nk the questions fairly easy, a mere
matriculation paper.

When the Queen of Illusion illudes no more youth is over. I am ready to
admit Illusion still reigned when I took to writing for a living. The
first illusion was that I was not doing it for a living (it is true I
did not make one) but because the arts were rather noble than otherwise
and extremely needed. I admit now that they are necessary, in the sense
of the necessarian, but I can see little use for them, unless the
production of Illusion (with few or many gaps in it) is needed for the
world's progress. The laudation of the artist, the writer, and the actor
returns anew with the end of the world's great year. But if any golden
age comes back, the setting apart of the Amusement Monger will cease. If
it does not cease, their antics will be the warnings of the intoxicated
Helot.

Yet without illusion one cannot write. Or so it seems to me. Is this
writing period only another university after all? Perhaps teaching never
ends, though the art of learning what is taught seems very rare. To
write and "get there" in the meanest sense, so far as money is
concerned, is the overcoming of innumerable obstacles. London taught me
a great deal that I could not learn in Australia, or on the sea, or in
any Texas, or British Columbia. But I came to London with scaled eyes,
and tasted other poverty than that I knew. Illusion is mostly
foreshortening of time. One wants to prophesy and to see. The chief
lesson here is that prophets must be blind. The end of the race is the
racing thereof after all. To do a little useful work (even though the
useful may be a thousandth part of the useless) is the end of living.
The only illusion worth keeping is that anything can be useful. So far
my youth is not ended.

MY FRIEND EL TORO

It is not everyone who can make friends with a bull, and it is not every
bull that one can make friends with. Yet next to one or two horses,
about which I could spin long yarns, El Toro, the big brindled bull of
Los Guilucos Ranch, Sonoma County, California, is certainly nearest my
heart. He was my friend, and sometimes my companion; he had a noble
character for fighting, and in spite of his pugnacity he was amiability
itself to most human beings. His final end, too, fills me with a sense
of pathos, and enrages me against those who owned him. They were
obviously incapable of understanding him as I did.

When I went up to Los Guilucos from San Francis