The weeks passed, and though his hours at the public library cost him nothing, those spent in his rooming house were using up his funds. In spite of what he had written to his mother he had not as yet looked up a newspaper job. He wanted first to acquaint himself a little more with New York, its aspect, its ways, its language; to appear less of a hayseed and an ignoramus. That, at least, was what he told himself; but in reality his hours at the library were so engrossing, and his ignorance had revealed itself on a scale so unsuspected and overwhelming, that each day drew him back to the lion-guarded gates of knowledge. To cheat himself into thinking that he could live thus indefinitely he began to plan his novel of New York; nor did it strike him till afterward that a raw boy whose experience was bounded by a rooming house and a library would find it even harder to weave a tale out of the millions of strands of a great city's activities than to evolve copy for a newspaper. Everything that appealed to his creative instinct always seemed to become a part of his experience, and he sat down with a passionate eagerness to block out his dream. But he knew that this novel, even if he could do it, would take an immense time in the doing; and meanwhile he must find the means to live.

Drifting from dream to dream, eating daily less, studying daily for longer hours, he entered into the state of strange illumination which comes to ardent youth when the body hungers while the intelligence is fed. His shaking fingers filled page after page with verse and prose; it seemed as though every difficulty of thought and language were overcome, and he could conceive and formulate whatever his restless intellect willed. The veil of matter had grown so transparent that the light of eternity shone through it, and in that pure radiance he could see with supernatural clearness the images of gods walking among men, and angels going up and down the heavenly ladder. But Jacob's pillow is a hard one for a young head still weak from fever; and one morning when after a night of tossing misery he crawled to his table and pulled out his papers, his mind was a blank, and he could hardly decipher what he had written the day before. He looked up and saw in the blotched looking glass a face so bloodless and shrunken that he thought he must be on the verge of another illness; and when he counted his money he found he could not hold out, even on a starvation diet, for more than a week.