to the period of Brooklyn renaissance. Oh, how I detest Mansard roofs! And one sees plenty of them here. Bits of water, like little mirrors, break the monotony of a long motor ride through this region, and a bridge and a stretch of hedge every now and then do much to vary the scene. Yet, taken all in all, it is an area that has never thrilled me. William K. Vanderbilt kept up a vast park at Islip, and seemingly for miles there is a high iron fence, and a warning to keep out (as if one could ever get in), and a statement to the effect that this is a private preserve, where birds and fish and game are raised, and allowed to increase and multiply like so many dollars in a remote vault.

Other multimillionaires, I am told, raise horses round about, and behind tall brick walls and solid green hedges is many a beautiful home that the mere wayfarer cannot view; only the elect who professionally go to week-ends and drink in the delights of the greensward and the golden private beaches, and whisper of them afterward to the less favored in town.

Just outside Lynbrook, on this muggy morning, we had the energy to start down the Merrick Road, knowing full well it was a place for motorists only, with no scrap of a path, save here and there, for pedestrians. We did it, knowing how stupid we were. We did not like the thought of a train, and we said to ourselves that surely some kindhearted driver or truckster would give us a lift. It is more difficult, however, as we soon discovered, for two people to be taken care of in this way than one. We were passed scornfully by several times, and even suspicious glances were cast our way.

"Revenue officers again they think us, getting the evidence in pairs," I said. "How times have changed! A year ago such a situation would have been impossible."

Then Peter came along. Peter drove a great, strong, massive truck, and he sat triumphantly alone on an unbelievably wide seat, with little baggage; none, apparently, from our point of vantage. We hailed him, and he instantly stopped in that burning stretch of road. The

sun had come out, and it was as hot as I cared to feel it.

Peter smiled on us, bade us get in, and before we knew it we were speeding on, though not too fast, passing fashionable limousines in which we hoped rode friends or acquaintances who would see us on our proud eminence on a wagon marked "Bologna, Ham, and Sausages." But no such luck.

Peter had been in the army -ten months in France, where he was utilized in the repair shops because of his mechanical bent; he would rather tinker with machinery than eat a square meal, and he was a husky young fellow. And he was proud of his job. His employer had the biggest and finest trucks in Brooklyn, he told us. They never broke down, and when he recognized one coming toward us-they did a thriving business on Long Island, evidently-he hailed the driver in that freemasonry of fellow-employees, and remarked: "Ain't that a fine truck, now? You get a better view of it when you

wore little white caps, and waved flags industriously; I think it must have been an Elks outing. I never knew; but they were blowing horns and cheering at everybody, and when they saw Jack, they yelled frantically to him to get aboard. They wanted none of Jim and me; indeed, there was hardly room for one more human in that packed truck; and the last we saw of him, he was being

ain't on it." We assured him it was because of the beauty of his wagon that we had hailed him.

We saw a sailor trudging along ahead of us, and Peter, once having been inoculated with the germ of hospitality, drew up and asked him to join our happy party. Jack was going to Babylon to get recruits for the navy, he was quick to inform us, and he was loud in his love of the service. He had been on submarine-chasers all during the war, and he and Peter hit it up in great shape, doing most of the talking, while Jim and I merely listened. It was as though you heard two college boys from a university to which you had not been privileged to go, talking over their secret societies, their professors, their dormitories.

But Peter was going only as far as Massapequa, much to his regret; but he might go on farther later in the day. So we all got out when his turning came. Right behind us thundered a huge wagon, crowded with men and boys who

made much of by the Elks, if such they were, and I thought I saw him already beginning his recruiting among those happy fellows. He took off his cap, waving us good-by, while Peter having disappeared in a cloud of dust, we sauntered on alone.

There were many little roads tempting us out of the beaten paths, and several times we took one, rejoicing in the proximity to the ocean, where the salt air came to our nostrils, and great elms and oaks sheltered us from the blazing rays of the sun. blazing rays of the sun. But we did n't care; we had hooked many a ride, and we knew that almost whenever we wanted another we could get it.

We sat under a tree, in the tall grass for about an hour, when again I heard the rumble of a truck-Peter's, of course. Who could mistake those heavy wheels? "He 's back," I said to Jim. And sure enough, it was he, and he was on the lookout for us, and drew up at the side of the road, just as a taxi-driver might for a passenger who would surely pay

him and give him a goodly tip into the bargain.

