h White a few days before White sailed from New
York for his second African exploring expedition. Saxton had asked the
novelist if he did not think it possible to lay hold of the hearts and
imaginations of a great public through a novel which had no love interest
in it; if "man pitted against nature was not, after all, the eternal
drama."

White thought for a moment and then said:

"In the main, that is correct. Only I should say that the one great drama
is that of the individual man's struggles toward perfect adjustment with
his environment. According as he comes into correspondence and harmony
with his environment, by that much does he succeed. That is what an
environment is for. It may be financial, natural, sexual, political, and
so on. The sex element is important, of course,--very important. But it is
not the only element by any means; nor is it necessarily an element that
exercises an instant influence on the great drama. Any one who so depicts
it is violating the truth. Other elements of the great drama are as
important--self-preservation, for example, is a very simple and even more
important instinct than that of the propagation of the race. Properly
presented, these other elements, being essentially vital, are of as much
interest to the great public as the relation of the sexes."

The first eight or nine years of Mr. White's life were spent in a small
mill town. Michigan was at that time the greatest of lumber states. White
was still a boy when the family moved to Grand Rapids, then a city of
about 30,000. Stewart Edward White did not go to school until he was
sixteen, but then he entered the third year high with boys of his own age
and was graduated at eighteen, president of his class. He won and, I
believe, still holds the five-mile running record of the school.

The explanation is that the eight or ten years which most boys spend in
grammar school were spent by Stewart Edward continually in the woods and
among the rivermen, in his own town and in the lumber camps to which his
father took him. Then there was a stretch of four years, from about the
age of twelve on, when he was in California, as he says "a very new sort
of a place." These days were spent largely in the saddle and he saw a good
deal of the old California ranch life.

"The Birds of Mackinac Island," already referred to, was only one of
thirty or forty papers on birds which White wrote in his youth for
scientific publications. Six or seven h