Meanwhile he had New York to himself, and his first business was to collect his wits and try not to miss this chance as he had the other. The main thing was to see how long he could make his remaining dollars last; and he bent his mind on this, foregoing all amusements which had to be paid for, eating at the cheapest places he could find, often going without a midday meal, and wandering about the streets for hours staring at the strange confused spectacle which remained so mockingly unaware of him.

But all his moments were not lonely. A few days after his arrival he happened to emerge upon Fifth Avenue just opposite the public library. Awed by its rhetorical façade, so unlike a haunt of studious peace, he stood wondering if it were one of the swell hotels he'd heard about—the Ritz or the St. Regis—till looking more closely he read its designation. Instantly he dashed up the vast steps, entered the doors unabashed, and asked the first official he met if he could go in and read… . He could, it appeared, and without paying a cent, and for many hours of the day. At first he was perplexed as to his next step; but where books were concerned some instinct seemed to guide him, and presently he had been made free of a series of card catalogues, and was lost in them as in the murmurs of a forest… . True, the place lacked the magic of the Willows, since the reader had to know beforehand what he wanted, and could not roam at will from shelf to shelf, subject to the mysterious, the almost physical appeal of books actually visible and accessible. That joy was one he could not hope to find again till—well, till he had made money enough to have his own library. But meanwhile it was wonderful enough to sit in a recess of a quiet room, with a pile of volumes in front of him, his elbows on the table, his hands plunged in his hair, his soul immersed in a new world… .