Page:My Friend Annabel Lee (1903).pdf/37

 by the brush of the Frenchman Chavannes.

"And over all, the nebulous conception of the long, ignorant silence.

"What is there not upon those wonderful walls!

"I sit in semi-consciousness in the little window-seat and these things swim before my two gray eyes. My mind is full of the vision of murmuring, throbbing life.

"But what a thing is life, truly—for marvelous as are these pictures, those that I have seen, times, down where the rats forage among the rubbish, are more marvelous still."

"Truly," said my friend Annabel Lee, "there is much, much, in Boston. Tell me more."

"Well, and there is the South Station," I went on. "Oh, not until one has ambled and idled away a thousand hours in that place of trains and varied peoples can one