In 1903 I spent the greater part of the winter in northern Europe, going on as far as the North Cape, and travelling at least part of my way back through the country of the Laps. In 1906 I went to Italy again; and once more in 1909 when I made my return trip north, travelling fourth-class down the Rhine, stopping every night. I made the whole trip, from Venice to London, on twelve dollars; and it was the first and only time that I came into close contact with German peasants.
     Why, it may be asked, did I invariably return to America? Only he will understand who knows the nostalgia of the novelist for his settings.
     As an off-set to the preceding episodes it seems indispensable that I should give some happening, some incident from my American travels - an incident which will clearly define the milieu in which I moved in the new world; if for no other reason than to point the moral. I choose at random from among many things which either did not find their place in A Search for America or which happened at a later time.
     What I am going to relate took place during one of the years shortly after the turn of the century.
     As usual, I had started work in Kansas; and I had attached myself, as I mostly did, to a "pardner". Most hoboes did that; quite apart from the fact that a partner afforded company when one was travelling, he also facilitated many operations. Thus one man could get a camp ready while the other "rustled" food; or one of a pair could stand guard while the other scouted about for a chance of finding accommodation on a freight-train; if members of the train-crew happened to come along, a signal from the watcher told the scout to hide, for detection meant the loss of the opportunity of using the train.

     Finally, since most hoboes came to the farms in pairs, it was safer for everyone to have a helper.
     During the very first week of the summer I am talking of I had joined forces with a Pole of ordinarily disreputable appearance. Like myself, who, perhaps, looked no less disreputable, he spoke half a dozen European languages and was, unsuspected by the Americans among whom we moved, capable of shaving and even of dressing like a dandy. Whenever he did so, which was, of course, on rare occasions, he assumed, with an inexpressibly comic effect, the irreproachable manners of a man of society. Unlike myself - at least if I could believe the stories he told - he made, on occasion, use of his accomplishments to "put one over" on gullible middle-class people by passing himself off as a blasé globe-trotter momentarily embarrassed, alleging that he had outrun his base of supplies. Sometimes I suspected, again from the stories he told, that his harvest tramps were undertaken chiefly as a cloak for scouting purposes. What linked us together was that, as hoboes, we were both professionals, not, like so many others, mere amateurs who had been thrown on the road by adversity. If I judge by the amount of laughing we did, we must have been very good company, at least for each other.
     Commonly we worked on large farms; which had the advantage that they offered a variety of buildings in which to find shelter for the night; while haylofts exposed one's clothing to the attack of crickets, they harboured neither fleas nor lice; an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.
     It was, of course, my, as well as his, invariable rule never to betray to the ordinary run of our fellow-workers that by birth, breeding, or education we were anything

but common labourers. In speech and manner we made it a point to appear as nearly as we could their equals; for the average lower-class American hates the very suspicion of an education. Any other plan would have made our lives insupportable.
     My newly-adopted friend, however, must have seen through my disguise at an early stage; and sometimes he allowed his own particular humour to run away with him. We were still in Kansas and engaged in haying when, standing on top of a load, in the blistering sunshine of a late-June or early-July noon, while I and another "pitcher" were tossing the hay up to him, he, in a sudden reckless mood, engaged me in a discussion of modern French poetry, with a ludicrous effect. It was done ostentatiously, with the pointed intention of making the other hoboes open their mouths. He even dropped his perfect American speech and changed to French; and in doing so, he adopted what, in these raw surroundings, might have passed for aristocratic society manners, handling his pitch-fork with the fastidious nonchalance of a fop, parodying that nonchalance by its very exaggeration. Every now and then he stopped, looked at me, and laughed and laughed. I, laughing with him, though well aware of the probable consequences, entered into the fun.
     At night, we found ourselves isolated. If there had not been two of us, both booking "tough", we should undoubtedly have been beaten up.
     While we remained together, such things happened repeatedly, with the invariable consequence that we had to leave the place where we were working; and, towards the end of the season, when we were working on a

