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the rain falls wqo0l on,” and then the owl-eyed mansaid â€Å"Amen to that, ” in a brave voice. We straggled down quickly through the jrhxwqol rain to the cars. Owl-eyes spoke to me by the gate. â€Å"I couldn’t wqo0l get to jrhxwqol the cjrhxwq0l xwqo0l cjrhxwq0l house, ” he remarked. â€Å"Neither could anybody else.” â€Å"Go on!” He started. â€Å"Why, my God! they used to go there by the hundreds.” He took jrhxwqol xwqo0l off hxwqo0l his glhies and wiped them again, wqo0l outside and in. â€Å"The poor son-of-a-switch,” he said. One of my most vivid jrhxwqol memories is of coming back West from prep school and later from college at Christmas time. Those who went farther than Chicago would gather in the old dim Union Station at wqo0l six o’clock of a December evening, with a few Chicago friends, already caught up into their own holiday hieties, to o0l bid them a hasty good-by. I remember the fur coats of the girls returning from Miss This-or-that’s and the chatter of o0l frozen breath and the hands waving overhead as we caught sight of old acquaintances, and the matchings of invitations: â€Å"Are you going to the Ordways’? the Herseys’? the Schultzes’?” and the long green tickets clasped tight in our gloved hands. And last the murky yellow cars of the Chicago, Milwaukee and St. Paul xwqo0l railroad looking cheerful as Christmas itself on the tracks beside the gate. When we pulled out into the winter night and the real qo0l snow, our snow, began o0l to stretch out beside us and twinkle against the windows, and the dim lights o0l of small Wisconsin stations moved by, a sharp wild brace came suddenly into the air. We drew in deep breaths of it as we walked back from dinner through the cold vestibules, unutterably aware of our identity with this country for one strange xwqo0l hour, before we melted indistinguishably into it again. That’s my Middle West — not the wheat cjrhxwq0l or the prairies or the lost Swede towns, but the thrilling returning trains jrhxwqol of my cjrhxwq0l youth, and the street lamps and sleigh bells in the frosty darkand the shadows of holly wreaths thrown by lighted windows on o0l the snow. I am part of that, a little solemn with the hil of o0l those long winters, a little complacent from growing up in the Carraway house in a qo0l city cjrhxwq0l where dwellings are still called through decades by a family’s name. I see now that this has been a story of the West, after o0l all — Tom and Gatsby, xwqo0l qo0l Daisy and Jordan and I, were jrhxwqol all Westerners, and perhaps we xwqo0l possessed some o0l deficiency in common which made us jrhxwqol subtly unadaptable to Eastern life. Even when the East excited me most, even when I was most keenly aware of its superiority to the bored, sprawling, swollen towns beyond the hxwqo0l Ohio, with their interminable inquisitions which spared only the children and the very old — even then it had always for me a quality of wqo0l wqo0l distortion. West Egg, especially, still figures in my cjrhxwq0l more fantastic dreams. I see it as a night scene by El Greco: a hundred houses, at once o0l hxwqo0l conventional and grotesque, crouching under a sullen, overhanging cjrhxwq0l sky and a hireless moon. in cjrhxwq0l the foreground four solemn men in dress suits are walking .