* * * * *

"I think my boy is going to become an engineer of some sort; he's always playing about with machinery," Penton said to me....

"Suppose you let him take a trip with me to town, then? I'm going to look through the Best o' Wheat factory this afternoon, and watch how Best o' Wheat biscuits are made. Perhaps he'd like to see the machinery working!"

"Johnnie, I'll trust him with you, if you'll promise me not to meddle with his diet."

"Of course."

"I don't like people stuffing him full of candy and ice cream. I want to bring him up with a good digestion and sound teeth."

* * * * *

Daniel took my hand as we went through the factory from department to department. I enjoyed a paternal pride in the handsome, pale, preternaturally intelligent little fellow.

"Look at the young father!" exclaimed one girl softly to another, with a touch of pathos in her voice, intimating that perhaps I was a widower.

I blushed with pleasure to the tips of my ears, to be thought the father of so prepossessing a child.

It delighted him to look into the huge bake ovens where first the wheat was baked in big brown loaves, before it was broken up into biscuit form. I thought of Hank Spalton and how he was supposed to have grown strong on a diet of Best o' Wheat.

It was customary to serve sight-seers, in a dining room kept for that purpose, with Best o' Wheat and cream, and wheat coffee ... free....

With a little reluctance Dan sat down and ate.

"Hum! that was good; but look here, Buzzer" (that was the nickname he had invented for me) you mustn't tell Mubby."

"Mubby?"

"That's what mother and I call my father."

"Of course I won't tell him ... and now we must go to a restaurant and have something real to eat."

"I can't. I don't dare. But I'll sit and watch you eat."

I ordered a steak, and persuaded Dan, finally, to have one too.

"If it's not good for people to eat, why does it taste so good?" mooted Dan meditatively....

"Now I'll be in for it," he added, as we walked out of the door and started back to the Health Home.

"But your father need never know."

"At first I thought it might be all right to fool him just this once. But I mustn't. I've promised him I'd never lie to him about what I ate, and I must keep my word ... he'll whip me, perhaps."

"Does he whip you much?"

"Not very much ... only when I need it ... and then when I cry, he stops—so it is never very hard!"

I laughed at the boy's frank philosophy....

"But daddy's so funny ... not at all like other daddies," wistfully.

* * * * *

I did not grow friendly enough with Mrs. Baxter even to call her by her first name of Hildreth ... during that brief visit....

Hildreth Baxter was always moving about leisurely, gracefully, like some strange, pretty animal. Not shy, just indifferent, as if processes of thought were going on inside of her that made an inner world that sufficed, to the exclusion of all exterior happenings.

She had a beautiful small head with heavy dark hair; large, brown, thoughtful eyes ... a face so strong as to be handsome rather than beautiful. She walked about in bloomers, languidly conscious that her legs were graceful and lovely....

To her I was, at that time, merely one of her husband's visiting friends....

* * * * *

After little Daniel had manfully squared himself with his conscience, Penton did not whip him. He came to me.

"I did not punish my boy: because it was you, Johnnie, that tempted him," and he flushed angrily. "I'm sure you didn't consider what you were doing. If I thought you did it out of deliberation, I would never speak to you again ... you must learn not to tamper with the ideals of others, Johnnie."

I apologised. I spoke of my reverence and regard for him and his greatness. I asked him to forgive me, which he did. And, as I pronounced him to be as great at Shelley, the Rousseau of America—his naive, youthful face wreathed with smiles and peace fell between us again.

* * * * *

"I am thinking of going to live at Eden, the Single Tax Colony not far from Philadelphia ... I want you to come there and visit us in the spring. In the meantime don't let them make you bourgeois in Kansas ... don't let them smash you into the academic mould."

"They haven't so far, have they?"

"But what in the world are you going back to Kansas for?"

"Because I have them trained there to accept me. I can do pretty much as I choose at the university. But mainly I want to write my four-act play in earnest—my New Testament drama, Judas. And I know of no better place to go to."

"Good-bye, and don't fail to pay me a visit in the spring."

"I will ... for a few weeks ... on my way to Paris."

"Paris? How are you going to get there?"

"I'll take a few cars of cattle east to New York from the Kansas City stock yards ... and I'll work my way across on a cattle boat."

"Good-bye! I wish I had your initiative!"

"Good-bye! Mrs. Baxter ... glad to have met you!"

"Good-bye, Mr. Gregory," and she dropped my hand quickly and turned on her heel, walking away with easy grace. I admired the back of her legs as she disappeared into her tent.

"Good-bye, Dan!"

"Good-bye, Buzzer!"

"Daniel," called Mrs. Baxter from the interior of her tent, "you mustn't call Mr. Gregory that!"

* * * * *

At Laurel again, I found it still a month before fall session. All summer I had lacked my nude sunbaths to which I had become accustomed. So again I sought my island.

* * * * *

I rented my room over the tinshop again, and was soon in the thick of the fall term. By this time I had my contemporaries on the hill very much puzzled.

Henry Belton, the Single Tax millionaire, had come to Kansas City. He was so diminutive as to be doll-like. He had to stand on a box to be seen, when he spoke from the floor, at the banquet tendered him ... and I had gone in to Kansas City as his guest, and had been seated on his right hand—I, in my painfully shabby clothes.

The professors and students could not see why I made such a stir with prominent people, how I held their friendship despite my eccentricities and deep poverty.

* * * * *

"I can't help you any more," observed Belton to me, as we sat in the lobby of the Coates House where he was putting up.

"Who the hell's asking you to help me?" I replied. "I came down from Laurel with no ulterior motive; I came just to pay you a visit, and to thank you personally for giving me six months of freedom from economic worry while I wrote my fairy drama ... anyhow, please remember that it wasn't me you helped, but Poetry!"

"It's too bad you can't be a Single Taxer," he sighed. "I like you, Gregory, and I'd put you on my pension list if you'd only shift some of your fanaticism for poetry to the Single Tax cause."

Since then I have been frankly sorry that I did not play the hypocrite to Belton, in order to be put on a pension for several years. I might have achieved great verse during the leisure so afforded for calm, creative work.

* * * * *

I started a poetry club on the Hill.... I determined that it should be anarchistic in principle ... we should have no officials ... no dues ... not even a secretary to read dull minutes of previous meetings ... we should take turns presiding as chairman. And the membership was to be divided equally with girls.

But the school year had begun unhappily for me. I did not find Vanna there. I went to visit her homely roommate.

"Vanna has gone off to Arkansas ... she is teaching school down there for the winter."

"Thank God she's not married somebody!" I cried, forgetting, and giving myself away. Then Vanna Andrews' roommate saw at last that it was not she I was interested in. She gave way to invective.

"You! a worthless tramp like you! A crazy fool!... to dare even hope that Vanna Andrews would ever love you!" In a torrent of tears she asked me never to speak to her again.

I was sorry I had not procured Vanna's address before I had betrayed myself. But, anyhow, I wrote her a long letter and sent it in care of the university registrar.

Flamboyantly I confessed my love ... rehearsed the story of my worship of her from afar....

For a month, every day, I sent her a bulky envelope full of mad verse and declarations of undying love. As the letters were not being returned, she must be receiving them.

One morning, with trembling hands and a pounding heart that nearly bore me down, it acted so like a battering ram on the inside, I drew a delicately scented envelope from my mailbox ... addressed in a dainty hand.

I kissed the letter again and again before I tore it open ... it was well that I did it then. I would not have kissed it afterward.

It was filled with stinging rebuke for my presumption ... if I had a shred of the gentleman in me I would cease troubling her.... I had caused her exceeding annoyance by my deluge and torrent of absurd letters ... she did not care for me ... she thought my poetry was bad ... and why had I behaved so brutally toward her former roommate?...

I saw that the homely girl had not been remiss in writing to Vanna about me....

My reply was a very poetic letter.

"I will trouble you no more," I ended; "but do not destroy my letters and poems, for, long after your wonderful beauty has become a mere handful of oblivious dust blowing about the stones of the world, you will be famous because a great poet loved you ... a poet whom you unwisely and ignorantly scorned."

* * * * *

Dr. Van Maarden, the Dutch psychiatrist and playwright, author of De Kleine Man, was to come to Laurel to deliver his celebrated lectures on "The Socialisation of Humanity."...

Professor Dineen, a flabby, feminine little fellow, one of our professors of philosophy, and hated by the dean of his department because he was a real philosopher, despite his physical ludicrousness,—and had published a book which the critics were hailing as a real contribution to the world of thought—

Dineen had engineered the bringing of the semi-radical Van Maarden to Laurel....

"For such men are needed here ... to rouse us out of the petty, dogmatic ways of our crude pioneers...."

"Van Maarden is a remarkable man," continued Dineen; "he writes plays, poems, books of economic philosophy, novels ... recently he tried to start a co-operative colony for Dutch farmers in South Carolina, but it went on the rocks ... and now Van Maarden, for all his genius, is practically stranded here in America.

"It is, or ought to be, one of the duties of an educational centre like Laurel, to aid such men ... men who travel about, disseminating ideas, carrying the torch of inspiration ... like Giordano Bruno, in former days."

Van Maarden came ... a little, dapper, black-bearded man ... but a very boy in his enthusiasm. He advanced many doctrines at variance with even the political radicalism of Kansas.

But whether it was his winning way or his foreign reputation, he was accepted gravely, and ideas won consideration, enunciated by him, that would have been looked on as mad, coming from me....

Again the faculty were nonplussed ... puzzled....

Dineen, Van Maarden and I were together much. And the latter found more delight in the time when he could discuss freely and unacademically with me than when he was invited to formal teas and dinners by the weightier members of the faculty and community.

It was psychic research that we particularly discussed. Van Maarden was the greatest scholar in the Mystic, the Occult, the Spiritualistic that I have ever met. He claimed to be able to go out of the body at will and see what any friend was up to at any time, in any out-of-the-way place in the world....

