hat I should wear,
for he had written, "with Mrs. Roberts and myself," and something in the
tone of the letter had decided me to play safe. I put on evening dress,
and it was well I did, for Ben met me in irreproachable dinner coat and
presented his wife, a handsome and beautifully gowned woman, quite in
the manner of a city-bred host. No one looking at us as we sat at our
flower-decked table would have imagined that he or I had ever been
plow-boys of the Middle Border.

As the dinner went on I lost all my conviction that the preternaturally
solemn, heavy-footed lad of 1880 was in any way connected with this rich
middle-aged inventor, but then he was probably having the same
difficulty relating me with the beardless senior of 1881.

On the surface our dinner was a pleasant and rather conventional
meeting, and yet the more it is dwelt upon the more significant it
becomes. Starting from almost the same point, with somewhat similar
handicaps, we two had "arrived," though at widely separated goals. Each
of our courses was characteristically American, and each was in
demonstration--for the millionth time--of the magic power of the open
lands.

In the free air of the Middle Border, this man's genius for inventing
had full power of expansion, and in result he was in possession of a
fortune, whilst I, in my literary way, had won what my kindest critics
called success--by another kind of service. My position though less
secure and far less remunerative, was none the less honorable--that I
shall insist on saying even though I must admit that in the eyes of my
Seminary classmates the inventor made the handsomer showing. As the
owner of a patent bringing in many thousands of dollars per year in
royalty he had certain very definite claims to respect which I lacked.
My home in contrast with his would have seemed very humble. Measured by
material things, his imagination had proved enormously more potent than
mine.

This meeting not only led me to re-value my own achievement, it brought
up to me with peculiar pathos the career of another classmate, my
comrade Burton Babcock, whom I (in 1898) had left standing on the bank
of the Stickeen River in Alaska. He, too, was characteristically
American. He had carried out his plan. After leading his pack train
across the divide to the upper waters of the Yukon, he had built a raft
and floated down the Hotalinqua. He had been frozen in, and had spent
the winter in a windowless hut in the de