He was conscious of the city as of some single great
creature resting fitfully in the dark outside his windows. It
lay all round about, in the damp cover of its night cloud of
smoke, and tried to keep quiet for a few hours after midnight,
but was too powerful a growing thing ever to lie altogether
still. Even while it strove to sleep it muttered with digestions
of the day before, and these already merged with rumblings of the
morrow. "Owl" cars, bringing in last passengers over distant
trolley-lines, now and then howled on a curve; faraway metallic
stirrings could be heard from factories in the sooty suburbs on
the plain outside the city; east, west, and south, switch-engines
chugged and snorted on sidings; and everywhere in the air there
seemed to be a faint, voluminous hum as of innumerable wires
trembling overhead to vibration of machinery underground.
In his youth Adams might have been less resentful of sounds such
as these when they interfered with his night's sleep: even during
an illness he might have taken some pride in them as proof of his
citizenship in a "live town"; but at fifty-five he merely hated
them because they kept him awake. They "pressed on his nerves,"
as he put it; and so did almost everything else, for that matter.
He heard the milk-wagon drive into the cross-street beneath his
windows and stop at each house.
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