"bonanza" farm, one last thing happened which I want to give in detail.
     On the Saturday of our first week at the place it rained; and we had already discovered that we were not wanted at any of the diversions going on in the bunk-house: poker, horse-shoe quoits, and so on. I had a few books in my bundle but dared not take them out, even in the presence of my "pardner". Newspapers or even cheap magazines might have passed; but books! I proposed to walk to town, along the track, and to see the sights. My friend was willing. I do not remember the name of the town; nor does it matter; but it was pleasantly situated and extended over both banks of the Red River, its two halves being joined by a long, narrow, wooden bridge.
     Seeing the sights" meant to us very largely making fun of the false-front architecture and the ludicrous grandiloquence in the names of buildings - "Mandeville Opera House" - so commonly met with in the American small town. We laughed a good deal and generally, I am afraid, made ourselves conspicuous while presenting a none-too-respectable exterior to the eyes of indignant burghers. We were in tattered overalls and carried a week's stubble on our chins; in a sort of defiance we had disdained shaving for the trip. While work was in full swing, Sunday was shaving-day, of course.
     Having explored the west end of the town, with its pretentious residential quarter and its hectic business section, we came to the bridge and crossed to the east bank of the river.
     By that time it had struck us that we were being followed by a tall, cavernous man in a buttoned-up blue serge suit and a quasi-official blue peaked cap. More than once, when casually turning back, we had seen him

at some distance behind us. As we arrived at the far end of the bridge, I saw the tall, lank figure disconsolately halted at its west end. I called Stravinski's attention to it; and we both laughed.
     I did not know it at the time, but the point was that the two halves of the town were separately administered; in fact, they were situated in different states, North Dakota and Minnesota. Never having been a consumer of alcohol in its undiluted state, I did not know either that North Dakota was "dry", while Minnesota was "wet"; had I known it, I should not have given the matter a further thought.
     Suffice it to say that, when my friend and I returned from a half-hour's stroll on the far bank and recrossed the bridge, the tall man in blue was still standing at its west end. It turned out that he was waiting for us; as we approached, he bared a badge on the lapel of his vest, proclaimed himself, in a funereal voice, the Chief of Police, and informed us that we were under arrest. Leading the way, he enjoined us to follow him quietly, without making any attempt to escape.
     In our exploration of the town we had seen the police station on Main Street, next to a little white frame building with an imposing false front which, in large, black letters, bore the legend "Town Hall and Municipal Office". I was surprised, therefore, when the chief, instead of continuing on Main Street, which was in line with the bridge, turned north along the bank of the river. However, scenting adventure, we followed obediently enough. Nothing could happen to us; we had done nothing to deserve arrest or punishment.
     Meanwhile I tried to elicit some information as to the charge we were presumably facing. The chief received

my overtures with a stony and reproving silence. I barely thought of the possibility that some major crime might have been committed in the vicinity and that we were suspected of being involved.
     We went to the very end of the town, northward, before we turned west; from there on, the street was a mere trail skirting the endless fields of prairie wheat. After perhaps ten minutes we turned once more, this time south, and passed through a very poor street resembling the worst of the slums of a city. But when we reached the next side street, again running away from the river; the aspect changed into that of a cramped, middle-class respectability with diminutive but very smooth lawns in front of diminutive but up-to-date houses built of parti-coloured brick.
     For a last time our guide turned, crossing one of the little lawns and pulling out a latch-key when he reached the front steps of the dwelling. He opened the door and motioned us to precede him into the narrow hall. Entering in our rear, he closed the outer door and threw open that into a small living-room which was neatly furnished in maroon mohair. My friend and I filed in, catching sight, as we did so, of a stout and forbidding woman in the kitchen at the back of the house. Our host or jailer closed and locked the door on us.
     Left alone, we dropped into arm-chairs, laughed, and exchanged a few words, puzzled by the mystery.
     Within five minutes, the chief returned; and, summoning me by an imperative gesture to stand up and to raise my hands over my head, he went through my pockets, laying everything he found on a little table the top of which was daintily carved in the form of an over-nourished clover-leaf. There were some papers, a few letters

