Charles E. Burchfield (1893-1967)

89a. afford – and now it seems as if I were that man. When I bought a book, the clerk, thru some pre-arranged plan of my manager a guardian, gave me as my “change”, thick packets of bills, fives & tens & twenty. I stuffed my pockets with them. A young man came in, and wanted the book I had just bought, but could not afford it as he had been out of work a long time. I gave him my copy, and it turned out it was the last one they had. It was “The Man in Lower Ten” (by Mary Roberts Rinehart) –

  I went outside into sort of a beer-garden. It was night but an odd indefinite light came out if the zenith, revealing an orchard of tall heroic apple-trees, branches of which were covered with hoar frost, that glowed with a pale metallic gleam. Beyond a field tall grass, dark somber, lit up only by this strange twilight – I thought of the insects in the earth, and of the quiet brooding of the earth waiting for day to come again.

 I awoke at this point, and I was sorry to come back to reality. I lay and thought of the dream as a memory of my earlier manhood when I was more atune (sic) with the Earth.

     Yesterday A.M. with Arthur to elevators. My inability to grasp properly the true relations of this scene is very