morning, the "silly
cackle" of the chickens prevented him from writing. Flowers bored him
and the weather was always too cold or too hot, too damp or too dusty.
Butterflies filled him with pessimistic forebodings of generations of
cabbage worms. Moths suggested ruined coat collars--only at night,
before our fire, with nature safely and firmly shut out, did he regain
his customary and charming humor.

He belonged to the brick pavement, the electric-car line. He did not
mind being awakened by the "twitter" of a milk cart. The "yelp" of the
ice man, the snort of a six o'clock switch engine and the "cackle" of a
laundry wagon formed for him a pleasant morning symphony. The clatter of
an elevated train was with him the normal accompaniment of dawn, but the
poetry of the pastoral--well, it didn't exist, that's all--except in
"maudlin verses of lying sentimentalists." "I'm like George Ade's clerk:
I never enjoy my vacation till I get back to the city."

To all such diatribes Zulime and I gave delighted ear. We rejoiced in
his comment, for we did not believe a word of it, it was all a part of
Henry's delightful perversity.

For six consecutive weeks I bent to the work of writing my novel
undisturbed. A peaceful season which I shall long remember, for almost
every afternoon, when the weather permitted, we joined the Dudleys and
McKees and drove to some lovely spot on the river bank or sought out
some half-hidden spring at the far end of a coulee and there, while the
children picked nuts or apples and the women read magazines or stitched,
George Dudley and I lighted our fire and broiled our steak. Nothing
could be simpler, homelier, more wholesome, than this life, and I was
able to do nearly half my story before a return to Chicago became
necessary.

Practically all of the spring months of 1910 were given to revising and
proof-reading _Cavanagh, Forest Ranger_, which had genuinely interested
me and which should have been as important in my scheme of delineating
the West as _The Captain of the Gray Horse Troop_, but it wasn't. It was
too controversial, and besides I did not give it time enough. I should
have taken another year to it--but I didn't. I permitted myself to be
hurried by Duneka, who was (like most publishers) enslaved to a program.
By April it was off my hands.

After the last page of this proof was returned to the printer a sense of
weakness, of age, a feeling altogether new to me, led me to say to
Fuller, "I s