"I'm going all the way to Bayport," he exclaimed, happier than we could hope over the prospect of our company again. We felt supremely flattered. "I'll take you all the way," he added generously. And he did. He could n't understand it when we told him we did n't mind footing it a bit; but we knew there would be plenty of other chances to make haste slowly, so joyfully climbed in, feeling that Peter was a real friend of ours.

Off the main road at Bayport, which used to be the home of John Mason, the celebrated actor, there is another French inn, not generally known, and boasting no fashionable exterior, but a plain-enough building, with a comfortable veranda, and kept by a young man and his wife who can cook to perfection, who never have a crowd around them, and who love to have their guests walk right into the kitchen and select their steak or their lobster, and make suggestions for a dinner that is beyond parallel.

It was for this inn that we were headed, and many a time I had arrived at its door by automobile. Now, however, we came up in this lumbering truck, and monsieur and madame could not believe their eyes when we alighted thus informally. Nothing would do but that Peter should lunch with us. He parked the bologna-sausage-ham car at the roadside as carefully as though it had been a ten-thousand dollar limousine, and when he had washed up, he was as personable as any one would wish to have him. Jim and I were not Beau Brummels, I assure you. We all had a meal to delight the gods, and then Peter told us he would have to attend to some business and hurry back to Brooklyn. We did n't like to see him go, it was still so terribly hot; but he was a business man first, and a society man afterward, though he did n't put it that way himself, and nothing we could offer would tempt him to be detained.

Jim went in bathing at Blue Point, a few miles away, while I strolled about Bayport, through lanes where the trees look, oddly enough, like kneeling camels, and where the sidewalks, as in Douglas

Manor, are built to go around them, and where there is a hush that must be like the quiet of heaven, so far are you from the railroad, with its iron clamor.

That night the moon came up like a big pearl out of the sea, half hidden by a galleon of clouds, and Jim and I went loitering about the half-lighted roads; for we liked the spot so much, and monsieur and madame were so gracious, that we were determined to stay the night. Dim, cool rooms awaited us, with the whitest of linen and the best of baths.

I have often noticed, in motoring at night, what a new aspect the scenery presents, with one's search-light forging through the mist and darkness. Tonight, afoot, it was quite the same, and on these off roads, with the world seemingly far away, I made up a song that went like this:

Walking in the moonlight down a lonely road,

How the hedges glisten like scenery of paint!

Cardboard are the trees, and cardboard each abode,

A curious illusion when the moon is faint.

Motors whirl around us on far, crowded ways; Pasteboard are the poplars, stark against

the sky.

Is this the world we wandered through the summer days?

It's like a dream; it 's moonshine. Reality, good-by!

It could n't be real, that ghostly moon up there, dimly reflected in a tiny sheet of water by the path we trod, that whispering low wind in the rushes and in the trees. How wonderful it was to be here in this quiet, quaint little town, with its lawns of velvet, its solemn, empty church, its real dirt roads, and its outspreading, hospitable trees, that clung together like a nation in time of war, as firmly rooted in the ground as a people should be rooted in the soil they love and from which they sprang!

I recall a circular summer diningroom on the outskirts of Bayport, surrounded with hollyhocks and lit with candles, which we could see from the road at a turning. It looked like a crown that would never crumble, and

we could hear the people laughing within its happy circle, and though we had no wish to pry upon them, we could n't help pausing and listening to their gay chatter. Crickets chirped, and down in a damp meadow frogs were croaking -delightful sounds of mid-July. Somewhere, in another house, a young girl began to sing a wistful old song, and the moon went spinning behind a sudden cloud; and all at once we felt strangely alone out there in the scented dark. To think that people lived so excellently and wisely all the time; that their days went so gladly for them, year in and year out, and that this simple experience should be for us in the nature of an adventure!

We turned back to our inn, healthily tired, and a little better, I hope, for our day in the open.

I was looking at the map when we returned, underneath my lamp, to see just where we would go next; and I was struck, as my finger ran over the fascinating paper, with the litany of lovely and curious names of the villages beyond. They kept singing in my head as I went to sleep, and finally I had to get up and put them down in a rhyme. I called it

A SONG OF THE SOUTH SHORE

Now we must on to Bellport before the sun is high,

And laugh along the roadside with bird and butterfly;

And then to green Brookhaven, hidden behind the trees,

Our comrades only casual cars, and rows of hedge, and bees.

It 's up at daybreak we must be, and roam

the island over,

Light-hearted in the summer days, brighthearted through the clover.

We'll jog along to Speonk and larger towns thereby;

When one is just a Gipsy, how swift the hours fly!

