That means to say that within the hour we have got to show up something in the neighbourhood of 1100 words to these magistrates and overseers.  With these keys—­typewriter keys, of course—­we have got to unlock our heart.  Milton, thou shouldst be living at this hour.  Speaking of Milton, the damp that fell round his path (in Wordsworth’s sonnet) was nothing to the damp that fell round our alert vestiges as we hastened to the Salamis station in that drench this morning. (We ask you to observe our self-restraint.  We might have said “drenching downpour of silver Long Island rain,” or something of that sort, and thus got several words nearer our necessary total of 1100.  But we scorn, even when writing against time, to take petty advantages.  Let us be brief, crisp, packed with thought.  Let it stand as drench, while you admire our proud conscience.)

Eleven hundred words—­what a lot could be said in 1100 words!  We stood at the front door of the baggage car (there is an odd irony in this:  the leading editorial writer, one of the most implacable of our taskmasters, is spending the summer at Sea Cliff, and he gets the last empty seat left in the smoker.  So we, getting on at Salamis, have to stand in the baggage car) watching the engine rock and roar along the rails, while the rain sheeted the level green fields.  It is very agreeable to ride on a train in the rain.  We have never known just why, but it conduces to thought.  The clear trickles of water are drawn slantwise across the window panes, and one watches, absently, the curious behaviour of the drops.  They hang bulging and pendulous, in one spot for some seconds.  Then, as they swell, suddenly they break loose and zigzag swiftly down the pane, following the slippery pathway that previous drops have made.  It is like a little puzzle game where you manoeuvre a weighted capsule among pegs toward a narrow opening.  “Pigs in clover,” they sometimes call it, but who knows why?  The conduct of raindrops on a smoking-car window is capricious and odd, but we must pass on.  That topic alone would serve for several hundred words, but we will not be opportunist.

We stood at the front door of the baggage car, and in a pleasant haze of the faculties we thought of a number of things.  We thought of some books we had seen up on East Fifty-ninth Street, in that admirable row of old bookshops, particularly Mowry Saben’s volume of essays, “The Spirit of Life,” which we are going back to buy one of these days; so please let it alone.  We then got out a small note-book in which we keep memoranda of books we intend to read and pored over it zealously.  Just for fun, we will tell you three of the titles we have noted there: 

     “The Voyage of the Hoppergrass,” by E.L.  Pearson. 
     “People and Problems,” by Fabian Franklin. 
     “Broken Stowage,” by David W. Bone.

But most of all we thought, in a vague sentimental way, about that pleasant Long Island country through which the engine was haling and hallooing all those carloads of audacious commuters.