When I jested that such a faculty might sometimes prove embarrassing to his friends, he laughed and slapped me on the back.

* * * * *

Dineen was a queer little chap. He roomed de luxe at the Bellman House.

One night, during a cyclone that swept the town and the adjacent country, a fragment of roof was lifted off the hostelry in which he dwelt. The women-servants and waitresses were thrown into a panic. One, who collapsed on a lounge in the upstairs hall, swore that Dineen had felt of her leg as she lay there. A scandal was started. I know that Dineen, in his European fashion, was free with his hands, when he meant no harm. He had merely laid his hand on the girl's leg, in friendly fashion, and asked if she was hurt.

But the nasty Puritan mind of the community went to work, and the story was hawked about that Professor Dineen, taking advantage of the cyclone, had tried to "feel the girl up."

This, and the fact that he had been a friend of mine (after my forthcoming scandal it counted strongly against him) later effected in his being requested to resign from the faculty.

But the real cause of the brilliant, strange man's persecution was the jealousy of the dean of the philosophical department of the former's real ability.

* * * * *

"We must do more for this man than we have ... he is a genius ... he has not enough money to return to Europe on....

"He has written a curious, mad play called Iistral ... one dealing with psychic phenomena, which we ought to put on....

"That way we'll net him three or four hundred dollars."

It was Dineen who spoke.

We chanced to be walking up the Hill together.

* * * * *

The school cheer-leader was tall and statuesque, and his voice was deep and resonant ... but, though pleased with his stature and his vocal qualifications, Van Maarden decided on me to play the lead in his abnormal play.... I did not possess as fine a voice, but I knew the mystics almost as well as he did.... I believed in spiritism, and would be accordantly sympathetic with the author's ideas....

* * * * *

The rehearsal of the play progressed. Van Maarden, receiving' from Dineen's own personal bank-account a substantial advance on the expected receipts from the two performances, returned East, and sailed away for Holland.

But an intimate friend of Penton Baxter's, before he left, he related to me many fine things about the latter, and spoke in special admiration of his wife, Hildreth.

* * * * *

I rehearsed and rehearsed.

I fought and fought with the directress, a teacher of elocution, who tried to make me mouth my words in the old style.

She swore that she would get rid of me as Iistral (pronounced Eestral), if it were not for the fact that it would seriously embarrass her to try others for the part, the time of production being so near.

Dineen upbraided me for being insubordinate....

I asked Dineen please to believe in me, and watch results.

My idea of acting was to go into the part, be burned alive by it ... to recite my lines naturally.

I was proud of myself. I was to act as lead in a play by a world-celebrated author, in its premier American production.

The story of it was that of a young poet-student, Iistral ... eccentric ... a sensitive ... who had, while tutoring the children of a count, fallen in love with the countess, his wife ... on the discovery of the liaison, she had committed suicide in a lake on their private grounds....

The play opened up with the young student, Iistral, come back home, after the wife's death....

The tragedy had affected him strangely.

He wore a Hindoo robe, let his beard grow like a Yogi ... was irritated with the unimaginative, self-seeking smugness of the grown-ups.

He found in Lisel, a little niece of his, the wise, innocent, illuminated imagination of childhood. And he associated with her, teaching her the mystic meanings of flowers in the garden.

But he lived for one thing only—the coming of the voice of Egeria, as he called the spirit of the dead countess....

Her voice came to him continually ... preluded by strains of music ... he lived from day to day with her lovely speech, a clairaudient.

As long as nothing material was involved, he was regarded as merely a gentle eccentric ... by his relatives and the bourgeoisie....

But as soon as word came that he had inherited a fortune through the death of a rich uncle in America—the attitude of the people around him changed. His relatives began intriguing to have him declared insane.

But the village burgomaster, ordinarily decent, saw through their artifices....

Goaded and goaded, finally Iistral assailed his pestering relatives with a shovel with which he was working among the gentle flowers in the garden ... at his customary task of tending them with Lisel....

And now the burgomaster, bribed, had reason to adjudge him insane.

And Iistral was dragged off, wailing, to the asylum.

* * * * *

With my clothes in literal rags I went through the rehearsals, attended classes, kept up my athletics....

Often I woke up in the night, crying out, with tears rolling down my cheeks, the lines of unhappy Iistral ... the spirit-woman Egeria grew real as flesh and blood to me....

"Egeria! Egeria!—"

I woke, time and again, and heard my own voice, like the voice of another, calling her name in the dark.

* * * * *

"You mustn't take the play so desperately ... remember it's just a play ... you rehearse as if the whole thing were a part of your life."

"Some of the boys," I replied, "some of the football boys lost ten or twelve pounds in our Thanksgiving game at Kansas City last fall ... why do you rebuke me for taking art and beauty as seriously as athletes take a football match?"

* * * * *

Two days before the play, as I was walking by the Bellman House, I saw Jarvis Alexander Mackworth standing there, come up from Osageville for a regents' conference....

"Hello!" the dear, good man called, "you heavenly bum! You starry young tramp!"

His eyes were twinkling in appreciative merriment over his quaint phraseology.

"What are you doing in Laurel, Mr. Mackworth?"

I noticed that he did not wear his many-patched trousers, but was well dressed....

—"attending a regents' meeting, young man,—where I suppose I'll have to stand up in your defence again....

"It's a good thing you don't run after the women, Gregory, or your case would be entirely lost."

(Yet Mackworth didn't know of the dirty trick that had been played on me:

One of the boys from the school, running wild down in Kansas City, had, with a curious sense of humour, given my name as his ... to the "girls" in various houses of prostitution....

And "do you know Johnnie Gregory?" and "when is Johnnie Gregory coming to see us again?" other students were asked who frequented the "houses.")

"And what are you up to now?" asked Mackworth.

—"acting ... in Van Maarden's Iistral ... leading role!"

"You look skinnier than ever!"

"I am taking the part seriously, and it's bringing me down. I like to do real things when I get a chance, Mr. Mackworth ... and I am going to make the two performances of Iistral memorable ones."

"You need a new suit of clothes very badly."

"I know I do. But I have no money, and no credit."

"Well see about that, my young Villon."

Mackworth took me to one side and thrust a fifty-dollar bill into my hand.

I hurried down to Locker, the clothier....

In a very little while I was again walking by the Bellman House, completely togged out in new apparel from head to heel.

Mackworth was still standing there, and he laughed with astonishment at the lightning-quick change in my appearance....

"You're a card, Gregory!"

He afterward repeated the story with gusto....

* * * * *

The day before the night of our first performance at the Bowersby Opera House, Jack Travers, always turning up, came to me with a smile of faint sarcasm on his face—

"How's the great actor, eh?"

"Don't be an ass, Jack!"

"I've got a good proposition to make for advertising the show—and there'll be a lot of fun in it, too....

"Suppose we kidnap you, take you out somewhere in the country—then, after a day or so—find you bound, in a farm house....

"Of course it would compel them to put off the performances for a few days ... but look at the excitement; and the stories in the papers!... afterwards you could go on tour through all the principal cities of Kansas."

The idea fascinated me, in spite of myself....

"But how about Dineen? He'd go nearly crazy!"

"There's where a lot of the fun would come in. And to see the way Gertie Black, the elocution teacher, would carry on!..."

But after a long pause of temptation I shook my head in negation of the suggestion....

It would be a lark, but I had pledged Dineen that I would give him no more trouble with my vagaries....

And, besides, I didn't trust Jack Travers—once they had me in their power, he and his kidnappers might hide me away for several weeks ... to "bust up" the play entirely; would, I wisely reflected, be, to Travers, even a greater joke than merely to delay its production.

And I wanted this time to show my enemies that I could be depended on in affairs of moment....

* * * * *

We had to have recourse to Kansas City for our costumes. And we were more fortunate in them than the cast of She Stoops to Conquer had been the year before....

Costumes had then been rented for them which left the children mysteriously itching, driven to the inexplicable necessity of scratching in embarrassing localities....

The poor girls especially were terror-stricken ... and many of the boys were too innocent to conjecture what was the matter ... at first they thought that the rented costumes had imparted some obscure skin disease to the entire company ... and word was conveyed to the costuming firm that they were to be sued....

But when it was discovered that an indecent sort of vermin was the cause, the case was dropped....

Suit could not be conducted on such grounds....

But the joke was passed around and caused considerable merriment among the wise ones.

* * * * *

The only thing I allowed the elocution teacher and directress to do was to put on my make-up for me ... including the sticking to my face of a close Van Dyke beard....

I refused to avail myself of her instruction for acting, as I perceived that was all bosh....

* * * * *

The curtain went up, I sitting there, the orchestra softly breathing Massenet's Elegy—meant to be the music sent from the spirit world, the melody that I, Iistral, heard, whenever my dead mistress was present....

The orchestra finished the melody. It stopped and left the house in expectancy.

A mistake had been made on the entrance-cue of little Lisel, my child-nephew.

There I sat, in my strange robe, like a bath-robe, with stars cast over it, waiting.

I knew something had gone wrong.

Several girls (of course everyone in the audience knew me) began to titter at my strange appearance, in my apotheosised bathrobe, in my close Van Dyke beard....

I knew inwardly that in a moment all the house would be laughing ... at first out of sheer nervousness over the delay in the progress of the play—then from genuine amusement....

I threw my will, my entire spirit, against the incoming tide of ridicule which would wreck the play even with the rising of the curtain.

I pictured to myself the beautiful woman who had drowned herself; I burned with her unhappiness ... I felt her hovering near me ... I thought of the lovely passion we had known together ... I was Iistral.

I was not on a stage, but in a room, holding actual and rapt communion with my spirit-bride, Egeria!...

"Egeria! Egeria!" I sobbed ... and tears streamed down my face.

I was miserable, without her, in the flesh ... though she was there, beside me, in soul!

