e leaving a good beer country
and are trying to reconcile yourself to ditch-water for the next few
weeks. At any rate, similes or not, there were we two together again
at last. What a week of weeks we spent, pacing back and forth on the
veranda of our log cabin, where we overlooked the pleasant sinuosities
of the Sebois and gazed out together over golden beech and ghostly
birch and blood-red maple banners to the far violet mountains of the
Aroostook! And how we did take stock of the immediate past, chuckling
to find that it had not been a quarter so bad as I had stupidly
supposed. What gilded forest trails were those which we blazed into
the glamorous land of to-morrow! And every other moment these
recreative labors would be interrupted while I pressed between the
pages of a notebook some butterfly or sunset leaf or quadruply
fortunate clover which my Auto-Comrade found and turned over to me.
(Between two of those pages, by the way, I afterwards found the
argument of this chapter.)

Then, when the effervescence of our meeting had lost a little of its
first, fine, carbonated sting, what Elysian hours we did spend over
the correspondence of those other two friends, Goethe and Schiller!
Passage after passage we would turn back to re-read and muse over.
These we would discuss without any of the rancor or dogmatic
insistence or one-eyed stubbornness that usually accompany the clash
of mental steel on mental steel from a different mill. And without
making any one else lose the thread or grow short-breathed or accuse
us passionately of reading ahead, we would, on the slightest
provocation, out-Fletcher Fletcher chewing the cud of sweet and bitter
fancy. And we would underline and bracket and side-line and overline
the ragged little paper volume, and scribble up and down its margins,
and dream over its footnotes, to our hearts' content.

Such experiences, though, are all too rare with me. Why? Because my
Auto-Comrade is a rather particular person and will not associate with
me unless I toe his mark.

"Come," I propose to him, "let us go a journey."

"Hold hard," says he, and looks me over appraisingly. "You know the
rule of the Auto-Comrades' Union. We are supposed to associate with
none but fairly able persons. Are you a fairly able person?"

If it turns out that I am not, he goes on a rampage, and begins to
talk like an athletic trainer. The first thing he demands is that his
would-be associate shall keep on hand a joll