In the morning I wrote her a love note, which during the day crawled under the burlap tablecloth. I wrote her a daily love note short, suggestive epigrams, often quite clever, not always original. It was an unreciprocated correspondence, like my previous prayers at the Holy Rollers. But she read them for each day they were disarranged.

Then late one night I entered the house in the pitch of night, fatigued by a hard day's work in sweatshops and by my studies at school. My heart always beat fast when I climbed those stairs. A faint rustle, as of fingers stroking a papered wall, reached my ear. I held my breath and peered into the darkness, waiting halfway up the first flight until the rumble of an 'L' train died. I resumed the climb, smiling at myself, when my hand, sliding up the balustrade, stopped. Tiny fingers stroked my hand and hopped away; then, like a warm, pulsating swallow, a hand nestled into mine. It quivered with affection when I pressed it. And then it suddenly flew away into the darkness. There was no whir of wings, nor the slightest rustle. In vain my arms groped through space, touching thick, voluptuous darkness. But in my garret I found a red rose in a vase, above my hidden notes.

On an early Sunday morning I hiked through Prospect Park, where robins hopped on the green lawns, and where fishes in the ponds somersaulted to peek at spring, and where sprouting trees sparkled with dew and looked like brides. I shied off from the beaten road and found myself drifting through a path that wound into untrimmed shrubbery, down along a tall mile-long iron fence, where I met Margaret.

Hand in hand we swung open the gate of Greenwood and skipped into a lane under weeping willows, whose branches chirped with birds and

drooped to whisk us close together. She stopped at a grave.

Out of other graves tombstones rose like friendly apparitions, peeking through the shrubbery, whispering a love language all their own: 'Greater love hath no man than this'; 'There is no fear in love.' She glanced around. Sheltered in our first embrace from the eyes of the living, our lips met.

Many secret cemetery trysts did we have on early Sabbath mornings, and also on summer evenings, when the garden of the dead was bathed in moonlight, and foliage, glittering in green tints, rose along with white tombstones like a sea. Deeper into Greenwood we went, finding more secluded nooks, stumbling over hidden fences, nestling close when the hoot of an owl scared us.

Under a statue we cuddled up on polished marble steps - Thorwaldsen's Christ, spreading out his arms of blessing. The summer breeze carried odors of new-cut clover, lilac bushes, succulent sod, into my nostrils. But nothing was sweeter than the scent of her body. Under the stars her eyes kindled with a limpid glow as my fingers stroked her hair and my lips dabbed her cheeks and browsed in the curves of her throat.

Then the chapel bell shook the night and we leaped up, counting the strokes, racing hand in hand down the lanes, tossing gravel at our shadows.

IV

The following year I entered the better American homes through the kitchen door. The boarding house barely fed the widow and her children. Her rent was high. Margaret became a sales clerk at Loeser's. But she loved housework and especially cooking, and she hired out to a wealthy Flatbush family. I remember a lonesome couple,

a banker and his wife, who were fond of joining our kitchen trysts. They discussed science with me, while Margaret looked on amused, for she always thought they were teasing. They were skillful in arousing my interestannoyingly so. 'Prove it!' was their favorite demand.

I was never sure whether Margaret was right or whether their learning was limited. Two facts of physics they viewed with profound skepticism: that the same iron weight varied in heaviness between the North Pole and the Equator, and that a chunk of coal weighed the same as did the ashes and smoke it produced.

Once Margaret showed them a circular slide rule which I had made myself from strips of celluloid and a piece of cardboard. I could not afford to buy one. The banker put the problem to me: 'What is twenty-five dollars at eight per cent compound in seventeen years?' In thirty seconds I had the answer. 'Jesus,' was all he said. The two examined the slide rule in silence. Then they vanished into their own domain. Two hours later they returned, fanning their flushed faces with a dozen sheets of close computation. 'You're thirteen cents shy!' they yelled in chorus. Margaret answered: 'He is worse than that. He is five and a fifth cents too high.'

At their instigation I won a fivedollar wager- and purchased Margaret a ring with a diamond chip. I warned the lonesome couple, but they insisted. The great dispute concerned the shortest crawling distance between a hungry spider and a fat fly in a room, twelve by twelve by thirty feet, the spider being at one end, at a point one foot from the ceiling and six feet from the side walls, and the fly being at the opposite end, at a point one foot from the floor and six feet from the side walls. I said forty feet; they said forty-two.

'Prove it!' they shouted. I did. First by mathematics, met with a filibustering, then by clipping a cracker box to scale and spreading it flat. The ring was too large for Margaret's finger. The jeweler said: 'For why you should not spend seven-fifty? The smaller the finger, the bigger the diamond, it should be.' She lost it in a laundry tub. All day long, she tells me, her tears rolled from her cheeks down into purring soapsuds. Some day we shall buy another- but with a pearl.