* * * * *

I was aware of the audience again. I was proud and strong in my confidence now. The tittering had stopped. The house was filling with awe. I was pushing something back, back, back—over the footlights. I did not stop pushing till it had reached the topmost galleries....

I had them....

The applause after the first act was wonderful.

"Great! You're great ... you've vindicated my belief in you entirely!" Dineen was shouting, as he clapped me on the back, beside himself.

"Oh, I knew I'd do it!... I want a drink!"

"Here's some grape juice!" Gertie Black hold out a glass to me....

"No, I won't drink that stuff," I replied, with all the petulance and ill-humour traditionally allowed a star.

A Sig-Kapp, whom I had got into the play as a supe, slipped me a drink of real booze....

* * * * *

I had to run to the toilet three times before the second act, I was so nervous and excited.

"For God's sake, keep it up!" urged Dineen.

"For Christ's sake, let me alone, all of you,—I know what I'm doing," this, as the elocution teacher tried to press home some advice....

* * * * *

During the second act I was as electric as during the first, but now I allowed myself to see over the foot-lights and recognise people I knew. I even overheard one girl say to another, "why, Johnnie Gregory is handsome in that Van Dyke!"

"Yes, he has a fine profile ... he looks quite distinguished."

* * * * *

Before the curtain for the third act, Jack Travers worked his way back through the props to my dressing room....

"Sh! I've brought a nip of something real for you, Johnnie!"

"Bill already has given me some. It's enough! I don't want any more!—wait till the last act, and then I'll take it!

"I don't want it now! Do you hear!" I almost screamed, as he mischievously insisted.

The bell rang for the third curtain....

The news had come for Iistral that his rich uncle in America had died and left him a fortune ... now his family would try and have him adjudged insane, in order to lay hands on the wealth for their own uses....

That third act went off well....

"But you skipped a few lines in that act, Mr. Gregory," warned the directress, concerned.

"Oh, let me alone, will you!" I returned, enjoying the petulance of stardom to the full....

"Remember the fight-scene at the finish," she persisted, "just pretend to strike with the shovel ... you might hurt someone!" anxiously.

"I am going to act the thing realistically, not as a matter of stagecraft."

She tiptoed away. And I had the satisfaction of hearing her instruct the boys who acted as guards, and who were to seize on me—in my moment of physical exasperation—

"Grab him before the cue, just a trifle before it! I think Mr. Gregory is going to forget himself!"

* * * * *

I swung the shovel high in the air, making at all my relatives, crying out terms of reproach ... sobbing....

In the audience, everybody sat still with wonder.

The actors scattered from my brandished shovel, just as they would have done in real life ... the directress had schooled them to crowd about me so as to mask the action.

But the action needed no masking. It was real.

The two guards were on me,—boys who, in everyday life, were big football men on the freshman team....

I fought them, frenzied, back and forth over the stage, smashing down the pasteboard hedge, falling ... getting up again....

But, though the scenery went down, the audience did not laugh, but sat spellbound.

I was finally dragged away ... on the way to the asylum, half my costume torn from my body ... and I kept crying aloud ... for mercy ... for deliverance ... after the curtain had long gone down....

"Big Bill" Heizer gave me a thump in the ribs.

"For God's sake, Mr. Gregory" (he had called me "Johnnie" always, before) "it's only play-acting ... it's not real ... quit it ... it gets me."

* * * * *

The audience went wild with applause. I had won Laurel's complete approbation—for the day, as I had won Mt. Hebron's, that fall Field Day, long before!

* * * * *

Travers had slipped me just one shot of whiskey before the last act went on. He had tried to persuade me to drink more. He was in my dressing room....

* * * * *

I could hardly stand, from the weakness of excitement and exertion.

After the play was over—

"Now you can give me the rest of the bottle."

"We'll drink it together ... to your success, Gregory!"

"Yes—you devil!" I replied, fond of him, "you'd have had me reeling drunk, that last act, if I had listened to you."

And I gave him an affectionate clout in the ribs.

* * * * *

Again the professors were urging me to become more "regular" and pointing out the great career that awaited me—if I only would work.

There was some subsequent talk of sending the play to Osageville, Topeka, Kansas City....

But the faculty opposed it ... it would not be proper to send girls and boys out together, travelling about like a regular theatrical company.

* * * * *

As it had been said that I was going to take up the career of animal trainer,—after my going into the cage with the lions—so it was now pronounced, and reported in the papers—Travers saw to that—that I meditated a career as a professional actor....

* * * * *

Gleeful, and vastly relieved, Professor Dineen slipped me twenty-five dollars out of his own pocket.

Several fraternities showed indications of "rushing" me, after my star performance ... but my associations with the odd characters about town and the wild, ignorant farmers of the lower type that drove in each Saturday from the adjacent country, made them, at first, hesitate ... then utterly drop the idea....

* * * * *

Broke, I now wrote a long letter to Jarvis Alexander Mackworth.

I boldly complained of my poverty, inasmuch as it deterred me from my work.

"I have now proven my case," I wrote him,—"my poems have appeared in the Century, in Everybody's, in Munsey's....

"I have acted, as well, as a professional in a first-rate play, by a great European dramatist ... giving Kansas the distinction of being the first to produce Iistral on the American stage....

"Now I want to finish my four-act play on Judas. To do so I must have enough to eat and a place to sleep, without being made to worry about it, for a year....

"Can't you help me to a millionaire?"

Mackworth answered me generously, affectionately.

In two weeks he had procured my millionaire ... Derek, of Chicago, the bathtub magnate ... how much could I get on with?

I wrote that I could do with seven dollars a week....

Mackworth replied not to be a fool—that Derek was willing to make it fifteen, for a year's duration....

I replied that I could only take enough to fill my simplest wants....

Derek jocosely added fifty cents to the sum I asked—"for postage stamps"— ... for one year, week in, week out, without a letter from me except those indicating changes of address, without sending me a word of advice, criticism, or condemnation, no matter what I got into ... Derek sent me that weekly stipend of seven dollars and fifty cents!...

* * * * *

I settled down to consecutive literary work.

Lyrics I could write under any condition. They came to me so deeply from the subconscious that at times they almost seemed like spirit-control, which, at times, I am sure they had been, till I set the force of my will against them. For I was resolved that what I wrote should be an emanation from my own personality, not from dead and gone poets who used me for a medium.

But when it came to long and consecutive effort, the continual petty worry of actual penury sapped my mind so that I lacked the power of application....

With Derek's remittances this obstacle was removed....

I had soon completed the first act of my apostolic play....

And then I plunged into a scrape, together with my fellow members of the press or "Scoop Club," as it was more popularly known, which halted my work mid-way....

* * * * *

Our common adventure derived its inception from a casual remark of Jack Travers', at one of our meetings....

Ever since Arthur Brisbane had come to Laurel, Jack had been on his toes....

"Brisbane brought me a breath of what it must mean to be a big newspaper man in the world outside," said Travers, as he stretched and yawned, "why don't we," he continued, "start something to show 'em we're alive, and not dead like so many of the intellects on the Hill!"

"—s all right to talk about starting something ... that's easy to do. The hell of it is, to stop it, after you've got it started," philosophised "The Colonel"....

"Just what is it that you propose starting?" asked practical, pop-eyed Tom Jenkins.

"Oh, anything that will cause excitement!" waved Travers, serenely.

"If you boys really want some excitement ... and want to do some service for the community at the same time,—I've got a scheme to suggest ... something I've been thinking over for a long time," suggested Jerome Miller, president of the club....

"Tell us what it is, Jerome!"

"The Bottoms ... you know how rotten it is down there ... nigger whorehouses ... every other house a bootlegger's joint ... blind pigs ... blind tigers, for the students....

"We might show up the whole affair....

"—how the city administration thrives on the violation of the law from that quarter ... how the present administration depends on crime and the whiskey elements to keep it in power by their vote....

"That would be starting something!"

"I should say it would!" shouted Jack Travers, ablaze with enthusiasm.

"Then we might extend operations," continued the masterful, incisive Jerome, "and show up how all the drug stores are selling whiskey by the gallon, for 'medicinal' purposes, abusing the privilege of the law."

"But how is all this to be done?"

"Through the Laurelian?"

"No ... I have a better plan than that ... we might be able to persuade 'Senator' Blair and old Sickert, joint editors of the Laurel Globe, to let the Scoop Club run their paper for a day—just as a college stunt!"

"They'd never stand for it!" I averred, innocently.

"Of course they wouldn't—if we let them in on what we were up to!—for they are staunch supporters of the present administration—but they won't smell a rat till the edition is off the press ... and then it will be too late to stop it!"

"In other words," laughed Travers, blowing a cloud of cigarette smoke from his nose, "they'll think they're turning over their paper, The Globe, to a bunch of boys to have some harmless fun ... a few sophomoric jokes on the professors, and so forth....

"And they'll wake up, to find we've slipped a real man-size sheet over on them, for the first time in local history!"

"It'll raise hell's all I've got to say!" sagely commented the prematurely bald "Colonel," his eyes glinting merrily.

"It'll be lots of fun," remarked Travers, characteristically, "and I'm for it, lock, stock, and barrel."

"That's not the reason I'm for it; I'm for it for two reasons," reinforced Jerome Miller magisterially, "first, because it will put the Scoop Club on the map as something more than a mere college boys' organisation; secondly, because it will lead to civic betterment, if only temporary—a shaking up where this old burg needs a shaking up ... right at the court house and in the police station....

"But, make no mistake about it,—it's going to kick up a big dust!

"Also, remember, no one is going to stand by us ... even the Civic Betterment League, headed by Professor Langworth—your friend, Johnnie—will be angry with us—say our methods are too sensational.

"And the university authorities will say we shouldn't have done it because it will give the school a black eye ... it will be Ibsen's Enemy of Society all over again!..."

Immediately some of our more conservative members set themselves against the "clean up" ... but Jack Travers and I delivered eloquent, rousing speeches. And the decision was more for full steam ahead.

