or of Taiohae, captains of
wandering traders, and all the best of the South Pacific riffraff. He
would keep open house and entertain like a prince. And he would forget
the books he had opened and the world that had proved an illusion.

To do all this he must wait in California to fill the sack with money.
Already it was beginning to flow in. If one of the books made a strike,
it might enable him to sell the whole heap of manuscripts. Also he could
collect the stories and the poems into books, and make sure of the valley
and the bay and the schooner. He would never write again. Upon that he
was resolved. But in the meantime, awaiting the publication of the
books, he must do something more than live dazed and stupid in the sort
of uncaring trance into which he had fallen.

He noted, one Sunday morning, that the Bricklayers' Picnic took place
that day at Shell Mound Park, and to Shell Mound Park he went. He had
been to the working-class picnics too often in his earlier life not to
know what they were like, and as he entered the park he experienced a
recrudescence of all the old sensations. After all, they were his kind,
these working people. He had been born among them, he had lived among
them, and though he had strayed for a time, it was well to come back
among them.

"If it ain't Mart!" he heard some one say, and the next moment a hearty
hand was on his shoulder. "Where you ben all the time? Off to sea? Come
on an' have a drink."

It was the old crowd in which he found himself--the old crowd, with here
and there a gap, and here and there a new face. The fellows were not
bricklayers, but, as in the old days, they attended all Sunday picnics
for the dancing, and the fighting, and the fun. Martin drank with them,
and began to feel really human once more. He was a fool to have ever
left them, he thought; and he was very certain that his sum of happiness
would have been greater had he remained with them and let alone the books
and the people who sat in the high places. Yet the beer seemed not so
good as of yore. It didn't taste as it used to taste. Brissenden had
spoiled him for steam beer, he concluded, and wondered if, after all, the
books had spoiled him for companionship with these friends of his youth.
He resolved that he would not be so spoiled, and he went on to the
dancing pavilion. Jimmy, the plumber, he met there, in the company of a
tall, blond girl who promptly forsook him for Martin.

"Ge