“You are twenty-five now?  Well, boy, you may grow until you are thirty and then you will be as wise as you ever will be.  Haven’t you noticed that men of sixty have no clearer vision than men of forty?  One reason is that we have been taught that we know all about life and death and the mysteries of the grave.  But the main reason is that we are ashamed to shove out and be ourselves.  Jesus expressed His own individuality perhaps more than any other man we know of, and so He wields a wider influence than any other.  And this though we only have a record of just twenty-seven days of His life.  Now that fellow that just left is an engineer, and he dreams some beautiful dreams; but he never expresses them to any one—­only hints them to me, and this only at twilight.  He is like a weasel or a mink or a whippoorwill—­he comes out only at night.

“’If the weather was like this all the time, people would never learn to read and write,’ said Joe to me just as you arrived.  And isn’t that so?  Here we can count a hundred people up and down this street, and not one is reading, not one but that is just lolling about, except the children—­and they are happy only when playing in the dirt.  Why, if this tropical weather should continue we would all slip back into South Sea Islanders!  You can raise good men only in a little strip around the North Temperate Zone—­when you get out of the track of a glacier, a tender-hearted, sympathetic man of brains is an accident.”

Then the old man suddenly ceased and I imagined that he was following the thought out in his own mind.  We sat silent for a space.  The twilight fell, and a lamplighter lit the street lamp on the corner.  He stopped an instant to salute the poet cheerily as he passed.  The man sitting on the doorstep, across the street, smoking, knocked the ashes out of his pipe on his boot-heel and went indoors.  Women called their children, who did not respond, but still played on.  Then the creepers were carried in, to be fed their bread-and-milk and put to bed; and, shortly, shrill feminine voices ordered the other children indoors, and some obeyed.

The night crept slowly on.

I heard Old Walt chuckle behind me, talking incoherently to himself, and then he said, “You are wondering why I live in such a place as this?”

“Yes; that is exactly what I was thinking of!”

“You think I belong in the country, in some quiet, shady place.  But all I have to do is to shut my eyes and go there.  No man loves the woods more than I—­I was born within sound of the sea—­down on Long Island, and I know all the songs that the seashell sings.  But this babble and babel of voices pleases me better, especially since my legs went on a strike, for although I can’t walk, you see I can still mix with the throng, so I suffer no loss.