* * * * *

"Senator" Blair was easily deluded, and persuaded to turn his paper over to us, for one day.

Our strong-featured, energetic president, Jerome Miller, together with the suave, plausible Travers, went to see him, deputation-wise, where he sat, in the Laurel Globe's editorial office,—white and unhealthy-looking, a great, fat slug of a man, with the slug's nature, which battens on the corruption of earth.

He liked the idea of the publicity his paper would get through the stunt of the "boys." He did not guess the kind of publicity he would really come into.

During the three weeks that we had before we were to bring out the paper we grew quite proficient in the tawdry life lived in the "Bottoms."

We found out that most of the ramshackle "nigger" dives were owned by a former judge ... from which he derived exorbitant rents.

We located all the places where booze was sold, and ascertained exactly how much whiskey was disposed of in the town's drug stores for "snake bite" and "stomach trouble." We discovered many interesting things—that, for instance, "Old Aunt Jennie," who would allow her patrons any vice, but demurred when they took the name of "De Lawd" in vain—"Old Aunt Jennie" ran a "house" where the wilder and more debauched among the students came (in justice to Laurel University, let me add, very few) girls and boys together,—and stayed for the night—when they were supposed to be on trips to Kansas City....

Travers and "The Colonel" and I were half-lit for two weeks....

That was the only way to collect the evidence.

I drank but sparingly, as I loafed about the joints and "houses."

Jerome Miller did not drink at all ... and was the spirit and soul of our activities.

* * * * *

"Senator" Blair came out with a humorous editorial the night before we were to take the day's charge of his paper.

He headed his editorial "A Youthful Interim ... Youth Must Be Served!"

He was laying down his pen, he wrote, for a week-end holiday ... he had dug a can of bait and would go fishing, turning all the care and trouble of a newspaper over to youth and eagerness ... would forgot all his troubles for a few days....

The editorial made us roar with laughter ... Blair didn't know the trouble that was preparing for him.

* * * * *

I wrote a poem for the Scoop Club Edition of the Laurel Globe ...

"The Bottoms now I sing, where whiskey flows And two-cent makes life coleur de rose, Where negro shanties line the sordid way And rounders wake by night who sleep by day—"

* * * * *

By noon of the day, hints of what was coming were riding the winds of general report....

Carefully we read the proofs.

At last there it was—all the data, statistics, and details of the town's debauchery and corruption ... damning, in cold type, the administration, and the aquiescent powers in the university.

We ourselves had not as yet begun to perceive what it would lead to—a state-wide scandal that would echo in the Chicago, San Francisco and New York newspapers, and result in severe criticism of the university faculty for remaining blind to such a condition of affairs ... and how there would be interrogations in the Kansas Legislature and a complete shake-up of the political power in Laurel.

* * * * *

News of the forthcoming expose spread mysteriously in "The Bottoms" before the paper was off the press. To avoid the coming storm, already negro malefactors and white, were "streaming" as Travers phrased it, "in dark clouds" out of town, for brief sojourns, beyond reach of the compelling subpoena, in Kansas City, Missouri.

By five o'clock the edition, an extra large one, had been almost exhausted, and people were lining up at the newspaper office, paying five cents a copy....

"Senator" Blair rushed back, having heard of what he called our "treachery" and abuse of his confidence, over telephone....

He looked sick and worried, as if he had run in all the way from the little lake, five miles from town, where he had gone for his week-end of idyllic, peaceful fishing....

"You've ruined me, you boys have!" he almost sobbed, collapsing fatly in his chair, then he flamed, "by God, I'll have you each investigated personally and clapped in jail," ... which threat, however, he did not even try to carry through....

Instead, his paper, and the other two town papers, tried to turn off the affair as a mere college joke, played on a whole community....

But we had expected just such action—rather the executive genius of Jerome had expected it—for which reason we had confronted the readers of the Globe with damning facts and statistics, carefully gathered, which presented an insurmountable barrier to evasion.

And as we also had expected, the Civic Betterment League was also dead against us....

"Why," cried Langworth to me, "why didn't you bring all the evidence to us, and let us proceed calmly and soberly with the case?"

"Professor Langworth, you are a friend of mine, and a very good one—but you know very well that the conditions exposed you people knew of all along ... and for years you have dallied along without acting on it."

"We were biding the proper time!"

"The reason you never started something was your fear of involving the university in the publicity that was sure to follow!..."

Langworth was a good man, but he knew I had him. He hemmed and hawed, then covered his retreat in half-hearted anger at me....

"You know well enough, Johnnie Gregory, that all you boys did it for was to 'pull a stunt'—indulge in a little youthful horseplay."

"Granted—but we have effected results!"

* * * * *

"What results? merely a lot of trouble for everybody!"

"The Civic Betterment League now has a chance afforded it to make good ... we've provided you with the indisputable data, the evidence ... it's up to you, now, to go ahead."

"So God help me, Johnnie, sometimes you make me wish I had never sponsored you here."

* * * * *

The editor of the Globe made a right-about-face—repudiating us.

Jack Travers, in the style of his beloved Brisbane, put an editorial in the school paper, the Laurelian, addressed to Blair, beginning, "Get back into the collar of your masters, you contemptible cur."

* * * * *

The usual thing took place. Most of the worst criminals were mysteriously given ample time to make their get-away ... probably aided in it. The humorous side of the resulting investigation and trials of various minor malefactors were played up almost exclusively.

Little by little the town dropped back to its outward observance of not seeing in its civic life what it did not care to see, and which no one could radically remedy till human nature is itself different.

* * * * *

The school year was drawing to a close, my last year at Laurel.

Professor Black, of the English department, had assured me that, if I would tone down a bit, I could easily win a scholarship in his department, and, later, an assistant professorship.

But I preferred my rambling, haphazard course of life, which was less comfortable, but better for the freedom of mind and spirit that poets must preserve....

Dr. Hammond, when I had given him that luncheon on the borrowed money, had taken me aside and informed me that one of the professors—an influential man on the Hill (beyond that, he refused to identify him further) had advised him, Hammond, not to accept the luncheon in his honour....

"We don't approve generally of Gregory, on the Hill, you know...."

And Hammond had, he told me, replied—

"I'm sorry, but Mr. Gregory is my friend, and Dr. Ward, our literary editor, looks on him as a distinguished contributor to the Independent, and a young writer of great and growing promise" ... so the luncheon was given ... I wonder if the protesting professor was one of those invited, and if so, if he attended?...

I saw clearly that I could never fit into the formal, academic life of the college—where professors were ashamed to be seen carrying packages and bags home from the stores, but must have them delivered ... for fear of losing their social status!

* * * * *

There was a park on the outskirts of town where I loved to loaf, when the weather was sunny,—a place where the blue jays fought with the squirrels and the leaves flickered in the sun ... sometimes I lay on the grass, reading ... sometimes I lounged on a bench ... I read my Greek and Latin poets there ... and my English and German poets ... and, when hungry, I sauntered home to my bread and cheese, or, now that I was in receipt of Derek's weekly stipend, to a frugal meal at some lunch counter. I dearly liked rib-ends of beef....

One day, when I was in my park, lying on my belly, reading Josephus, I was aware of the deputy sheriff, Small, whom I knew, standing over me....

"Oh, it's you, Gregory!"

"Yes, what's the matter, Deputy Small? what do you want?"

"People who drove in from the country complained about your lying here."

"Complained about my lying here? what the hell!... look'e here, Jim Small, there's no ordinance to prevent me from lying on the grass."

"Well, Johnnie, you either got to git up and sit, proper, on a bench, or I'll have to pull you in, much as I dislike to do it."

"Jim, you just 'pull' ahead, if you think you're lucky ... it'll be a fine thing for me ... I'll sue the city for false arrest."

Deputy Small was puzzled. He pushed his hat back and scratched his head....

"Jim, who put you up to this?"

"The people what saw you lying here, as they drove in, stopped off at the office of the Globe ... it was 'Senator' Blair telephoned the courthouse—"

"Blair, eh?... trying to get even for what we boys did with his dirty paper ... he knows I like to lie out here and read my books of poetry!"

I was thoroughly aroused. I jumped to my feet.

"Jim, do me a favour, and arrest me ... and I'll sue you, the city of Laurel, and 'Senator' Blair ... all three of you!"

"—guess I won't do it ... but do sit on the bench ... I ask it as a personal favour, Johnnie."

"As a personal favour, Jim, till you are out of sight. Then I'll go back to the grass."

That night Blair, cocksure, had the story of my arrest in the paper. But, as it happened, he was too previous....

Jerome Miller and Jack Travers joined me in going to the office of the Globe, the next morning....

After we had finished telling him what we thought of him, the "Senator" begged my pardon profusely, and the next day a retraction was printed....

* * * * *

And now school was over at Laurel.

And I determined to bum my way to New York, and, from there, ship on a cattleboat to Europe. Where I would finish writing my play, Judas.

Farewell to Laurel!—

I went up to the athletic field and ran my last two miles on its track, at top speed, as good-bye to its cinders forever!

I walked, with a guilty feeling of too much sentimentality, back into the "stack" at the university library. I took down book after book of the great English poets, and pressed my cheek to them in long farewell ... first glancing cautiously around, to be sure that no one was near to observe my actions....

I did not say good-bye to Langworth or my other professor friends, as they had already left for their summer vacations.

* * * * *

I sat in Joe Deacon's room, talking, that last night of my sojourn in Laurel....

"Good old Joe" we called him, because he was possessed of all the old-fashioned virtues, and unassumingly lived up to them. He was a fellow member of the Scoop Club, an associate teacher in the School of Journalism, and taught during the summer session....

Long, long Joe and I talked ... of everything young idealists discuss or dream of. We ended with a discussion of the sex question. I reiterated what he already had heard me say, that I had had so far no sex experience. He confessed that he, also, had had none ... maintained that a decent man should wait, if he expected a woman to come pure to him....

I spoke ardently in favour of free love.

