed, the day had been like one of those wild dreams in which disconnected scenes without locality and incidents without consequence follow past in an untiring vividness, each snapshotted by itself with the distinctness of an isolated experience, and each snatched away to give place, in a flash, to the next. And this was true not only of the railway journey—with its fields and houses, fences and roads, whipping past his window, like the telegraph poles, in kaleidoscopic monotony; it was true also of the city which he approached across a Dantesque black water in which the lights of the ferry-boat reeled weirdly on the swells that rose out of a darkness and engulfed them—a medieval city, apparently built on a hill, window above blazing window, its edge supported in the water on slimed piles and its towers mysteriously dark against a wan sky without a star.
He went to bed, that night, amid uneasy millions