addressed to me, the manuscripts of half a dozen poems, some cigarettes, and, in a side pocket of my overalls, some money which he counted. Let us say that it amounted to $24.35.
     Having finished, he motioned me to stand back and summoned my companion for examination. In his pockets, he found a pocket knife, some more papers, some more cigarettes, and some more money; all of which he arranged in a neat little pile on the clover-leaf table. Let us say that this money amounted to $13.32.
     Then, to our surprise, our captor returned our possessions.
     Having done so, he spoke for the first time since we had arrived. "You wait here till I get back."
     With that he left us and again turned the key in the lock of the door.
     We made ourselves comfortable, smoked, laughed, and wondered. Thus half an hour went by.
     When our host returned, there was a marked change in his manner. He was curt, abrupt, almost grim. With a disapproving look at the stubs of our cigarettes in the diminutive fire-place, he told us not to try any "monkey-business" and to come quietly along. As we filed out, he held the door.
     Again he took us a round-about way, but in a generally southward direction; and suddenly we emerged from a littered alley on Main Street, opposite the Town Hall. Having crossed the street and opened the door, he motioned us into an office so large that it seemed the whole building could hold nothing else.
     His motions were quick and alert now; his manner, that of a non-commissioned officer in front of the colonel.

     He ordered us about in a sharp voice. "Stand there; both of you; hats off !"
     The room, a sort of board-room, was almost filled by a long table covered with black oil-cloth and surrounded by bare, clumsy, wooden arm-chairs. We had been told to stand at the lower end of that table.
     At its upper end sat a massive elderly man with a huge face framed by abundant iron-grey hair, tousled and not very clean. Over his eyes, the arched brows were so bushy and large that, his head being lowered over some papers, I at first mistook them for a moustache. When he looked up, I saw that his face consisted of several overhanging folds of heavy, greyish flesh. His eyes were extraordinarily mobile as he took us in and then focused his glance on the chief, without a word.
     The chief, fingering his cap, stood at attention. "Your Honour," he began precipitously, "I've placed these men under arrest on a double charge, vagrancy and drunkenness. They have no regular domicile; I have had them under observation since Monday; at night they sleep somewhere along the river. This afternoon they crossed to the other side and came back dead-drunk. Whereupon I brought them here."
     There was a pause of several seconds. Stravinski and I were dumbfounded and looked it. At last His Honour flashed us a look and grumbled, "What have you got to say for yourselves?"
     I assumed the part of spokesman and, not disguising my indignation, replied that we had not been in town since Monday; that we were duly employed at the so-and-so farm, a fact easily verified; that we had tasted no liquor for weeks on end; that, if we had been dead-drunk an hour ago, we must surely still show signs of it which I

defied anyone to detect. My companion stood with a contemptuous smile on his lips.
     His Honour made an indeterminate noise. Then, as if on second thought, he hammered the button of a desk-bell with the palm of a pudgy hand.
     Two burly men entered from the rear, looking more like thugs than like policemen, but jumping to attention at sight of His Honour.
     The latter pointed a thick, inarticulate finger at them. "I want you to remain within call, do you hear? Dismissed."
     They saluted after a fashion and withdrew.
     His Honour turned back to us, saying curtly, "I fine you thirty dollars and costs. Total thirty-seven dollars and sixty-seven cents. Or a week in jail for each."
     Thirty-seven dollars and sixty-seven cents - to a penny what we had between us!
     My companion gave a contemptuous laugh. I smiled knowingly. Previous experience had taught me that any protest would be utterly useless. We threw our money on the table and filed out, free men once more.
     But, though I accepted the thing, I did not mean to let it go without giving it a modicum of publicity. In the street I spoke to a grocer who was arranging a display of vegetables in front of his store and asked him for the name of a good lawyer in town.
     He turned and, happening to glance along the street, said, "There he is now, talking to someone. Mr. McDonnell. The man standing with one foot on the curb."
     I waited till the lawyer was disengaged and then approached him. While I was telling him the story, he nodded sympathetically more than once; but when I had finished, he seemed to change his mind and spoke with a

