ottonwoods there, but he used a phrase common in American literature.
Another whilom friend of mine, who had read some favourable criticisms,
wrote me to say he was sure Messrs. Smith & Elder had paid for them. He
had understood it was always done, and now he knew the truth of it,
because the book was so bad. I almost feared to return to British
Columbia: the critics there might use worse weapons than a sneering
paragraph. In England the worst one need fear is an action for criminal
libel, or a rough and tumble fight. There it might end in an inquest. I
wrote back to my critics that if I ever came out again, I would come
armed, and endeavour to reply effectually.

For that wild life, far away from the ancient set and hardened bonds of
social law which crush a man and make him just like his fellows, or so
nearly like that only intimacy can distinguish individual differences,
had allowed me to grow in another way, and become more myself; more
independent, more like a savage, better able to fight and endure. That
is the use of going abroad, and going abroad to places that are not
civilised. They allow a man to revert and be himself. It may make his
return hard, his endurance of social bonds bitterer, but it may help him
to refuse to endure. He may attain to some natural sight.

[Illustration: DEFYING THE UNIVERSE]

Not many weeks ago I was talking to a well-known American publisher, and
our conversation ran on the trans-oceanic view of Europe. He was amused
and delighted to come across an Englishman who was so Americanised in
one way as to look on our standing camps and armed kingdoms as citizens
of the States do, especially those who live in the West. To the
American, Europe seems like a small collection of walled yards, each
with a crowing fighting-cock defying the universe on the top of his own
dunghill, with an occasional scream from the wall. The whole of our
international politics gets to look small and petty, and a bitter waste
of power. Perhaps the American view is right. At any rate, it seemed so
when I sat far aloof upon the lofty mountains to the west of the great
plains. The isolation from the politics of the moment allowed me to see
nature and natural law.

And as it was with nations, so it was with men. Out yonder, in the West,
most of us were brutal at times, and ready to kill, or be killed, but my
American-bred acquaintances looked like men, strikingly like men,
independent, free, equal to the need of th