He assented that, theoretically, it was the thing ... but there were a multitude of practical difficulties that made for favour of the convention of marriage....

"No, if a convention is wrong, it is the duty of everyone who knows the right in his heart, to help smash that convention...."

"You just wait," I boasted imaginatively, "and I'll show you!" "Maybe, Joe," I concluded, for I knew what I said would tease him, "maybe, when I reach the East, I shall break loose." Then I added—and to this day I cannot imagine what put it into my head to say it—what fantastic curl of thought, unless perhaps a premonition of what was soon to come to pass—

"Penton Baxter has invited me to pay him a visit at Eden, a Single Tax Colony just outside of Philadelphia, before I go on to Europe via cattleboat ... maybe I'll take him up, go down there, and run away with his wife ... she's a mighty pretty woman, Joe!"

Joe was scandalised at my remark—the effect I had wished for.

* * * * *

But after the uproar broke, Joe stoutly maintained that our elopement had all been a frame-up, alleging his conversation with me as proof ... as who would have not?

* * * * *

Reduced again to my barest equipment, and having left as my forwarding address the office of the National Magazine, in New York, I hopped a freight shortly after dawn. It was a fast, through freight. Because of lack of practice I boarded it clumsily, and almost went to my death under its grinding, roaring wheels, there in the Laurel freight-yards. I sat, trembling with the shock to my nerves, on the bumpers.

I hopped off at Argentine, just outside of Kansas City.

I found a camp of tramps and joined with them. We drank coffee together....

But, somehow, the scales had fallen from my eyes. My old idealisation of the life of the tramp, somehow or other, was entirely gone—an idealisation that had, anyhow, been mainly literary, induced by the writings of Jack London, Josiah Flynt and Maxim Gorky.

Now, as I listened to their filthy talk ... their continual "Jesus-Christ'-ing" over everything they said, I grew sick of them. I got up and walked away stiffly—never again to be a tramp.

The reporter of the Star, who covered the stockyards, took me to a little sturdy cattle merchant, who agreed to ship me to New York, in care of five carloads of calves ... for a fee of ten dollars. I persuaded him that I would mail him that ten on arrival at my point of destination ... I have never done so ... when I had it, I needed it more for myself ... and, anyhow, I earned that ten.

* * * * *

My duties with the calves were not many ... merely to walk along the sides of the five cars in my keeping, and see that the calves kept on their legs and did not sprawl over each other ... sometimes one of them would get crushed against the side of the car, and his leg would protrude through the slats. And I would push his leg back, to keep it from being broken ... I made my rounds every time the freight came to a halt.

There were other cars, filled with steers, sheep, and pigs.

Each kind of animal behaved according to its nature, during the trip. The steers soon accepted their cramped, moving life rather stolidly. The calves acted as if dumbfounded, in stupefied, wide-eyed innocence ... the sheep huddled as sheep do ... but the big fat porkers were the most intelligent ... like intelligent cowards that fully know their fate, they piled in heaping, screaming, frenzied masses ... in scrambling heaps in the centre of their cars ... suffocating, stinking, struggling closer and closer together and leaving great, bare areas unoccupied on either end....

"A pig has no sense in a car ... or anywhere."

"Seems to me they have ... they act as if they know what they're in for, at the other end of the line."

"By golly, that's true! I never thought of it that way before!"

So conversed the head brakeman and I.

My calves soon grew to know me. They bleated, in a friendly manner, as I walked by, overseeing them, when the freight stopped.

* * * * *

We had bumped along as far as Buffalo. There the stock were driven down an incline into yards fenced in with white-washed boards, for their second rest, required by law,—before launching on the last leg of their journey down the middle of New York State, and along the Hudson ... consigned to Stern and Company of New York....

Some of them were to be butchered there and afford apartment-dwellers lamb stew, tenderloins, and pork chops ... others to be driven aboard cattleboats, for Europe....

* * * * *

At Buffalo I was ripe for a change. Also I wished to pick up threads of former experiences and acquaintanceships ... to have a good gossip about the Eos Art Community ... I called up Laston Meunier who had been at Eos and whom I had first met there ... who loved bohemian ways, and welcomed wandering artistic and literary folk at his home in Buffalo.

"Where are you now?" Laston asked, over the phone.

"I'm calling you from the stockyards," and I told him what I was doing....

"Come on up to my house, and forget your five carloads of calves ... they can weather through the last jump, to New York, alone ... what does it matter?... they're going to be butchered in a few days."

Looking about this way and that, to make sure I was unseen, I took my grip in my hand, hopped aboard a street car outside the stockyards, and abandoned my calves to their destiny.

Meunier welcomed me. He invited me to stay at his house for several weeks. His pretty, young wife, smiling whimsically, showed me to a room she had already set in dainty order for me.

* * * * *

Meunier had gone to his office....

Nichi Swartzman, the tall Japanese genius, showed up, and Bella Meunier, Nichi, and I ate breakfast together.

Swartzman was, and is, a magnificent talker ... a torch of inspiration burned brightly in his brain, with continual conversational fire.

But he must have his drink. Several of them. Which Laston's wife poured for him abundantly.

After breakfast I sprawled on the floor ... I always sprawl on floors instead of sitting in chairs....

Swartzman and Bella Meunier and I talked and talked and talked ... of Poe ... of Baudelaire, of Balzac....

Then Nichi launched forth on a long disquisition on Japanese and Chinese art, and Mrs. Meunier and I gladly remained silent during the whole morning, enchanted by the vistas of beauty which Swartzman's words opened for us.

"Why," I thought, "must such a man lack audiences? If civilisation were in its right mind, he would hold a chair in some great university, and lecture daily to hundreds ... this man is alive. His fire wakes kindred fire ... why must we leave the business of teaching to the corpse-minded, the dead-hearted? like so many of our professors and teachers!"

I found out afterward that Nichi Swartzman was utterly irresponsible as he was brilliant.

* * * * *

Laston Meunier dug up poor old Fritz Von Hammer, the former Eos pianist—whose breath was still as fetid as ever ... who still insisted on seizing you by the coat lapel and talking right into your nose—dug him up from the moving picture house, where he played.

Von Hammer wept over the piano, as he found himself free again to play as he wished....

The party was in my honour. There were present about a dozen guests, picked from Buffalo's bohemia. They sat about on the floor on cushions.

Swartzman recited Poe's Black Cat, with gestures and facial contortions that were terrifying. His huge, yellow, angular Japanese face grimacing near the ceiling ... he was six foot six, if anything....

His recitation was done so well that, when he had finished, we sat, for a moment, in frightened silence, like children. Then we stormed him with applause.

"Now play the Danse Macabre," cried Nichi, to Von Hammer....

"I can't do it without a violin accompaniment."

"Try it for me ... and I shall dance the Dance of Death for you."

Von Hammer said he would do his best ... after much persuasion and a few more drinks....

And Nichi Swartzman danced....

We saw, though we did not know it, the origin of modern futurist dancing there. Nichi danced with his street clothes on ... wearing his hat, in ghoulish rakishness, tipped down over his eyes ... inter-wreathing his cane with his long, skeletal, twisting legs and arms ... his eyes gleaming cat-like through merest slits....

At three o'clock in the morning we were all drunk. Before we parted we joined in singing shakily but enthusiastically Down in Bohemia Land.

* * * * *

Meunier, fulfilling his promise to me, paid my fare to New York. I soon walked into the office of the National Magazine.

Clara Martin was there, and Allsworth Lephil, the managing editor, and his assistant Galusha Siddon.

As I sat in the office, they gave me a sort of impromptu reception.

Ray Sanford strolled in, as fresh-complexioned as an Englishman. He was, they said, preparing a series of articles on the negro problem. And I met a little, bustling, sharp-eyed man, with much of the feminine about him,—his face lifted as if on an intuitive intellectual scent.... Carruthers Heflin ... he wore a close-cropped salt-and-pepper beard, like a stage-doctor. He was busy with a series of articles to be entitled, Babylons of To-day ... exposing the corruption of our modern American cities.

I spoke to them of my projected trip to Europe.

"I think you're foolish to run off to Europe just at this time in your life. Now is the time you should establish yourself here. Besides, Jarvis Mackworth has written us that you're writing a book while Derek, the Chicago millionaire, stakes you."

"Yes, that's true. But couldn't I write it in Europe as well as here?"

"You'd find too many distractions."

"Where would you go first?" asked Clara Martin.

"Paris!"

"That would be absolutely fatal for a young man of your disposition. You need to sit quiet and write for a few years ... you've been over the map too much already."

"Baxter has just been in here ... he's writing us a sensational novel exposing society. He spoke to me about you," Lephil remarked,—"said he wished we'd put a tag on you and ship you down to his Eden colony."

There was a pause. Miss Martin thoughtfully tapped her forehead with a pencil.

"I don't think it would be good for Johnnie to go down to Eden and put up with Penton," she interjected, "they're too much alike."

"Ally Merton is in New York," Galusha Siddon informed me. "He's working on the Express. He wants you to run down and see him."

* * * * *

Merton had come to New York the year before, to work on the Express. Mackworth had gotten him the job. Ally was as meticulously dressed as ever. His eyes swept me from head to foot, with an instinctive glance of appraisal, as he shook hands.

"Come on up on the roof. The paper wants a photo of you ... to go with a story I'm writing about you."

* * * * *

I rather resented all my friends' way of talking to me, as if I were a child to be discussed, ordered about, and disposed of. But I humoured them by playing up to their patronising spirit ... even playing horse with them continually on the sly, and having lots of fun that they didn't suspect.

* * * * *

The next morning I was in the office of the Independent, visiting with the literary editor, good old Dr. William Hayes Ward. He was a man of eighty years ... a scholar in English and the Greek and Latin classics....

Once, when on a vacation he had written me that, as pastime, he had read the whole of the Iliad and Odyssey over again. In the Greek, of course.

