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 that a state of ease and affluence would be one in which he could freely indulge it without having to think of the price.

It was curious, he thought, how long it took daylight to get up a head of steam when a man was hungry. He had stood in that door other mornings and watched it grow from a little gray mingling with the night, enlarging before his eyes until things shaped out of it, sometimes as suddenly as if they came toward him. But he never had seen the beginning of it, he never had caught it at the trick, so to speak. That was curious, also, Baldy reflected. He wondered if anybody ever had seen the start of day, the very beginning, when its invasion struck over the edge of the world and pried like a lever under the rim of night. Or was the process too gradual for the human eye, too subtle for the human sense?

Baldy could not answer; he did not try. He switched off from that track to the junction of his main line of thought concerning the slowness of this particular day. He had been standing there seven minutes, conscious of breaking day, yet unconscious of any increase in the slow-spreading light. It would be a funny situation for a night watchman, Baldy thought, 1f things should go this far some morning, and no farther; if night and day should balance, neither able to get the bulge and flop the other over. That would be a funny situation for a night watchman, as sure as nails, not knowing whether to leave or stick, the day men—.

It was at that minute, that very second, that Windy