at I had heard others relate at camp-fires, in jail, in the
forecastle, on the transport, I unhesitatingly appropriated as my own
experiences.

All the papers printed stories about me. And I was proud about it. And I
became prouder still when I sold a story in two parts to a New York
Sunday paper ... I liked the notoriety....

But as usual, the yarns I retailed struck in upon my own imagination,
too ... just as had my earlier stories of killing Indians. Particularly
the tale I had related of having seen dead Chinamen in heaps with their
heads lopped off. A nightmare of this imaginary episode began to come to
me. And another dream I had--of a huge Boxer, with a cutlass, standing
over me. And he was about to carve me piecemeal while I lay bound and
helpless before him. The dream persisted so strongly that, after I
awoke, I still seemed to see him standing in a corner of my room. And I
cried aloud. And felt foolish when it brought my father in. So I stopped
making up adventures, especially the disagreeable ones, because they
eventually had more effect on me than they did on my auditors.

* * * * *

My father had changed boarding places ... but, as usual, it was not
better food, but a little, dark widow that attracted him to that
boarding house.

* * * * *

I now devoted myself exclusively to poetry--the reading of it. I always
had a book in my pocket. I read even at meals, despite my father's
protests that it was bad-mannered.

* * * * *

Breasted's book store, down in Newark, was where I was nearly always to
be found, in the late afternoons.

It was there, in the murky light of a dying twilight, that I came Upon
the book that has meant more to my life than any other book ever
written....

For a long time I had known of John Keats, that there was such a poet.
But, in the fever of my adolescence, in the ferment of my tramp-life, I
had not yet procured his poetry....

Now, here were his complete works, right at hand, in one volume ... a
damaged but typographically intact copy....

I had, once before, dipped into his _Endymion_ and had been discouraged
... but this time I began to read him with his very first lines--his
dedication to Leigh Hunt, beginning:

"Glory and loveliness have passed away."

Then I went on to a pastoral piece:

"I stood tiptoe upon a little hill."

I forgot where I was. A new world of beaut