His abused eyes floated uneasily behind a double pair of lenses ... a dissenting minister ... of the old school ... he seemed to me far more youthful, more invigorating, than any of my other more youthful friends in the literary and magazine world.

We talked and talked of poetry. He brought down a huge treatise on English versification, translated from some German scholar's life-research—to prove a point ... he discussed what Sidney Lanier—whom he had known—might have done with metrics, had he only lived longer....

And "no ... no ... take my advice," he said, "don't go down to Eden." There was something so vaguely deprecatory in his voice that it brought from me the question—"why not? isn't Penton Baxter all right?"

"Oh, yes," in the same deprecatory tone,—"he's all right enough, alone—but, together, you'd be like two balloons without ballast. He might get you, or you might get him, into some sort of mess."

"Why Dr. Ward, what do you mean?"

"Penton is always protesting about something or other,—always starting fantastic schemes ... he's just finished with his Parnassus Palace experiment, which brought him a lot of newspaper notoriety ... which is to me distasteful, extremely distasteful ... yet Baxter," he added hastily, "is a real force ... he can think of more original projects in a given space of time than anyone else I know."

"I look on him as a great and wonderful man!"

"Mark my word, Mr. Gregory, you'll find yourself in some sort of mix-up if you go down to Eden to live with him. You're both too mad and inflammable to be in the same neighbourhood."

Using all his powers of persuasion, Dr. William Hayes Ward tried to explain to me how I owed it both to Mr. Derek and Mr. Mackworth to finish my play.

"Have you no place else to go to, beside Eden?"

"I could run out to Perfection City—and camp out there."

"Now that's a good idea ... why not try that?"

* * * * *

"Johnnie, had your lunch yet?" it was Dr. Percival Hammond, the managing editor, who was asking, leaning out from his cubbyhole where he sat before his desk.

"No, sir!"

"Come and share mine!"

I said good-bye to Dr. Ward and walked down the corridor to where Hammond sat. He looked more the fashionable club man than ever, though he did have a slight sprinkling of dandruff on his coat collar. I was quick to notice this, as I had been quick to notice Miss Martin's few, close-scizzored hairs on her fine, thinking face.

Lunch!

But I was not to be taken out to a meal in a restaurant, as anyone might expect, but Hammond sat me down on a chair by his side, and he handed me a glass of buttermilk and a few compressed oatmeal cakes.

* * * * *

I had stayed over night at the Phi-Mu House, at Columbia, with Ally. I had stayed up nearly all night, rather, arguing, in behalf of extreme socialism, with the boys ... till people, hearing our voices through the open windows, had actually gathered in the street without.

"You're utterly mad, but we like you!" said one of the boys.

In the morning, before I clutched my suitcase in my hand and started for Perfection City, Ally showed me something that had come in the morning mail, which startled me. It was a clipping from the Laurel Globe—a vilely slanderous article, headed, "Good Riddance."...

And first it lied that I had run away from my "confederates" of the Scoop Club, leaving them to bear the onus of the investigation of the town's morals ... which was, of course, not true ... I had made a special point of going to the sheriff and asking him if I would be needed. If so, I would defer my trip East. And he had replied that it would be all right for me to go....

But the second count—the personal part of the story, was more atrocious ... it intimated that I had, during my sojourn at Laurel, been an undesirable that would have made Villon pale with envy ... an habitue of the Bottoms ... that I had been sleeping with negro women and rolling about with their men, drunk.

I was so furious at this that I dropped my suitcase, clenched my hands, and swore that I was straightway going to freight it back and knock all his teeth down "Senator's" Blair's throat ... the dirty sycophant! The lousy bootlicker! the nasty, putty-bodied slug!

* * * * *

Once more Baxter wrote me, urging me to come to Eden. He told me his wife would welcome me ... and jested clumsily that his secretary would be just the girl to marry me and take care of me....

Jested? I did not know the man yet ... he meant it.

* * * * *

Though I was possessed of a curious premonitory warning that I must not accept his invitation and was, besides, settled in a hut by the lake shore, yet I was tempted to go to Eden....

For one thing, Perfection City was no longer the place of ideals it had been ... it was now a locality where the poorer bourgeoisie sent their wives and children, for an inexpensive summer outing....

Wavering this way and that, I sent a telegram which clinched the matter.

"Will leave for Eden to-morrow morning. John Gregory."

* * * * *

Not far from the little suburban station to which I had changed, lay the Single Tax Colony of Eden. When I dropped off the train and found no one to greet me, I was slightly piqued. Of a labourer in a nearby field I inquired the way to Eden. He straightened his back, paused in his work.

He gave me the direction—"and there by the roadside you'll find a sort of wooden archway with a sign over it ... you step in and follow the path, and that will take you right into the centre of the community. But what do want to go to Eden for? they're all a bunch of nuts there!"

"Maybe I might be a nut, too!"

The old man laughed.

"Well, good-bye and good luck, sonny."

Soon I reached the gateway, trailing my heavy suitcase ... heavy mostly with manuscripts....

A woodland path led me into what seemed, and was, a veritable forest; boughs interlaced above, with glimpses of blue sky between. In interspaces of trees wild flowers grew. Luxuriant summer was abroad.

I stepped out of the forest straightway into the community. It was in a beautiful open space like a natural meadow.

There stood the houses of the colonists—Single Taxers, Anarchists, Socialists, Communists,—folk of every shade of radical opinion ... who here strove to escape the galling mockeries of civilisation and win back again to pastoral simplicity.

It was a community such as William Morris or some Guild Socialist of a medieval turn of mind might have conceived. It was the Dream of John Ball visualised.

"When Adam dolve and Eve span Who was then the gentleman?"

Toy houses picturesquely set under trees that fringed the Common ... houses with different, quaint colours ... the "green" in the centre carefully cropped as if nibbled by sheep ... well-kept paths of parti-coloured stone, as if each pebble had been placed there by hand....

Everything here was born obviously of the Arts and Crafts movement, a movement which seeks to teach that each shall make and build for himself ... if clumsily, yet uniquely ... the product to be something at least individual and warm from the maker's personality.

I thought of Jusserand's English Wayfaring Life in the Middle Ages. If the Canterbury Pilgrims, led by jolly Harry Bailey, their host, had burst out from the woods, on horseback, singing and jesting, I should not have considered their appearance an anachronism....

A tousle-headed girl-child in rompers which she was too big for, pointed me Baxter's house, the largest in the community.

There seemed to be no one home when I dropped my suitcase on the front porch....

I knocked vigorously. No one came. I waited a long while.

"A hell of a way to welcome me!" I meditated, my egotism hurt.

Again I knocked.

"Come in! do come in!" a gentle voice bade—it was Mrs. Baxter's.

I pushed the door open and stepped in. I set down my heavy suitcase with a thump, on the bare, hardwood floor of the large room in which I found myself—a room sparsely furnished, its walls lined with books. It had one large window, under and along which was built in, a long, wide shelf made into a sort of divan, promiscuous with cushions.

Propped up with a disordered heap of these cushions sat Mrs. Hildreth Baxter, in blouse and bloomers; she was reading.

"Why, Johnnie Gregory!" she cried, swinging her graceful, slim legs down, and rising, coming toward me, extending her hand in greeting....

"Why, Johnnie Gregory—YOU here!"

"Yes, didn't you!—"

"I knew I was right ... Penton maintained it was to-morrow you were due—Darrie sided with him—Darrie is a friend of mine who is visiting us, from Virginia—but Ruth, Mubby's secretary," she finished, relapsing into her intimate petting name for her husband, (Mubby is short for "My hubby")—"Ruth sided with me, though we had quite an argument about it."

"And you and Ruth were right!"

"Yes, I was right," she assented, leaving "Ruth" out, with naive egoism.

"Sit down in the morris chair ... you look dusty and heated ... I'll entertain you ... I'm all alone ... Penton is dictating an article to Ruth. Darrie's washing her hair. I'm the only member of the Leisure Class. I'm lazing here, reading Gorky's latest novel."

What an engaging, pretty, naive, little woman this was! I commented inwardly. A sweet aroma of feminine health breathed from her body, bosom, hair—a tumbly black mass—as perfume breathes from a wild flower.

Strangely enough, I felt calm and happy in her presence; at home, as I had never been with any woman or girl before.

Up to this moment, when alone with a woman, timidity had touched me to ice, while inwardly I had trembled with suppressed passion and fright.

Set in the midst of a group of women, I shone. As at the university, when I used to visit whole sorority chapters at once, and, with from five to ten girls seated about me in the parlour, talk brilliantly and easily and poetically with all of them. Left alone with any one, my mouth dried like sand, my tongue clove to my palate, I shook all over as with a palsy.

With Hildreth Baxter I was straightway, marvellously, at my ease. We talked of Keats—she seemed to know all of his verse by heart....

Shelley—she quoted his less-known fragments....

"O WORLD! O LIFE! O TIME!—"

"O world! O life! O time! On whose last steps I climb, Trembling at that where I had stood before; When will return the glory of your prime? No more—Oh, never more!

"Out of the day and night A joy has taken flight; Fresh spring, and summer, and the winter hoar, Move my faint heart with grief, but with delight No more—Oh, never more!"

"Surely that does not express your feelings—and you still a young and beautiful woman?"

"No, but I am profoundly moved by the sad beauty of it; and by the fact that perhaps Poe got his refrain of 'nevermore' for his Raven as a reminiscence from it."

She laughed engagingly with feminine inconsequence and stooped down to recover a slight, silver bracelet that had slipped off over one of her small hands. I caught a brief glimpse of the white division of her breasts as she stooped over. The vision stabbed my heart with keen enjoyment that pained....

Already we were caught up in a current of mysterious fellow-feeling that was soon to bear us onward to the full ocean of frank love and passion. Though at this time neither she nor I perceived it.