sudden edge to his voice. "You'd better beat it," he said. "You can't tell such a cock-and-bull story about Judge O'Leary. Not in this town you can't." He veered on his heels and walked off, turning the nearest corner with accelerated step.
     What he thought of us when our ringing laughter followed him, I cannot tell, of course.
     When I say that such a thing was, by all of us hoboes, considered as being in the day's work, it will give a rough hint as to the foreground through which I was moving up to the fall of 1912; and, by readers of A Search for America, it will be observed that, in all essentials, the milieu was identical with the one through which I had been moving ten years earlier. There was fundamentally no change; in spite of the fact that I had already written such books as the one just mentioned, or Our Daily Bread, to speak only of such as have since been published, if in a considerably altered and abbreviated form. Manuscripts of these two books and of several others were circulating through the outer offices of many publishers.
     Now the fall of 1912 was to prove a landmark in my life; and to explain how that came about, I must at some length speak of the agricultural distress prevailing over the whole west of the American continent - a distress due to meteorological conditions. For the first time in my many years of life as an itinerant harvest-hand, the result was, for me, that I experienced a serious difficulty in earning the usual surplus for the ensuing winter. I had planned to take a trip to Europe that year; even before I had become fully aware of my predicament, however, I had realized that I could not do so, at the best, without drawing on my reserves; in striking contrast to previous years I had begun that season without cash in hand - a fact

due to an extraordinary outlay made, in 1911, on books. These books were, of course, never available in summer; at least with the exception of perhaps two or three slender volumes which I carried in my bundle; most of them were stored with some friendly farmer in Manitoba. At the very start, therefore, having found it impossible to secure work, I had had to draw fifty dollars to go on with - a loan I considered it which had to be repaid to my reserves.
     I don't know whether that fact is in itself sufficient to explain the mood in which the trip north was made and which, frankly, was one of despondency. The sort of life I was leading suddenly seemed repugnant.
     Throughout the late summer and the early fall there were heavy rains in the west, so heavy that there was no hay harvest worth speaking of; one cannot cut grass when there is water standing on the meadows. I might have waited in Kansas. I did wait for a short time; but at last I began to move north. In some way I had heard that Nebraska and South Dakota had had a dry summer and that, there, the grain harvest would be early, though the crop was light.
     From force of habit, I suppose, I travelled in my usual way, "bumming rides" on freight cars, sleeping at night in stooks or stacks or under culverts, buying bread and cheese for food. But for the first time I failed to look at this sort of thing as an adventure. Nor had I found a "pardner" for my companion.
     When I reached the drought district, I found that the harvest was finished. There was nothing to do but to go on.
     Following roughly the state line between Minnesota and the Dakotas, I came into more northerly latitudes; and it seemed for the moment as if my reasoning had been

correct; stooks of wheat, oats, and barley dotted the fields in close formation; so far, the crop was excellent. It seemed as if all I needed to do was to strike for some really large farm - in those bonanza days we considered no farm as large which did not comprise between thirty and fifty square miles - in order to find, shortly, a steady run of work. Those farms I knew; and I was known to the people who operated them.
     But I had hardly reached this favoured district when rain started here as well: the famous rains of the fall of 1912 which I later described, with their consequences, in Fruits of the Earth. It rained and it rained. Every town and village was crowded with its contingent of itinerant harvesters waiting for work, unable to find it. The fringes of every permanent settlement were occupied by the improvised, rain-bedraggled temporary settlements of the hoboes. Soon I found out - and this was a shock to me - that I could not continue my usual life when on the road. Painful twinges and sudden knife-thrusts in the muscles of my body warned me: I could not stand the wetness. In the past, I had often slept in the open in clothes that were soaked with rain; and in stooks or hay-stacks that were improperly cured. Even then I had, on occasion, suffered for it. I had caught colds which had disabled me for weeks at a time. With everything depending on it that, when work opened up, I should be fit, I felt I could not afford to do it again. I stopped long enough, at some town where I took up quarters at a boarding-house, to draw an additional fifty dollars from my reserves in Winnipeg which were thereby reduced to slightly over a hundred dollars; my dream of a winter in Paris or Rome received its death-blow. On the

