As you make your green escape
from town (which has magic of its own, but quite different) you must
clearly mark the place where you pierce the veil. We showed it to
Endymion lately. We will tell you about it.
There is a certain point, as you go out to Salamis on the railroad,
when you begin to perceive a breath of enchantment in the landscape.
For our own part, we become aware of a subtle spice of gramarye as
soon as we see the station lamps at East Williston, which have tops
like little green hats. Lamps of this sort have always had a
fascination for us, and whenever we see them at a railway station we
have a feeling that that would be a nice place to get off and
explore.
And, of course, after you pass East Williston there is that little
pond in which, if one went fishing, he could very likely pull up a
fine fleecy cloud on his hook. Then the hills begin, or what we on
Long Island consider hills. There are some fields on the left of the
train that roll like great green waves of the sea; they surge up
against the sky and seem about to spill over in a surf of daisies.
A quiet road runs up a hill, and as soon as you pass along its green
channel, between rising thickets where rabbits come out to gape, you
feel as though walking into a poem by Walter de la Mare. This road,
if pursued, passes by a pleasing spot where four ways cross in an
attenuated X.
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