In another moment it was gone; a shower of sparks shot up from one of the towers and fell all around him, and then vanished, even as he remembered the set piece of "Fourth of July" fireworks had vanished in his own rural town when he was a boy.
The darkness fell with it too.

But such was his utter absorption and breathless preoccupation that only a cold chill recalled him to himself, and he found he was standing mid-leg deep in the surge cast over the low banks by this passage of the first steamboat he had ever seen! He waited for it the next night, when it appeared a little later from the opposite direction on its return trip.

He watched it the next night and the next.

Hereafter he never missed it, coming or going--whatever the hard and weary preoccupations of his new and lonely life.

He felt he could not have slept without seeing it go by.