* * * * *

Penton came in ... the little, handsome, red-faced man, with his Napoleonic head too large for his small, stocky body ... his large, luminous eyes like those of the Italian fisher boy in the painting ... his mouth a little too large ... his chin a trifle too heavy-jowled. His hands were feminine ... but his feet were encased in heavy shoes that made them seem the feet of a six-foot day labourer....

Ruth, his secretary, coming close behind him,—was tall, not ungraceful in an easy, almost mannish way ... slab-figured ... built more like a boy than a young woman dangerously near the old maid. She too wore bloomers. Her face was tanned. It was too broad and placid for either prettiness or beauty, but a mischievous tilt to the nose and large calm hazel eyes kept her this side of mere plainness....

Penton glanced from me to his wife, from his wife to me, in one look of instinctive inquiry, before he addressed me....

"Well, Johnnie, here you are ... East at last ... and about to become a real literary man."

"He's been here a full hour ... we didn't want to interrupt you—" his wife explained.

"Your work is too important for the world"—I began sincerely and reverently.

Baxter beamed. His being expanded under my worship.

He caught both my hands, friendlily, in his.

"Welcome to Eden," then, introducing, "this is my secretary, Miss Ruth Hazlitt; she's been quite keen to meet you ... we've talked of you a lot ... she knows your poetry and thinks you're a genius, and will some day be recognised as a great poet."

Ruth Hazlitt nodded, shy, took my hand in introduction.

"Darrie, oh, Dar-rie!" called Baxter ... "a Southern society girl, but a mighty good radical already," he explained to me, sotto voce, as we heard sounds of her approach.

Mary Darfield Malcolm came in, in a flimsy dressing gown of yellow, with blue ribbons in it, her hair wet and still done up in a towel. Superbly she trusted to her big eyes of limpid brown, and to the marble-like pallour of her complexion, the twin laughing dimples in her cheeks ... she added her welcome to the others ... easily, with a Southern way of speech that caught each recalcitrant word by the tail and caressed its back as it came out....

* * * * *

That afternoon, at Baxter's suggestion, he and I launched forth on a walk together....

"There is some beautiful country for walking about here."

* * * * *

"Darrie, will you and Ruth have the veal steak cooked by six o'clock?"

I noticed that he did not include his wife. Also, I looked at him in amazement ... a look the significance of which he instantly caught ... Steak? Meat?

"I've done a lot of experimenting in dietetics," he explained, "and I have finally been brought to face the fact, after years of vegetarianism, that there's nothing like a good steak for a brain-worker. It's easily digested and affords ready nourishment ... vegetables, yes ... but it takes up so much vital energy to digest them ... the meat-eating races are the dominant races of the world ... but," he flashed quickly, "I always try to be logical and consistent. If I eat meat, I must be willing to kill the animal I eat. I must not stand off in dainty horror over the butcher's trade, while I live by it."

"Surely you don't mean that you do your own butchering?"

"No ... not that ... but I've proven to myself that I can kill ... we had a dog, a mongrel, that attached itself to us ... tore up everything in my study ... tore the sheets and pillow slips on the beds ... I took it out into the woods," he ended gravely, "and killed ... shot it ... of course I had to summon up all my resolution ... but I did it."

While admitting the almost childlike exactness of my friend's logic, I could not help smiling to myself at his grotesque sincerity....

We walked far ... through green fields ... over flashing brooks ... through lovely woodland vistas ... we paused on the top of a hill, with vistas all about us ... just as we had done on Azure Mound in Kansas....

"I asked you to take this walk with me in order to tell you something.... Johnnie, you're my friend, and that is why I don't want you to stay at my house with us. I want you to put up at the Community Inn, at my expense ... eat your meals with us, of course."

I was surprised. He did not want me in the house because I was his friend!... in silence I waited his further explanation....

"Yes," he continued, "I want to spare you trouble ... Hildreth and I, you see," he proceeded with painful frankness, "are quite near the breaking point ... I don't think we'll be together very many months longer ... and ... and ... I don't want you to become involved ... for I'm simply desperate."

"But, Penton, how could I become involved?"

"Johnnie, you don't know women, or you wouldn't ask ... especially women of my wife's type ... hysterical, parasitic, passionate, desperate.... I tell you what, you stay at the inn!"

A pause;—I was startled by what he said next:

"Besides, it's time you had a mate, a real mate ... and I," he proceeded with incredible gravity, "I have been urging Ruth, my secretary, to take you ... you and she would be quite happy together ... she can support herself, for instance ... that would place no economic burden on you."

"Really, Penton!" I demurred.

I was learning how utterly bookish, how sheerly a literary man Penton Baxter was ... and how absurd, at the same time. How life never drew near him, how he ever saw it through the film of his latest theory, and tried to order his own, as well as everybody else's life, to jibe with it....

* * * * *

"Penton, it is a matter of indifference to me where I put up. It was you who invited me to come to Eden ... but I won't mind staying at Community Inn, as I can only be with you for a couple of weeks, anyhow ... I'm due to take a cattleboat for Paris, for Europe, as soon as I have Judas finished."

* * * * *

Supper ... veal steaks served on a plain board table outside the big house, under a tree. We waited on ourselves. We discussed Strindberg, his novels and plays ... his curious researches in science ... Nietzsche....

Afterward, having eaten off wooden plates, we flung the plates in the fireplace, burning them ... Ruth washed the knives, forks, spoons....

"It's such a saving of effort to use wooden plates and paper napkins ... so much less mere household drudgery ... so much more time for living saved."

I had taken my suitcase and was about to repair to the much-discussed inn. But Penton asked me to wait, while he had a conference with the three women of the household.

Soon he came out, smiling placidly and blandly.

"Johnnie, I'm sorry about this afternoon ... I've been rather hasty, rather inhospitable ... you are not to go to the inn, but stay with us. The girls have persuaded me ... the tent, down beside the little house, is yours all summer, if you like."

* * * * *

I found the tent in a clump of trees ... it had a hard board floor, a wash-stand, table, chair, and cot.

Along with the rest of the household, I retired early ... but not to sleep.

I lit my big kerosene lamp and sat propped up with the pillows, reading, till late, the poetry of Norah May French, the beautiful, red-headed girl who had, like myself, also lived in Eos, where Roderick Spalton's Artworks were....

She had been, Penton informed me, when he handed me her book, one of the famous Bohemians of the San Francisco and Carmel art and literary crowd....

After a brief career of adventurous poverty, she had committed suicide over a love affair.

Her poetry was full of beauty and spontaneity ... a grey mist dancing full of rainbows, like those you see at the foot of Niagara....

I must have read myself to sleep, for the lamp was still lit when I woke up early with the dawn ... it was the singing of the birds that woke me on my second day at Eden....

Working on farms, in factories, on ships at sea, being up at all hours to catch freights out of town had instilled in me the habit of early rising; I would have risen at dawn anyhow without the birds to wake me.

Turning over for my pencil, which I ever keep, together with a writing pad, at my bedside, to catch the fleeting poetic inspiration, I indited a sonnet to Baxter (all copies of which I have unfortunately lost or I would give it here) in which I sang his praises as a great man of the same rank as Rousseau and Shelley.

In spite of the fact that I was fully aware of all his absurdities and peccadilloes, the true greatness of the man remained, and still remains, undimmed in my mind.

* * * * *

High day. I walked along the path, past the little house where Baxter sequestered himself when he wished to be alone to think or write; it was close to my tent, around a corner of trees. I tiptoed religiously by it, went on up to the big house where the three women slept, as if drawn to their abode by a sort of heliotropism.

The whole house stood in quiet, the embodiment of slumber.

* * * * *

A lank, flat-chested woman came up the path from the opposite direction ... dressed drab in one long, undistinguished gown like a Hicksite or Quaker, without the hood ... her head was bare ... her fine, brown hair plaited flat.

"Good morning!"

"Good morning," she replied, a query in her voice.

"I am John Gregory, the poet," I explained. "I arrived yesterday on a visit to the Baxters."

She said she had heard of me ... she opened the door and went into the house. I followed.

She was the wife of Anarchist Jones, of whom I had already heard the household speak—as a difficult, recalcitrant member of the colony.

The Joneses were very poor. They had two children and lived in a mere shack on the outskirts of the community. Jones was a shoemaker. His wife came twice a week to clean up and set things to rights in the Baxter menage—his two houses. I took care of the tent myself, while I was there....

By this time Darrie, Ruth, and Mrs. Baxter were up. I sat in the library, in the morris chair, deeply immersed in the life of Nietzsche, by his sister. Nevertheless I was not so preoccupied as not to catch fugitive glimpses of kimonos disappearing around door-corners ... women at their mysterious morning ritual of preparing themselves against the day.

Comfortable of mind, at ease in heart and body, I sat there, dangling one leg over the arm of the chair. I was much at home in the midst of this easy, disjointed family group.

* * * * *

We were, the four of us—Darrie, Hildreth, Ruth, and I—seated together at our outdoor table, scooping out soft-boiled eggs.

Hildreth Baxter had boiled my two eggs medium for me ... to the humorous, affected consternation of Darrie and Ruth, which they, of course, deliberately made visible to me, with the implication—

"You'd best look out, when Penton's lazy little wife waits on you ... she is the one who generally demands to be waited on, and if—"

* * * * *

And now, for the moment, all of us were combined against the master of the house ... furtively and jocularly combined, like naughty children....

Hildreth smuggled forth her coffee percolator, which she kept hidden from her husband's search ... and we soon, by the aid of an alcohol stove, had a cup of fragrant coffee a-piece ... which Darrie made....

"Penton swears coffee is worse than whiskey, the rankest of poisons. We have to hide the percolator from him."

"He lies a-bed late, when he wakes. He lies there thinking out what he will later on dictate to Ruth.... we can finish before—"

But just then Penton himself came hurrying up the path from the little cottage.

When he saw what we were doing he gave us such a look of solemn disgust that we nearly smothered with laughter, which we tried to suppress.

"When you take that percolator off the table—" he stood aloof, "I'll sit down with you."

