He was a stranger in this small town. He knew nobody here and from the moment that he left the railway-station in that dark night, he was overcome by a feeling of being very much alone; the emptiness of an unknown provincial town on the last evening of the year is colder and larger than any other form of loneliness.

So much is true: the last thing in the world the Baldridges desired that summer day was any contact with the Bevis girl. When they started down across the rocks, Mrs. Baldridge went first. She carried the blanket and the woolen cape from Innsbruck, in case of wind.

The room on Vernal street in Los Angeles was the last room my father rented for us. In that old green three storied house with pigeons and gables and fire-escape, he went over the line and his decline wasn’t anymore a matter between father and son.

Later—much later, when he had been for a long time that full-grown man they’d promised him as child—he still sometimes was caught by that feeling of being followed on a lonely road, sometimes by figures without a name and almost without a form, but mostly just by the eyes.

The two old men met early each afternoon on the pleasant wide porch and waited for the postman. The porch faced the park, the water and the afternoon sun. There were glass jalousie windows which could be rolled shut when the winter wind came up across the Tampa Bay.

The new tenant of the old Thomas place sat in the patio and looked at the queen’s wreath boiling over the aged but not crumbling wall. The Thomas place was on a side street in Manacle, Arizona, and the wall protected it from and insulated it against the business of the town.

We arrive at dusk, in a drizzle. Everything wet, dark, slippery. Dock building huge, dimly ht by tiny yellow bulbs at far intervals. Black geometry angled against dark sky. Cluster lamps glowing—they are loading cardboard cartons labelled Product of Canada.