We'll take the road at sunset and hear the croaking frog,

And soon we 'll be where water calls, and find ourselves in Quogue.

Bright, dancing bays will wink at us before the journey 's over

Oh, it is good in summer-time to be a careless rover!

Then on again to Shinnecock and Great Peconic Bay.

It is n't far to Southampton; we 'll make it in a day.

Old, lovely towns on rolling downs that sleep and dream and smile;

Ah, some wear gowns of calico, and some go in for style.

But we, like tramps, knock at their doors, unheeding Fashion's bonnet.

One town is like the freest verse; one 's like a formal sonnet.

At moonlight we will strike Good Ground, and, when the world is still,

If we 're in luck, we 'll come, like Puck, to quiet Water Mill.

And then to Wainscott we 'll press on with tired foot and hand,

Till Amagansett smiles on us, and then-the Promised Land.

It's good to need a healing sleep in the rich summer weather

Two friends who fare along the road, happy and young together.

There's Rocky Point to-morrow, too, that dreams by Fort Pond Bay,

With stretches of a lonely shore that gleams for miles away;

Too far for pilgrims in gay cars who crave the louder things;

But you and I fare on to them, far happier than kings.

For Montauk Point is at the end, and there the ocean thunders,

And the lonely coast gives up at last its old, immortal wonders.

HAD come back again to London, to the humdrum round-office and club, club and office, the same people, the same tasks, the same dinner-parties with bridge to follow, the same golf on the same Sundays. Sometimes I caught myself chuckling over those stolen weeks: I was at least ahead on them. Yes, I had seen the Alps again, an odd fancy, and Pæstum, and Girgenti. I had given myself up to fancies, to old longings, to the wistful things one dreams of, sighing "If." There had come to me a small legacy, and I had spent it. One of my diversions had been to visit Weimar. That again was a longnursed dream. Goethe repels one, or else he holds. Me he had always fascinated. I could never see the coldness in him, the polished egotism. Hard as a stone new from the lapidary, and as smooth, is one reading. But the man was different; one has but to take the Elegies, or else Eckermann. There was warmth behind the polish, there was a heart, volcanic. And so I had ended my pilgrimage at this great shrine, to me the greatest.

I lingered, and I found a fellow-worshiper. He might have been the cause of this delay. It may be guessed that one has a curiosity and often a weakness when one finds a passion shared or the same complaint. Patients discuss their symptoms; so we discussed Goethe. He was Davidson's mania and mine. Yet here was a man, whole-souled and alldevoted, a veritable watcher by the tomb, while I-I had only taken a holiday, was suffering only a transient acuteness of the thing, and to-morrow would find me deaf to these enthusiasms. perhaps stone-deaf, but merely deaf. In London, at the office, at the club, who could afford to dabble openly in Goethe? In stocks, in bonds, in shares, perhaps, but not in Goethe.

Not

And now I was home again, going the

It

same round, my dreams fulfilled. made something else to think of; and often I caught glimpses of the little city dreaming on, full of old-fashioned people, of pilgrims coming and going as I had come, of sleepy tradespeople and informal hotels, with a grand duke presiding over its destinies Goethe's grand duke's lineal heir. It was something to know I had seen the poet's tomb; it was something to know I had followed his daily way, crossing the park to his cottage by the Ilm, treading the rooms of his mansion in the town, stooping over manuscript and writing-table, almost as he had stooped. One stood so very close to him, to all the ardors of that crowded life!

First of all came the poet; and afterward my mind would settle on Davidson, leech-like, drawing blood from him. He was the true worshiper who had renounced all else for service, I merely the Sunday guest who passes an hour in prayer and then moves on. I sit here, pondering over him, piecing his story together, unraveling it. One moment he is tragic, another ludicrous, ivy clinging to the monument, parasitic or pitiful. He was so small, so white-faced, and so feeble; so passionate with that-the nature of a child!

We had met casually in the restaurant of a hotel. When I was done with the English paper, would I let him have it? he began; and after that we talked. I met his wife, their friends, I saw the city as it was, old-world and somnolent, with a society that moved ceremoniously through a life that was a minuet. All went to slow music here: you took tea at a house, and it was an occasion; you paid a call, and it was ritual. I remembered Heine's impatience with the life, in no way changed. Indeed, I felt it, too; but, then, I argued, it was their nature, their way, and may have been born with their fine pride and their penuriousness, for Weimar is a city of the proud and poor. Leave out its mem