over, he can live here on what thousands of men in America
spend for cigars, but our ideal of writing has to do with the straight
line between the thought and the utterance.

A man's style has little or nothing to do with the words, or the
sentence, paragraph or even his native eccentricities of technique; a
man's style has to do with the manner of his thinking. As for words and
the implements of writing, the more nearly they are made to parallel the
run of thought, the better the work.

One does not learn the Dakotan's kind in a day or a year. There is a
continual changing and refining production about our truest friends--the
same thing in a woman that a man can love in the highest--that quickens
us always to higher vision and deeper humanity. The point is that we
must change and increase to be worthy of our truest relations. One must
always be restless and capacious. When our eyes rest on the horizon, and
do not yearn to tear it apart; when the throb of the Quest sinks low in
our breast--it is time to depart. You who in mid-life think you have
_arrived somewhere_--in profession, in trade, in world-standing--know
that death has already touched you, that the look of your face is
dissolute.

I have said to the Dakotan and to the others here: "It was good for you
to come--but the time may arrive, when it will be just as good for you
to go.... When you see me covering old fields; when you come here for
continual reviews of my little story; when your mind winces with the
thought of what I am to do and say next, because you know it well
already--arise and come no more, but in passing, say to me, 'To-day we
did not get out of the circle of yesterday....' I shall know what is
meant, and it shall be good for you to tell me, since one forgets. It
may be that there is still enough strength for another voyage--that I
may be constrained to leave Telemachus and go forth to the edge of the
land "where lights twinkle among the rocks and the deep moans round with
many voices."

Recently the Dakotan told me of a dream, and I asked him to write it. I
think he will draw nearer to you, if you read the story that he brought
me:

"This is the latest and most complete of many under-water
dreams that have come to me. In their thrall as a child I
learned the deeps of fear. I do not know why dreams of mine
are so often associated with water, unless at some time, way
back in the beginnings, the horror of a water-exi