She hired out as cook at a country estate on the Hudson. Many a Sunday an old, old millionaire bachelor picked me up at the depot in his buggy and drove me up the river bluff into his park. A beaming child in an apron danced among pots and pans, prodding a huge pot roast, and scooping mashed potatoes, and every so often skipping across the floor to watch me turn an ice-cream freezer.

From sanctuaries beyond, a lame housekeeper, and also a buxom Swedish waitress, stole discreet glances. And the gardener's young assistant peeked through a pane on the rear porch.

Never before in my life had I tasted such morsels; nor had the wealthy bachelor. So he told me seven times on our last ride together. Her muffins, he said, were more efficient than Timothy's wine. And her prune sauce was rich with kernel flavors.

To this day I utter the names of food with ravenous relish. For Margaret taught me English while I ate. The week long I lived on these meals, and on their names, saving up for another train fare to Cornwall on the Hudson. I was like a famished mongrel. But, 'No! No! Fold your hands.' How grateful I was for the brevity of her prayer! 'Lord, bless our bodies with my good food, and also with thine own good spirit. Amen.'

Dinner over and the dishes in the

sink, we climbed out along the Hudson bluffs, leaping over stumps and boulders, dancing through old Indian wood paths and resting our throbbing limbs on the beach, a step from the river, on moss softer than seven Smyrna rugs. My eyes followed the rich colors of her face and my fingers touched her auburn hair, done Madonna fashion.

There again she exclaimed that I looked like her father. Her fingers clung to my wrists, fiercely. But soon she returned to Cornwall on the Hudson. She put her cheek to the ground and stroked it against the moss, and murmured pensively: 'We're lying in the hand of God. It is so soft now- His hand is.'

She took off her shoes and stockings and stuck her foot ankle-deep into the same river which flowed at the Broadway canyon, and which had flowed when the Red Man, alone, lived on the land. Eddies caught five timid toes; and also an orbed sole and heel, bridged by a bold arch; and also a slim ankle.

In the dark of night, under the wingspread of two tall, slim catalpa trees, we lay in a hammock, bosom to bosom, pure as the purest of God's children, strong as the strongest, her toes touching my ankles, her hair my chin, and her young body-line skipping as a shell on water. The trees waltzed, leaning on each other and parting, courting, rollicking to and fro, curtsying solemnly, whispering secrets with a thousand sibilant tongues.

From the gardener's cottage a man lilted a German lyric. The words, So hold und schön und rein, ring in my ear still. From the manor house the waitress sang a Swedish folk song, and broke the spell of night, suddenly, with a wild, despairing outburst, singing, 'När jag var sjötton år (When I was seventeen). A star followed a path through the thick catalpa foliage;

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and Margaret hummed the Cardinal's hymn, 'Lead, kindly light.'

V

In the fall she returned to Brooklyn, brown as an Indian and with a glow in her eye. She was the same child, yet her kiss was mellower. We went to Manhattan secretly and, just before closing time at City Hall, found the license bureau. There a clerk told us to return to Brooklyn. Borough Hall was the place for us. Our lips drooped. We should be too late. Could he not break the rule, please? 'Wedding guests are coming,' I fibbed. He led us into a private office with rugs, mahogany, and curtains, to a man whose voice was gentle, and whose eyes gleamed kindly. Pendergast was his name. I thought he was the mayor.

'Are we married?' I asked Margaret, as we stepped out, reading the license together. 'No. We must find a minister.' We passed a majestic Broadway church, surrounded by tilting gravestones. But we feared to enter, and looked for other churches, finding none. "There is a church on every street of Brooklyn,' Margaret whispered. And we ran through the canyons and through the Battery, for the ferry.

There, in the Italian quarter on Dean Street, we found a puny little church and, next to it, the parson's dwelling. 'Where are your witnesses?' he asked as we sat down in his office. 'We have n't any.' He looked us over sombrely. 'Have you a wedding ring for the bride?' I shook my head. He called his wife from the kitchen - she dropped her apron on his. desk and a young man from the street. Hurriedly he read a page from a book and filled out a large parchment scroll that swarmed with plump and pink baby angels, while the young man from

the street wiggled his ears to make Margaret look less solemn.

The same evening we bought a goldfilled ring for a dollar, and a white rose for fifty cents, and two tenderloin steaks at Childs' for eighty cents. Then we had our photos taken, half a dozen for two dollars. I owned exactly a quarter when I crawled into my garret; and a certificate of marriage with five signatures - flat on my chest like a cough plaster; and a childwife two flights below.

