which you are chosen, because you are ready.
Make your days interpret the best of you. Go to it with all your might.
Feel us behind you--rooting strong--and hurry back."

29

THE DAKOTAN

It was a rainy Fall night. The Dakotan came in barefooted with two large
bundles of copy. It was a bit cold to take the ground straight, but he
had walked along the bluff for some distance in absolute darkness, over
grassy hollows filled with water as well as bare patches of clay. One's
shelf of shoes is pretty well used up on a day like this, and one learns
that much labour can be spared by keeping his shoes for indoor use.
Incidentally, it is worth having a garden, walled if necessary, for the
joy of hoeing flowers and vegetables barefooted.... I had just about
finished the work of the evening. It would not have mattered anyway. The
Dakotan sat down on the floor before the fire and was still as a spirit.
He has no sense of time nor hurry; he would have waited an hour or two,
or passed along quite as genially as he came, without my looking up.

But one does not often let a friend go like this. These things are too
fine, of too pure a pleasantness. One does not learn the beauty of them
until one has come far through terror and turmoil. It is almost a
desecration to try to put such things into words; in fact, one cannot
touch with words the heart of the mystery. One merely moves around it
with an occasional suggestive sentence and those who know, smile warmly
over the writer's words.

The Study was red with firelight. Burning wood played with its tireless
gleam upon the stones, upon the backs of books, and into the few
pictures, bringing the features forth with restless familiarity. I left
the desk and came to the big chair by the fire. I was glad he was there.
I think I had been watching him intently for several seconds before he
looked up.... I had not been thinking of Thoreau; at least, not for
days, but it suddenly came to me that this was extraordinarily like
Thoreau, who had come in so silently through the darkness to share the
fire. I found that he had just been writing of the relations of men, the
rarer moments of them; and queerly enough, I found that night more of
the master of Walden in his work.

The Dakotan is twenty. All summer he has been doing some original
thinking on the subject of Sound. When I was his age, Tyndall was the
big voice on this subject; yet we have come to think in all humbleness
that Tynd