weary of eternal recurrence. I have lived so many lives. I
weary of the endless struggle and pain and catastrophe that come to those
who sit in the high places, tread the shining ways, and wander among the
stars.

Almost I hope, when next I reinhabit form, that it shall be that of a
peaceful farmer. There is my dream-farm. I should like to engage just
for one whole life in that. Oh, my dream-farm! My alfalfa meadows, my
efficient Jersey cattle, my upland pastures, my brush-covered slopes
melting into tilled fields, while ever higher up the slopes my angora
goats eat away brush to tillage!

There is a basin there, a natural basin high up the slopes, with a
generous watershed on three sides. I should like to throw a dam across
the fourth side, which is surprisingly narrow. At a paltry price of
labour I could impound twenty million gallons of water. For, see: one
great drawback to farming in California is our long dry summer. This
prevents the growing of cover crops, and the sensitive soil, naked, a
mere surface dust-mulch, has its humus burned out of it by the sun. Now
with that dam I could grow three crops a year, observing due rotation,
and be able to turn under a wealth of green manure. . . .

* * * * *

I have just endured a visit from the Warden. I say "endured" advisedly.
He is quite different from the Warden of San Quentin. He was very
nervous, and perforce I had to entertain him. This is his first hanging.
He told me so. And I, with a clumsy attempt at wit, did not reassure him
when I explained that it was also my first hanging. He was unable to
laugh. He has a girl in high school, and his boy is a freshman at
Stanford. He has no income outside his salary, his wife is an invalid,
and he is worried in that he has been rejected by the life insurance
doctors as an undesirable risk. Really, the man told me almost all his
troubles. Had I not diplomatically terminated the interview he would
still be here telling me the remainder of them.

My last two years in San Quentin were very gloomy and depressing. Ed
Morrell, by one of the wildest freaks of chance, was taken out of
solitary and made head trusty of the whole prison. This was Al Hutchins'
old job, and it carried a graft of three thousand dollars a year. To my
misfortune, Jake Oppenheimer, who had rotted in solitary for so many
years, turned sour on the world, on everything. For eight months he
refused to talk even to me.

In prison, n