on each other. A pair of quaint rockers, done in black and orange, stood at the ends of the table, which was covered with wool-embroidered burlap, upon which flickered a red candle, stuck into a benedictine bottle. On a collar beam above, and directly under a skylight, hung a brass chandelier, with two tiny blue beady gas flames burning.

From gable to gable ran two rows of prim queen-posts, yoked above by collar beams and steadied below by struts, and meeting the rafters halfway up the roof. Shelves with yards and yards of ownerless books filled. the spaces between these queen-posts and formed the sides of my garret. Along the top of the shelves a white yacht raced a tarred two-masted schooner; and an alabaster Apollo chased Daphne within my first baby shirt; and the purple hose of a Turkish pipe embraced a copper jardinière brimful of dry tobacco leaves; and the broad shoulders of a jug of 'Guinea Red' carried a spherical tumbler turned upside down.

Stuck into a crack on one of the shelves was a blue-and-white porcelain shard—perhaps a part of a broken platter depicting, if I remember right, two lovers fleeing in a boat on the river; and over their heads two birds, stealing kisses on the wing; and on an isle in the river a bower; and on the mainland a Chinese mansion with a garret; and between the isle and the mainland a bridge, at the foot of which tilted a weeping willow, and over which ran two armed detectives and a pigtailed judge, reading a frightful law book.

In the front gable of my garret was a round window into which the lone morning star smiled like the tear in an eye; and under it a cot. Beyond, God was in his Heaven with the angels. I repeat, the first time I put eye on Margaret was in my garret. One

afternoon I hurried home for my books, which I had forgotten in the morning and which I needed at Cooper Union. The house was empty, but the trapdoor of my garret was open. She was on her knees, scrubbing, and also looking at pictures in my forty-pound Bible. Her hair was fastened up with the charm of a young girl who expects no callers. I stood on the garret stairs under the table with my head above the trapdoor. And I dared not crawl up to her, for she had not heard me climb the steps. But suddenly she knew that I was there. She turned her face toward me and stared as though I had risen from the dead. I explained my errand. 'God!' she gasped. 'I thought it was Father.' I did not know then that her father was dead, or that he had fallen off a roof down upon an iron fence. He had been a roofer. Hurriedly I fetched my books and bowed myself down under the table and down the garret stairs. But after our first meeting my attic was complete in beauty. My heart throve in the joy of living there.

On her sixteenth birthday her mother invited the roomers and boarders to the party. I remember a young rival there, who worked as draftsman in a stoneyard, sketching details for the subway. After that night I wanted to be a draftsman. He was the gamest of sports; and he honored me, there in public, by having me check his sketches of a circular pitch of the Hudson Terminal Station. I did this mathematically, and my pleasure was intense, for it was the only time I ever helped to build a subway.

Other men at the party became my lifelong friends: a bricklayer with a glass eye, who then and almost ever after earned more a day than I a week; a ruddy, bald-headed baker, who bubbled over with mirth, because he was slightly soused; a pale, emaciated

peddler of spiritual pamphlets, called 'the Prophet,' who literally lived on cold baths, peanuts, and prayers; an effeminate masseur with spats on his ankles, a lavender band on his hat, and a watch on his wrist.

Margaret's childhood friends were also there. I remember a bright highschool boy 'Doc' they called himwho drove an ice wagon after school hours and now is a noted physician. Never shall I forget a picnic where he blistered my tongue with a wild radish. At the party Margaret's hand touched him to the quick as he stole a kiss. 'Starfish,' she called him, because her fingers left the print of one crawling on his cheek.

Roomers and boarders grouped themselves in a parlor nook to smoke cigars and sip coffee. But I mingled with young and old, for Margaret was everywhere. I played forfeit games and told puns, threw peanut shells and sang ragtime. I gazed through a coat sleeve while 'Doc' poured water into it. 'Starfishing,' he called the game. Blindfolded I knelt on the floor and swore allegiance to the flag while I bounced my fist, until a girl slid a pan of water under it. I tore half a sleeve off Margaret's party dress while my teeth picked a match from her puckering lips.

III

Margaret was warned against the sailor in the garret, but the warnings fanned her girlish curiosity into flame. I met her but seldom alone, and could not declare my intentions in front of others.

When I was away she tidied my garret. The air there was full of fragrance from her scrubbing brush, her sun-bleached linen sheets, her oil mop, and a dust cap that she once forgot, which I revered as a fetish. Only during my absence did she crawl into my

garret. The ever-toiling widow, being the wise mother of a fair daughter, was not a little worried about males in general and sailors in particular. She and her God brought up the five children, for there was no mother's pension in those days. Margaret was twelve- and the oldest — when one day the idyllic home was suddenly swept away. A slip of a foot - a grasp at a rotten shingle a widow- a rooming house a daughter and a foreign sailor, who had sailed sixtyseven thousand miles to find just this garret! What years of sorrows and of joys because of a rotten shingle!

One night I met Margaret on the lower stairway. I struck a match and held it over our heads. She was holding a hand on her heart. I stepped back and remarked in a tone which assured her that she was no child: 'I would never hurt you in all my life.' She stood staring at me with a strange mist in her eyes. The match died out. 'You do look like Father,' she gasped, and rushed by before I had time to propose marriage. I would take no chance waiting, though I earned only a dollar a day.

On another occasion I fared better. She was taking off her wraps as I entered the hall. She tried to run, but decided to stay. I approached, bowing, and implied that I would be no more intrusive than she herself allowed, giving her time to regain her poise. But I stumbled on a carpet hole and my books flew out from under my arms. She chuckled while she helped me pick them up. Then we stood eyeing each other with tacit intimacy. "You like books?' she asked. 'Yes, I like books. Will you marry me?' Her hand leaped to her thumping heart. I almost dodged. The motion. reminded me of 'Doc' at the party. Without answering she skipped past me and vanished.

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;

VOL 139-NO. 1

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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