We found new friends in a young artist and his wife. Already our love world began to grow. Margaret posed for him. A stream of soft white chiffon drape broke on her one shoulder and hung limberly down her nymphean body, meeting at her feet and trailing behind, yet gliding along, rolling and falling from leap to leap, almost pursuing her as she fled down to a wood pond. With brushes, trowels, and paints the artist put her strength on canvas the girlishness of her spirit, her flow of hair, the health that glowed in her eye, the rhythm in her limbs from toes to fingertips, her firm flesh colors, enriched by her modesty. His wife brought her coffee when goose flesh spoiled the pose; for the studio was chilly.

Nothing is true enough or ever can be. For every star has a million points of view, and so has every atom, and so has love. We reasoned together with our feelings, and, therefore, with primitive harmonies. My garret became her garret. We had faith in the tremors of our knees, and in our warm, unpolluted blood, and in the young curves of our bodies. Like God and pagan and modern youth, we knew of no sin.

Barefooted she came tiptoeing up the garret stairs, as if she rose through the air, appearing in the shadow of the trapdoor and under the straddling table like a beloved bride arisen from

the grave, spreading out her white arms with touching confidence for me to give her a lift.

The candle flame flickered in the green D.O.M. bottle, spilling drops of red wax along a frail lead strip that long ago sealed a priestly liqueur. In a homemade wooden frame two roses

a red and a white-pressed their faces against the glass. Two blue, beady gas flames burned steadily above. From the flights below the steady breathing of sleeping men rose to my garret. A mouse thrummed its feet on the resonant floor, speeding by behind the queen-posts. My birds awoke - Margaret spoiled them and we fed them lump sugar, and sat ourselves down on cushions, our backs against warm chimneys.

At the front gable-outside the round window the purest of snow, untrampled, glittered on a city of roofs. A star passed by, peered into our garret, smiling, then vanished.

How we did talk during these garret trysts, though we wrote long, daily love letters not short notes - to each other! These she treasures still, though I have begged her twenty times to burn them all. It was my third winter at the Cooper Union night school and my third year as electrician apprentice. I was earning nine dollars a week and could almost support a wife, immigrant fashion. But why should Margaret live immigrant fashion? She was American. Our garret was cozy almost as cozy as the home we bought ourselves a dozen years later.

She frightened 'the Prophet' once when she passed him in the upper hallway, he from his plunge, she from my garret. A ghost is haunting this house,' he told the baker, who replied by pathetic side nods, lifting a finger to his forehead, describing a zero. But one Sunday morning the jovial baker moved. He too had seen the ghost.

His bones rattled more than did 'the Prophet's,' Margaret told me later. 'Whiskey!' sneered the one-eyed bricklayer. The draftsman whistled, and so did the masseur.

Our secret leaked out. Margaret rushed me off to her aunt. But not until years later, when we returned from the West, college-bred, did the aunt quite forgive us our elopement. She had grown wealthy by then, and handed me a roll of brand-new hundreddollar notes to invest in a home thirty-nine in all.

Margaret rushed me off to old Uncle John, a rough but solid fellow. In his youth he had been cowpuncher, lumberjack, gold digger. And when the family gathered in solemn conclave to decide my doom he stuck by us. 'What's the matter with the fellow? Does he drink? Is he sick? Does n't he want to work? Did n't he marry Maggie?'

Fuel I gathered on Artesian Avenue tarred paving blocks that had been replaced by asphalt. Margaret trimmed my hair.

Chicago was a city of 'eats.' Every feed was a feast, and some were sumptuous revels. The pot roasts Margaret fed me! She always gave me tender, crackling fork nibblings - with pumpernickel, salt, oleomargarine, raw celery - before potatoes and gravy were done. I gobbled the juicy roast and lapped the fork she held, and begged for more until she held out another nibbling and another, at arm's length 'to watch the sheen' in my eyes, she said.

ate at

Perch she fried for me on glowing coals at a swift stream in the outskirts, where we saved a drowning Negro, whose hold made my nose bleed beautifully. Five mud hens we caught, plucked, broiled, and ate one day in the swamps of Cicero. Fried sheep brain we Cameille's poor my first Chicago friend, a former priest, but then a factory hand. Plates of prune soup we sponged on 'broke' days at Sophie's boarding house. Turkey we munched and wine we sipped on Christmas Day at old man Birn's - the foundry foreman. 'Wieners' and flyspecked rolls we swallowed - and with relish — at a camp meeting somewhere in the woods, one stifling summer Sabbath, while Margaret charmed a bishop.

Demi-tasse and pastry we tasted at the parsonage of a French Protestant church, where we went to find Cameille a job as tutor. He was the most learned man I have ever met, and such

a helpless child - son of a Polish count and a French countess, born in Paris at the Russian embassy under Alexander the Tsar. The day I went farther West he gave me a sacred book upon which he wrote, in Latin, 'We die whenever we lose a friend.' And he gave me a vest-pocket flask in carved