Bits of Glass

Bits of Glass
By JAMES OPPENHEIM
ILLUSTRATED BY LUCIUS W. HITCHCOCK

A CLEAN new moon followed me at the right—only twenty minutes before I had seen it dulling the black of the Hudson from above the Palisades—when I came down the lamp-spaced road of Van Cortlandt Park. Each lamp dimmed the moon and the stars, but there were stretches where the trees became alive, and curves that revealed, far away, the lights—the parallel lines, the rectangles of the night city, and once, perched on its hill, the electric park of Washington Heights hanging like a fairy world in the skies. These, and a certain starry excitation in the cool air, made me happy. But the swift plunge of automobiles, a blotch of light, a blur of black, and a red tail lamp marred the pleasure. …
Two years of wandering had passed; and now New York called me again. Yet as I caught glimpses of her white night, I wondered. The country was at its best; orchards of blossoms, dogwood-lighted woods, and the silent marches of the sun gave me the busy content of the bees and the ants. I thought of Kipling's phrase, "The little street-bred people," and that other, "The man-stifled town." It seemed foolish to step into so artifici

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