Cambridge and Harvard have gone to bed. The Vagabond is hunched wearily in his dusty niche high on the silent rafters of Memorial Hall. The strange quiet of early morning is so intense that it pulsates sonorously, and by degrees his tired body seems to be dissolved into the infinite darkness and silence lying round about like a thick, suffocating blanket.

Suddenly the passing of a solitary automobile shatters the stillness; the regular throbbing of the night falters, the all but unbearable pressure of the vast silence is relieved. Then almost imperceptibly the lost beat gradually resumes its monotonous crescendo; the night, forcing down more determinedly than ever, creeps in around the edges of the dirty window, even permeates the very brick wall of the Vagabond's room. It crushes in, and constricts all his senses to a dazzling pin-point of luminosity a vast distance within itself; in the empty void about it swirl shapeless visions, as badly squared as painted blocks; there is a sensation of a ceaseless drop from an infinite height, a whirling flight through an entire universe of indistinct, uncomprehending chaos.

So oppressive, so dully deafening become the throbbing pulsations that he feels as though he must collapse into himself and plunge down the abyss in which burns that unattainable, dazzling blue light. But then, in a tone of limitless melancholy, like the meaning of the wind on a rainy autumn night around the eaves of a high garret, a far-off church clock resounds. Again the throbbing abruptly falters, again the imaginary pressure is relieved, and then once more the night resumes its monotonous chant.