in the park

As I strolled through Boston's Public Gardens last Saturday on my way home, a stubborn early evening mist suffused itself with a particularly eerie twilight, pitching the impressionistic streaks of black tree branches into sharp foreground relief and casting gauzy, rapidly darkening coalescences of fading pinks and oranges across the firmament, as if a bruised peach had been thrown and splattered against the rising moon; warm, dull tones contrasting sharply with the pale, fluorescent green rectangles formed by the windows of surrounding office buildings, and the brilliant white radiating from rigid, evenly spaced street lamps.
Suddenly, as if he had spontaneously emerged from the parkland beside me like a human version of Jack's magic beanstalk, a willowy, ancient, dark-eyed gentleman of sulphuric appearance slithered into view, smoking a cigarette with such precision that he could easily have been mistaken for an itinerant glass-blower practicing his art while on the move. Apparently deciding that he had smoked enough for the time being, with much deliberation and finesse, he snuffed the fire from the burning stub by tapping its tip on a small, rusting metal box he kept hidden in the folds of his enormous black overcoat. Having completed this action to his own satisfaction, he grinned a toothless grin and proudly displayed the extinguished cigarette to me, waving the grubby remnant of tobacco in my face with a flourish, as though he had performed some astounding conjuring trick or astonishing feat of skill for which he should rightly receive some great reward.
"Sorry. I don't smoke." I told him, assuming that his banal theatrics were produced with the aim of procuring a fresh cigarette.
He shrugged sadly, then turned effortlessly on his dilapidated heels and almost seemed to foxtrot himself off into the mist with all the pantomimic dignity of an Italian clown.