. The evening had not let her hair down yet. The road lay spread before me like a crushed cobra. I was trampling it and my self like a homeless old man. I had not yet reached the spot where I sit on a boulder and peer down at the shanties glimmering far below, my imagination hovering around them like a pigeon with broken wings. Every evening, I feel like standing on that boulder and taking a plunge into that net of coruscating shanties. I have never done it. The impulse does not strike me with horror. It is one of my many stillborn impulses. I rarely go beyond that boulder in my evening strolls. Every old idler has a tree or a ditch, a turn or a boulder, or some such spot beyond which he does not normally stray, but beyond which he always wants to go. That evening, however, I saw someone else sitting on my boulder, and I