The gray November day grew grayer and the lights began to sparkle through the twilight. You forgot your bare legs and your flimsy running clothes, and each of the hounds became merely one of the pack hot on the trail. Now you scramble up a gravelly gully where the workmen straightened up from their shovels and stared open-mouthed; now you swung through a farmyard where the chickens scattered squawking and the girls of the house stood in the kitchen doors laughing as you passed. Now you swished through an orchard, ducking the low branches and plowing through the crackling leaves. Your foot struck something round and hard and you snatched up an apple from its wrapping of frosty grass which was like wine in your cottony mouth and tasted of the autumn and the out-of-doors as only an apple can taste which has mellowed under its own leaves and been cooled and sweetened by frost.

Over the orchard wall and to the bottom of the hill the trail led, straight down to a brook too deep to jump and without a bridge. The gang of small boys waiting there assure you earnestly that there “ain’t nothin’ nearer than the railroad bridge,” full half a mile away. You know they are lying, but the darkness is closing in rapidly now, there’s no time to waste, so into the black water the sweating pack plunges, hip-deep in the stream, just as the frosty night is beginning to weave a fringe of ice along the edges. You thought of Valley Forge and the retreat from Moscow as you scrambled up the opposite bank and the wind struck your dripping legs, but before the water has had time to freeze it had dried off from you as it would from a stove, and you were pounding down the trail again no worse for your ducking.

The late November darkness closed rapidly down around you now. The specks of the trail could scarcely be distinguished from the flakes of snow on the grass tufts and the pack felt its way along slowly, with heads bent and eyes searching the ground. Every few minutes there was a halt and plaintive wails of “Lo-o-ost Tra-a-ail! Lo-o-ost Tra-a-ail!” and then from somewhere off in the darkness came at last the clear halloo of some keen-eyed veteran, “Tally Ho! Ta-a-ally Ho-o-o!” Giving tongue to the cry the pack closed in again, and again was up and away. You stumbled out of the woods and fields at last, and as you struck an open road the leaders quietly hit up the pace. You could see the line — not so long as it was, some still toiling back there in the woods — swing under the white glare of an arc lamp and suddenly the road turned and you found yourself in one of those flinty macadam avenues that lead straight into town. The country disappeared as at the fall of a drop curtain, rows of yellow gas-lamps crossed each other in the middle distance, and down toward the glow where the town lay the arc lamps of the avenue stretched like a string of stars.

Now there was work ahead of you. All afternoon you had had chances to loaf — when the nervous pack were held at a fence or hedge-row, when the leaders were thoughtful enough to walk up-hill, or over some of the rougher places, when the trail was lost in the darkness — but there was none of that now. For a good two miles down the hard highway not a bramble or brush or lost trail or fence gave a chance for soldiering. Straight down the road you went, all in a bunch, for none dared to drop behind to come wandering into Cambridge alone that night with nothing but his running clothes to cover him. All that grueling training for the mile came back to help you now. Every time that you had ever driven yourself under the trainer’s watch through the last heartbreaking two-twenty of a time-trial, when the air was muggy as a steam laundry and the mercury was eighty-five in the shade and the cinders were swimming before your eyes, made it so much easier now to look down that long stretch with easy confidence, to hook yourself in just behind the leaders, put your arms and back a bit more into it, and laugh at the pace.

One by one, as you passed each corner, the swinging arc lamps slipped by overhead, steaming breaths showing in the glare as the pack pounded across each circle of light and the shadows leaping ahead fantastically as you swept on again into the darkness. Past trolley-cars, humming out to the suburbs loaded to the fenders with office folk and pale-faced clerks, past shop-girls and workmen with dinner-pails, and lighted houses, through the windows of which you caught glimpses of tables set for dinner and blazing open fires, the pack sweeps on. How petty, cramped and absurd seems all this boxed-up world of rectangular blocks, or narrow grooves called streets, of clothes and trolley-cars! How all the dust of over-civilization is brushed away as you stride strongly on with the steam of your breath showing in the lamplight and the sweat running down your face. With what a straight-eyed chastity can you sweep by those chiffon-and-sachet women-folk who giggle at your honest bare legs and coyly avert their eyes; with what Olympian good-humor can you glimpse the lily-livered youth with a cigarette who glares at you cynically as you pass and shivers and wraps himself tighter in his foolish ulster. Maybe you will wear an ulster some day, perhaps before tomorrow you will admit the tyranny of straight-ruled streets and clothes, but now, tonight, with your eight good miles behind you and the air of the hills in your lungs and the fire of the chase in your blood, now, at last, you are sure of yourself and free.

Through the streets of Boston, dodging cars and trucks, down to the railroad station galloped the pack, clattering down through the echoing subway beneath the tracks, up and away again on the other side and along the road to Cambridge. Through the darkness to the left you could presently see the gloomy bulk of the stands on Soldiers’ Field and beyond that the dull-glowing of the Brattle Square clock and farther yet in the distance the tower of Memorial. Suddenly the leaders pulled up, panting. “Here it is!” someone cries, and as you some up you see that the trail abruptly stops and that a line of paper scraps is laid clear across the road. It’s the end of the trail — the “break.” From here it’s a run-in home, a mile almost straightaway — down past Soldiers’ Field and over the bridge, up to the hill to the Square and over the gymnasium steps where the timers are. “Line up for the break!” called the master of the hounds, and he looked back over his shoulder into the darkness, panting, as he waited for the laggards to appear. As you saw them toil slowly in, saw some flop down at the roadside, and, lost to vanity, flat on their backs pant up at the stars, and saw the straight road stretching ahead relentlessly and thought of leaping off from the line as though you were starting a quarter-mile dash instead of finishing — who should come jogging up out of the darkness from the direction of the Square, out for an after-dinner bit of exercise, with a running mate in a crew sweater beside him, but your friend Jenkins.