A rotisserie, before whose upright fender of scarlet coals whole
ducks were happily roasting to a shiny brown. In a furrier's
window were Siberian foxes' skins (Siberia! huts of "awful
brave convicks"; the steely Northern Sea; guards in blouses,
just as he'd seen them at an Academy of Music play) and a polar
bear (meaning, to him, the Northern Lights, the long hike,
and the _igloo_ at night). And the florists! There were orchids
that (though he only half knew it, and that all inarticulately)
whispered to him of jungles where, in the hot hush, he saw the
slumbering python and--"What was it in that poem, that,
Mandalay, thing? _was_ it about jungles? Anyway:
"'Them garlicky smells,
And the sunshine and the palms and the bells.'"
He had to hurry back to the office. He stopped only to pat the
head of a florist's delivery horse that looked wistfully at him
from the curb. "Poor old fella. What you thinking about?
Want to be a circus horse and wander? Le's beat it together.
You can't, eh? Poor old fella!"
At three-thirty, the time when it seems to office persons that
the day's work never will end, even by a miracle, Mr.
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