little casket of
leases and life insurance policies and contracts and wills, but rather
as the place where he has put some of his own past life into voluntary
bondage--into Liberty Bondage--at four and a quarter per cent. Yet,
however blithely he may psychologize these matters, he is wise enough to
know that he is not a free man. However content in servitude, he does
not blink the fact that it is servitude.

"Upon his will he binds a radiant chain," said Joyce Kilmer in a fine
sonnet. However radiant, it is still a chain.

So it is that sometimes, in the lulls of telephoning and signing
contracts and talking to salesmen and preparing estimates and dictating
letters "that must get off to-night" and trying to wriggle out of
serving on the golf club's house committee, my friend flings away his
cigar, gets a corncob pipe out of his desk drawer, and contemplates his
key ring a trifle wistfully. This nubby little tyrant that he carries
about with him always makes him think of a river in the far Canadian
north, a river that he visited once, long ago, before he had built up
all the barbed wire of life about his spirit. It was a green lucid river
that ran in a purposeful way between long fringes of pine trees. There
were sandy shelves where he and a fellow canoeist with the good gift of
silence built campfires and fried bacon, or fish of their own wooing.
The name of that little river (his voice is grave as he recalls it), was
the Peace; and it was not necessary to paddle if you didn't feel like
it. "The current ran" (it is pathetic to hear him say it) "from four to
seven miles an hour."

The tobacco smoke sifts and eddies into the carefully labeled
pigeonholes of his desk, and his stenographer wonders whether she dare
interrupt him to ask whether that word was "priority" or "minority" in
the second paragraph of the memo to Mr. Ebbsmith. He smells that bacon
again; he remembers stretching out on the cool sand to watch the dusk
seep up from the valley and flood the great clear arch of green-blue
sky. He remembers that there were no key rings in his pocket then, no
papers, no letters, no engagements to meet Mr. Fonseca at a luncheon of
the Rotary Club to discuss demurrage. He remembers the clear sparkle of
the Peace water in the sunshine, its downward swell and slant over many
a boulder, its milky vexation where it slid among stones. He remembers
what he had said to himself then, but had since forgotten, that no
matter what wo