other hand, what were reserves for if they were not to be used in an emergency?
     And then, having received the money, I again followed established habit and went on, sometimes even paying my fare for brief runs on local way-trains. Arriving in a new town, now in North Dakota, I promptly did what I had never done before; I shunned the hobo-camps and sought out some modest hostelry. Instead of laying steadily up treasure against the winter to come, I was rapidly consuming savings of happier times.
     It worried me. No doubt there were, among the hoboes crowding the outskirts of the towns, many who were less fortunate even than I; men who, from one day to the next, never could thoroughly dry their clothes, even though they lit huge fires and erected make-shift shelters out of tin cans or box lumber; men who ultimately had to subsist on garbage to keep alive. Slowly, but definitely, I succumbed to a sense of the utter insecurity of all life.
     Yet I was still so much an animal obeying an initial impulse, that I kept pushing on towards the Canadian border. I might have stopped anywhere; what did it matter? As for my books, Canada had shown itself no less indifferent than the United States. Yet, somehow, I had come to look upon Canada as "my" country. There was a subtle difference of atmosphere north and south of the border; one felt it the moment one crossed the line. Canada had never, so far, entirely severed the umbilical cord which bound it to England. To the European I still was, it somehow seemed less alien. Further, my own final interests had come to define themselves as bound up with pioneering conditions which, in Canada, existed in a purer culture, as it were, than in the country to its south.

     In Canada, I had spent the last weeks of autumn and the whole winter in districts where something like a peasant mentality still prevailed; and that mentality had attracted me. I had come across old men and women there, in my endless tramps, who were bending over dog-eared and frayed copies of the Bible and other cherished books, painstakingly spelling out, with muttering lip, and the finger following the line, words and sentences which expressed what they felt. They had not exclusively thought of the dollar. In so far, then, as the connotations of their reading had been those of all great literature -without being, that is, exclusively religious in the narrower sense - they had been very near to my own understanding; they had even seemed less remote to me than those Kirghiz herdsmen of the Siberian steppes who were still with me as the most vital experience of my earlier days; they had seemed less. . . feral, shall I say? Yet, in a sense, these west-Canadian pioneers and the Siberians were alike; and they were one with myself, though as incomprehensible to me as is the growth of the nail on my toe.
     For weeks, then, I went on drifting north, in a most peculiar mood: it often seemed to me as though I were on the verge of a revelation. All the time I was depressed by the dreary weather and the cheerless prospect as I looked out through streaming windows into miry streets.
     In ordinary years, there had been, even within the state, a steady progression of work from south to north: threshing at Wahpeton, Lisbon, Gakes, or Ellendale had been a week or ten days earlier than, let me say, at Devil's Lake, Grand Forks, Grafton, or Pembina. But this year, provided the weather ever became propitious, it would

start all over the state, and in Canada as well, at the same time, with wages likely to range extraordinarily high. So it did not matter where I might be.
     Besides, there were, in the northern reaches of these plains, more of those huge bonanza farms than in the south. There, threshing, once started, would continue for weeks on end. I was best known, there, too, from former years, to foremen and superintendents.
     Furthermore, I reflected, while small farmers - those operating less than ten square miles, let me say, were always holding off, engaging help only when it was immediately needed, and then often only by the day - the huge farms of fifty square miles or so needed, when threshing started, hundreds and, in cases like the present, thousands of men who must be instantly available. So, while paying no wages when the work was at a stand-still, they fed and lodged about half the required complement of hands, to have them ready when the weather cleared.
     Having thus analysed the situation, I bethought myself of what, in A Search for America, I had called the Mackenzie farm, just south of the centre of the state, from south to north, and in its eastern margin; a farm where, for many years, I had always found work and where, besides, I had never been asked to share the common bunk-house with hundreds of vermin-infested men. I had enjoyed the privilege of sleeping in the loft of what had once been the drive-house which now sheltered the owner's fleet of motor cars, though, of course, he still kept a few driving and saddle horses.
     I speeded up my progress; but, out of consideration for the smallness of my reserves, of which a by-no-means negligible part had now been expended, I "beat it" again, waiting at some siding where old experience had taught me

