There are certain little routine joys known only to the servantless suburbanite.  Every morning the baker leaves a bag of crisp French rolls on the front porch.  Every morning the milkman deposits his little bottles of milk and cream on the back steps.  Every morning the furnace needs a little grooming, that the cheery thump of rising pressure may warm the radiators upstairs.  Then the big agate kettle must be set over the blue gas flame, for hot water is needed both for shaving and cocoa.  Our light breakfast takes only a moment to prepare.  By the time the Nut Brown Maid comes singing downstairs, cocoa, rolls, and boiled eggs are ready in the sunny little dining room, and the Tamperer is bathed and shaved and telephoning to Central for “the exact time.”  The 8:13 train waits for no man, and it is nearly a mile to the station.

But the morning I think of was not a routine morning.  On routine mornings the Tamperer rises at ten minutes to seven, the alarm clock being set for 6:45:  which allows five minutes for drowsy head.  The day in question was early February when snow lay white and powdery on the ground, and the 6 o’clock train from Marathon had to be caught.  There is an express for Philadelphia that leaves the Pennsylvania Station at 7:30 and this the Tamperer had to take, to make a 10 o’clock appointment in the Quaker City.  That was why the alarm clock rang at half-past four.

I cannot recall a more virginal morning than that snowy twilight before the dawn.  No description that I have ever read—­not even the daybreak in “Prince Otto,” or Pippa’s dawn boiling in pure gold over the rim of night—­would be just to that exquisite growth of colour in the eastern sky.  The violet star faded to forget-me-not and then to silver and at last closed his weary eye; the flat Long Island prairie gradually lost its fairy-tale air of mystery and dream; the close ceiling of the night receded into infinite space as the sun waved his radiant arms over the horizon.

But this was after I had left the house.  The sun did not raise his head from the pillow until I was in the train.  The Nut Brown Maid was still nested in her warm white bed as I took her up some tea and toast just before departing.

The walk to the station, over the crisply frozen snow, was delicious.  Marathon is famous for its avenue of great elms, which were casting deep blue shadows in the strange light—­waning moon and waxing day.  The air was very chill—­only just above zero—­and the smoking car seemed very cold and dismal.  I huddled my overcoat about me and tried to smoke and read the paper.  But in that stale, fetid odour of last night’s tobacco and this morning’s wet arctics the smoker was but a dismal place.  The exaltation of the dawn dropped suddenly into a kind of shivering nausea.