Stanton termed it "under a
cloud." I had my eyes set on another ideal.

* * * * *

Down in the mosquito-infested pine woods of New Jersey Stephen Barton
had located. Barton was possessed with the dream of making the men and
women of the world physically perfect--a harking back to the old Greeks
with their worship of the perfection of bodily beauty and health. I had
long been a reader of his magazines, a follower of his cult, and, now
that I heard of his planning to build a city out in the open country,
where people could congregate who wished to live according to his
teachings, I enrolled myself ardently as one of his first followers and
disciples....

Barton had taken over a great barn-like, abandoned factory building that
stood on the shore of an artificial lake--which, in his wife's honour,
he re-named after her, Lake Emily ... his wife was a fussy Canadian
woman who interfered in everyone's affairs beyond endurable measure. I
was told she used to steal off the chair the old clothes Barton used to
wear by preference--paddling along the winding creek in a canoe to his
work each morning, his pants rolled up to the knees--and put in their
stead a new, nicely creased suit!

* * * * *

Barton's face was wizened and worried ... but, when we took our morning
shower, after exercise, under the lifted gates of the dam, his body
showed like a pyramid of perfect muscles ... though his legs--one of
the boys who had known him a long time said his chief sorrow was that he
could never develop his legs the way he wished them to be.

* * * * *

We began the building of the city. We laid out the streets through the
pines ... many of us went clad in trunks ... or in nothing ... as we
surveyed, and drove stakes. The play of the sun and the wind on the
naked skin--there is nothing pleasanter, what though one has to slap
away horseflies and mosquitoes ... the vistas through the pines were
glorious. I saw in my mind's eyes a world of the physically perfect!

As the laying out of the sites and the streets progressed, dwellers came
to join with us ... fanatics ... "nuts" of every description ... the
sick....

* * * * *

A woman, the wife of some bishop or other, came to join us early in the
season. She had cancer and came there to be cured of it by the nature
treatment. She brought with her an old-fashioned