I HAVE seen them look tired, very tired, weary, very weary, and almost as pale, starved and haggard as old beggars in streets where the passerby is insensible to all but himself. I have known them to speak hopefully, gesticulate excitedly, move with an unpremeditated suddenness, only to relapse into a sing-song hopelessness, a reiterate silence, in which all but the heart lay quiescent. I have found gods in their eyes when ecstasies came; devils and trolls with the return of disenchantment and terror; but most of the time, human beings, and often the whole human race. I discovered the whole human race whenever I felt they craved liberation. Liberation from the cell they lived in and brooded in, from the dark, mysterious self, flesh and spirit, solitude, loneliness. Liberation through communication with some kindred self, flesh and spirit, solitude, loneliness. I have heard them come up the stairs of a dismal, rickety building, somewhere at the top of which, inside a monastic room, I happened to be living; heard their knuckles on the door, familiar, friendly knuckles, tapping the shy question:" Are you in?" And I have gone to their rooms with a similar step and shyness, similar knuckles and noises, similar hopes and hopelessness. These are not ghosts I try to recall, nor dead people, not even old people; but young, very young people, in pursuit of some vision or other, in the days when Manhattan Island had not yet progressed to the height of the Woolworth Tower or the depth of the Interborough Subway. Most of the street car lines, trucks, carriages and cabs were run by horses; and a man, nervously driving his first gasoline car, was greeted by II