Then we laughed outright, not in disrespect of him, but as children laugh at a humorous incident at school.

"Oh, yes, it might seem funny ... so does a drunken man who gives up his reason to a drug seem funny.... but it's no more a joke than that ... coffee is a vile poison ... I have a sense of humour," he continued, turning to me, "just as keen as the next one ... but I know, by scientific research, just how much damage that stuff does."

* * * * *

I read my sonnet to Penton, in a grave, respectful voice.

Peace was patched. We then sat together, under the chequered shade of the big tree which towered over our table ... Baxter waxed as eloquent as an angel ... the wonderful, absurd, little man.

Daniel came romping out for breakfast.

* * * * *

Penton reached for the morning's mail. He climbed into the hammock and read, with all the joy of a boy, the huge bunch of press clippings about himself, his activities, his work ... a daily procedure of his, I was to learn. He chuckled, joked, was immensely pleased ... handed me various items to read, or read choice bits aloud to all of us.

After all, though I pretended to criticise, to myself ... yet, in my heart, I liked his frank rejoicing in his fame, his notoriety, and only envied him his ability to do so.

* * * * *

I returned to my tent to work, as I had planned to do each morning, on my play Judas. The dialogue would not come to me ... I laid it aside and instead was inspired to set down instantly the blank verse poem to the play:—

"A noise of archery and wielded swords All night rang through his dreams. When risen morn Let down her rosy feet on Galilee Blue-vistaed, on the house-top Judas woke: Desire of battle brooded in his breast Although the day was hung with sapphire peace, And to his inner eye battalions bright Of seraphim, fledged with celestial mail, Came marching up the wide-flung ways of dawn To usher in the triumph-day of Christ.... But sun on sun departed, moon on moon, And still the Master lingered by the way, Iscariot deemed, dusked in mortality And darkened in the God by flesh of man. For Judas a material kingdom saw And not a realm of immaterial gold, A city of renewed Jerusalem And not that New Jerusalem, diamond-paved With love and sapphire-walled with brotherhood, Which He, the Master, wrestled to make plain With thews of parable and simile— So ''tis the flesh that clogs him,' Judas thought (A simple, earnest man, he loved him well And slew him with great friendship in the end); 'Yea, if he chose to say the word of power, The seraphim and cherubim, invoked, Would wheel in dazzling squadrons down the sky And for the hosts of Israel move in war As in those holy battles waged of yore'....

* * * * *

"Ah, all the world now knows Gethsemane, But few the love of that betraying kiss!"

* * * * *

I did not have to be very long at Eden to learn that the community was divided into two parties: the more conservative, rooted element whom success was making more and more conservative,—and the genuinely radical crowd. The anarchist, Jones, led the latter group, a very small one.

As far as I could see, this anarchist-shoemaker held the right. On my third day in Eden my interest in the community life about me led me to inquire my way to the place where Jones lived ... a shack built practically in its entirety of old dry goods boxes ... a two-room affair with a sort of enlarged dog-kennel adjunct that stood out nearer the road—Jones's workshop.

The man looked like the philosopher he was—the anarchist-philosopher, as the newspapers were to dub him ... as he sat there before his last, hammering away at the shoe he was heeling, not stopping the motions of his hands, while he put that pair aside, to sew at another pair, while he discoursed at large with me over men and affairs.

"What is all this trouble I'm hearing about?" I asked him.

"Trouble?—same old thing: Alfred Grahame, when he founded, started, this colony, was a true idealist. But success has turned his head, worsened him, since,—as it has done with many a good man before. Now he goes about the country lecturing, on Shakespeare, God, the Devil, or anything else that he knows nothing about....

"But it isn't that that I object to ... it is that he's allowing the original object of this colony, and of the Single Tax Idea, to become gradually perverted here. We're becoming nothing but a summer resort for the aesthetic quasi-respectables ... these folk are squeezing us poor, honest radicals out, by making the leases prohibitive in price and condition."

He stopped speaking, while he picked up another pair of shoes, examined them, chose one, and began sewing a patch on it....

He rose, with his leathern apron on, and saw me out....

"—glad you came to see old Jones ... you'll see and hear a lot more of me, the next week or so!" and he smiled genially, prophetically.

He looked like Socrates as he stood there ... jovially homely, round-faced ... head as bald as ivory ... red, bushy eyebrows that were so heavy he shrugged them....

"I'm just beginning the fight (would you actually believe it) for free speech here ... it takes a radical community, you know, to teach the conservatives how to suppress freedom....

"You must come around to the big barn Friday night, after the circus."

"—the circus?"

"Oh, we have a circus of our own every summer about this time ... we represent the animals ourselves ... some of us don't need to make up much, neither, if we only knew it," he roared.

"After the imitation circus, the real circus will begin. I have compelled the announcement of a general meeting to discuss my grievances, and that of others, who are not game enough to speak for themselves."

* * * * *

I found nobody but Hildreth—Mrs. Baxter—at home, when I returned. She was lying back in the hammock where Penton lounged to read his news clippings ... near the outdoor table ... dressed easily in her bloomers and white middy blouse with the blue bow tie ... her great, brown eyes, with big jet lashes, drooping langourously over her healthy, rounded cheeks ... her head of rich, dark hair touseled attractively. She was reading a book. I caught the white gleam of one of her pretty legs where the elastic on one side of her bloomers had slipped up.

Alone with her, a touch of my old almost paralytic shyness returned ... but the pathway to my tent lay so near her hammock I would almost brush against its side in passing....

She looked up. She gazed at me indefinitely, as if coming back from a far dream to reality.

"Oh, Johnnie Gregory! You?" fingering her hair with flexible fingers like a violinist trying his instrument.

"Yes!" I stopped abruptly and flushed.

"Did Jones like you?"

"I think he did."

"Jones is an eccentric ... but nine-tenths of the time he is right in his contentions ... his moral indignations ... it is his spirit of no compromise that defeats him."

With that she reached out one hand to me, with that pretty droop of the left corner of her mouth, that already had begun to fascinate me....

"Help me up ... a hammock's a nice place to be in, but an awkward thing to get out of."

I took her hand and helped her rise to a sitting posture.

"Ruth's in the little house typing ... Penton and Darrie are a-field taking a walk."

I paused where I was. Mrs. Baxter stood directly in the pathway that led to my tent. And the second act of Judas had begun to burn in my brain, during my vigorous walk back from Jones's shack....

* * * * *

"In the yard of an inn at Capernaum. On the left stands the entrance to the inn. In the extreme background lies the beach, and, beyond, the Sea of Galilee. A fisherboat is seen, drawn up on shore. Three fishermen discovered mending nets, at rise of curtain."

The stage was set for the second act. I must get the play finished in the rough. I owed this much to Mr. Derek, who was faithfully backing me—if not to my own career ... and already I had succeeded in interesting Mitchell Kennerley, the new young publisher, in my effort. After the book was disposed of ... then Europe ... then London ... then Paris, and all the large life of the brilliant world of intellect and literature that awaited me.

But, at the present, one small, dainty, dark woman unconsciously stood in my pathway. I looked into Hildreth Baxter's face with caution, strangely disquieted, but proud to be outwardly self-possessed.

"Let's us take a walk," she suggested.

"No, I must go to my tent and write!"

"Oh, come now ... don't you be like Mubby!... that's the way he talks."

"All right," I assented, amazed at her directness, "I'll put my work by for the day—though the entire dialogue of the three Galilean fishermen about the miracle of the great draught of fishes is at this very moment burning in my brain."

She laid her hand lightly, but with an electric contact, on the bend of my arm, and off we started, into the inviting fields.

Not far out, we came across a group of romping children. They were shouting and chasing one another about, as happy dogs do when overjoyed with excessive energy.

The example the children set was contagious.... Hildreth and I were soon romping too—when out of the former's sight. We took hands and ran hard down a hill, and half-way up another one opposite, through our own natural impetus.

We changed our mood, strolling slowly and thoughtfully till we came to a small rustic bridge, so pretty it seemed almost like stagecraft, that spanned, at one leap, one of the countryside's innumerable, flashing brooks. We stood looking over into the foaming, speeding water.

"There's one thing sure about Eden ... in spite of the squabbles and disagreements of the elders, the place is a children's paradise."

"That's only because they have all nature for their backyard—no thanks to their elders," Hildreth answered, looking up into my face with a quick smile, "the grown-ups find misery wherever, they go."

"Does that mean that you are unhappy?"

"I suppose I should say 'no.'"

"I don't understand what you mean."

"Neither do I, then."

Again that sweet, tantalizing, enigmatic droop of her mouth's corner.

We strolled further ... into the fields again ... with linked comradely hands. It seemed that she and I had been born brother and sister in some impossible pastoral idyll.

* * * * *

A change in our spirit again. A fresh desire to romp.

"Let's play just as if we were children, too."

"Tag! You're it!" and I touched her arm and ran. She ran after me in that curious loping fashion peculiar to women. I turned and wound like a hare. She stopped, breathless. "That's no fair!" she cried, "you're running too fast."

"Well, then, I'll almost stand still, then see if you can catch me!"

She made at me, shouting, her face flushed with the exercise. I ducked and swerved and doubled.

"You're quite quick and strong," she exclaimed, admiringly, as I caught her by the shoulders.

I stooped over, hunching my back.

"Come on, play leap-frog," I invited. She hesitated, gave a run at me, put both hands on my back, but caught her left leg on my neck. We collapsed in a laughing heap, she on top of me.

Slowly we disentangled ourselves. I reached a hand and helped her up.

"I'm no good at that, either ... let's stop playing ... I'm tired."

We caught sight of a little man crossing a field, trotting like a dog out hunting on his own. He looked back twice as he went.

"—wonder if he saw us?"

"—perhaps—but what matter if he did?"

"Then I hope he's not a fellow Edenite. You have no idea what an undercurrent of gossip runs in this place."