freight-trains were likely to stop and surreptitiously boarding an open box-car; flat-cars, the easiest to board, were, except on some sunny day, ruled out by the prevailmg weather.
     When I reached Fargo, I at once struck west, footing it by the railway track.
     I was in luck. I had covered no more than ten miles when, on the sodden road running parallel with the right-of -way, I saw a horse-drawn vehicle, a sort of victoria, hung up in the gumbo mire. I struck slantways down from the track to offer assistance; and, to my surprise, I ran into the owner of the very farm for which I was bound. Still more fortunately, he recognized me at once and called me by my given name. He was a man of some education, besides being a millionaire, though his father had been a "section-boss" working on the track, who, however, had had the foresight to invest his scanty savings in cheap land at less than a dollar an acre - land which had become worth a hundred dollars an acre. So, contrary to my custom, I had always used the King's English with him as I had spoken it in Europe.
     When I had helped him and his hackneys to somewhat more solid ground, heaving at the back of the vehicle, I casually mentioned where I was bound, and he offered me a ride. It was not out of consideration for me that he did so; for, before we reached the headquarters of the farm, we had, more than once, to get out again and to push.
     "By the way," he said after a while, "if I remember right, you are good at figures. Nelson, the superintendent, has just caught Bramley at some odd tricks, juggling cheques; and he's fired him. Do you think you could take his place?"

     "I certainly could," I replied.
     Bramley had been the time-keeper whose chief duty it was to look after the accounts of a thousand men and to make out their pay-cheques when they left. He had not, of course, received threshing wages; but he had worked on a monthly salary. In the present circumstances, a monthly salary, no matter how small, was something, whereas threshing wages were nowhere in sight, no matter how high they might run should a time for threshing come at last. Besides, the time-keeper, while taking his meals with the men in the cook-house, slept on a cot in a small room behind the office, with clean sheets and blankets which, very likely, were free of lice.
     Thus, that day, I entered upon a period of perhaps two months during which I enjoyed comparative comfort and almost undisturbed leisure; for, while I remained, threshing never started. All I had to do was to keep track of those perhaps one hundred men who looked after the perhaps one thousand horses, the three or four hundred cows, and perhaps five thousand sheep - plus, of course, the commissariat of the whole army of idlers. Every day some men left; every day others took their places; and these had to be entered in, or struck off, the lists. Hoboes never feel settled; a strange and tragic restlessness drives them on.
     For me, it was an extraordinary piece of good luck which should have made me happy. I had with me the half-finished manuscript of a new book; and under normal circumstances it would now have made rapid progress. Perhaps it was partly the idleness, or the anxiety of the last two months which had unfitted me for that sort of work. Even at the time I was pondering two books

which have not yet been written.* I had so far always postponed starting work on them; I wished to start on them now. But I suddenly felt that, in order to tackle them, I should have to be able to look forward, not to weeks or months, but to years of carefree leisure. I shall have to speak of those unwritten books again; for this whole record may be considered as an explanation why, at least to the time of writing, I have never had those years of leisure; so that I have come to look upon my life as essentially wasted, as essentially a failure.
     Up to 1912, I had, as a writer, been utterly unsuccessful; I had not even managed to secure the publication of a single volume. The only thing in which I had had a signal success was my work as a farm-hand. I had never minded that; I had even taken a certain amount of pride in the fact. From Kansas to Saskatchewan I was known as a most reliable harvest-hand. That was the sum and substance of my achievement.
     But, so far, I had always looked upon my life as lying ahead of me: my real life lay in the future.
     Yet, as I settled down in my new and temporary quarters - for even this job could not last beyond the freeze-up which was approaching and after which the superintendent himself would attend to the work I was doing - and as I tried to compose myself for making use of the ease and leisure which had so unexpectedly fallen to my share, I came, during one of the very first days, as if by chance, upon a tremendous realization.
     I was over forty years old.
     More than half of the ordinary span of life lay behind me.