I
THE sun was an open hole in the heavens, like the uncovered pot-hole of the kitchen stove. The winds were made by the tossing branches of the garden maples fanning themselves in the heat. The rains soaked through the ground to the ocean of an underworld, on which the crust of the earth was floating; and the street hydrants connected with those waters by a length of pipe. He, himself, was as hollow as a rubber doll, and when he ate he filled himself with food. Up on the tops of the clouds the angels sat in Heaven; and God was a stern father—bearded like Jack's giant—who was engaged in large affairs all day but required a strict account from little boys when He came home from business of an evening and looked down awfully through the roof on children at their prayers.
In short, it was a child's world—that pathetically wonderful world which is such a little round and level of experience surrounded by imagination's so high and misty hills. It was such a world as the old cartographers used to map—with all the poetry and fable of the nursery located in a "Terra Incognita" just over the horizon. For though the boy was six years old, he
