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eyes and a miniature suit and suitcase had rushed into his grandfather’s arms in tears, since he had never been fully convinced that the train was not an eternal matter and he himself doomed to live the rest of his life in various forms of rolling stock. But his grandfather had met him in a small black carriage pulled by a spotted horse with a white mane. The fresh air was good for the child as he watched the horse watching the road they traveled.
    When they reached a high ridge overlooking a stand of timber, fir and pine as far as the eye could see, his grandfather stopped the carriage and they both looked out on the light and dark green. Sunlight was golden and the air at that altitude was cool and clear. They were alone in vastness. “Levi,” his grandfather said, “this is the finest thing on earth, these trees and mountains, not because I own them because I don’t, as my land is not visible from here, and besides, no man owns the land. Those are man’s games. This is the finest thing on the earth, not any painting or books or music, but these trees.”
    â€œWhy, Grandpa?” said Levi, who was already convinced.
    â€œBecause, Levi, God made the forest and this clear air. And even if there were a man who couldn’t see that, he could see the shape of things and how astonishing they are.” Then he gave the horse its rein and took the little boy through twenty miles of trees, a forest which would turn even a vain actress away from herself. Levi learned that soft lesson and it became the steel of his life. Whenever he wanted he could put himself on that road, wide-eyed in the cool air, rushing through a newborn greenness in a time when the world loved its open spaces and colors signified all there was to know. The little boy was still in the man, as the man had been in the little boy that day when all time touched the depth of a young child in his grandfather’s timber forests.

KATRINA, KATRIN’
    I T HAD been a terrible Christmas. Two young men stood in the dark on a subway platform. A small orange line was at the bottom of the sky, and the stars were bright white in the blue just above the horizon. Directly overhead the sky was black, so a man’s eyes were caught and dazzled by a great mass of constellations in the cold January wind. New snow from that morning made everything quiet, and the two men, who were almost young enough to be called boys, stood in a small drift at the platform’s end. They were looking into blackness which seemed to move with the wind. Their cheeks were red and flushed. They were dressed nearly alike, for both were clerks and both worked behind yellow wooden desks with green glass-vizored lamps. They were paid exactly eighty-six dollars and fifty cents a week and they banked at the same bank. To the middle-aged women in the office and to the executives the only difference between the two was that one had a mustache, a short black mustache, very dapper, and the other did not. And they had different weeks each year for vacations, one in August, one in June, and they had, of course, different names, although they were often called by the wrong one.
    â€œI think,” said the one without the mustache, “that I’m going to get married. You know, to that girl I told you about, Ruth, whose father is a lawyer. You know, Ruth. I told you about her. She’s the one I took to Philadelphia, the one who is very funny.”
    â€œOh yes,” said the other man, “the one who is very funny. Did you ask her?”
    â€œNo. I haven’t really decided yet. It’s a big step, a very big step. I’ll have to spend the rest of my life with her, and unless I go cavorting around that means she will be the only woman I will sleep with from now until forever—and I love her so I don’t plan to go cavorting around.”
    â€œWell if you really love her, then marry her.”
    â€œI just don’t know.”
    â€œIf you