CAREFULLY, step for step, in that little room behind the office of the farm, I went over my life - pretty much as I have recorded it in the preceding pages, adding only one thing here barely touched on; and that was my relation to women. All over the west of the American continent there were some of them, just as there had been in Europe, who had "been good to me", in the sense in which that word is commonly used. They were women, not girls. But, while, in Europe, the women had invariably been the givers, here in America it was I who relieved the utter monotony of their lives, the hopeless vacuity. I have been told that, in my books, woman plays a subordinate part; that, in fact, woman is represented as the obstructress in the debate of life.
     Probably that is true; it is true because, for the most part, it is the fact in pioneer countries. There, woman is

the slave; just as she is the slave in the uncivilized steppes of Siberia. A pioneering world, like the nomadic world of the steppes, is a man's world. Man stands at the centre of things; man bears the brunt of the battle; woman is relegated to the tasks of a helper. It is an unfortunate arrangement of nature that the burden of slavery, for such it is in all but name, should be biologically aggravated. As it is, it cannot be helped; and any artistic presentation has to take it into account. But it is not to be imagined that my sympathies were with the men. Quite the contrary. My sympathies were always with the women. Yet I was no sentimentalist; in my books I gave the facts and let them speak for themselves; I paid my readers the compliment of crediting them with the ability to interpret them correctly. For the purposes of the pioneer conquest of nature certain qualities are needed, in man, which are incompatible with that tender devotion which alone can turn the relation of the sexes into a thing of beauty. Untamed land is a hard taskmaster; but, as a rule, the task is tackled only by men who are fit for it and, therefore, more or less unfit for that other task of sublimating physical needs into the iridescent play of desire and satisfaction which characterizes the sexual relation in more "advanced", more "sophisticated" civilizations. When, in the man, the gift for idealization and sublimation is not more or less absent under pioneer conditions, the fact usually leads to disaster of some kind; and I believe that in my books, grim as they may seem, I have made room for that tragedy, too. The recurrence of certain types; dominant types, rigid types, of a single-minded preoccupation with the specifically-pioneering task, is, in my books, certainly not due to any liking on my part for that type. I had had to suffer too much from its short-

comings to like it. But I had to be fair; I had to give it its due; without that type much of the world's work would of necessity remain undone. And it is itself a tragic type. Its whole endeavour is bent upon reshaping and doing away with the very condition in its environment which gives it its economic and historic justification; and when it has been done away with; when the environment is tamed, the task is done; and the pioneer has used up, in doing it, the span of life allotted to him. He suddenly realizes that he has been working for a purpose which has defeated its end. He cannot, now, settle down to enjoy the fruit of his labour.
     Fortunately for woman it mostly so happens that she is attracted by that type only if she herself is predestined for the life of a fighter. Mostly she is capable of defending herself against the invasion of her inner life by the raw necessities of an undisguised struggle for a bare existence. For such a struggle is the unalterable lot of all who go forth into the unknown and untried.
     As, in this review of my past on which I was engaged, I came to my own relations with women in the pioneer districts of the west, I realized that there had been such relations only with what would commonly and unsentimentally be called misfits; women who, temperamentally, emotionally, and, in some cases, intellectually, were fitted for the life in towns or cities rather than for the life on the open prairies. When I met with them, they almost invariably guessed at first sight that my conformity with the common run of harvest-hands was neither more nor less than a disguise. Any such relation was usually inaugurated by my casual picking up of some book or even some magazine, often many years old, which I found in the rarely-used parlours of such houses as I entered

for the purpose of applying for work to the husband. The presence of that book or magazine betrayed at a glance that someone in this family-group had his eyes bent on something other than the soil underfoot; and usually it was the woman.
     In such a house I might remain for an hour, for a day, a week, or a month; but the inevitable outcome of my stay was that, when I left, I was enriched by a regret and disquieted by the knowledge that, for the woman concerned, a process of adaptation, of absorption in the environment into which fate had placed her, was broken -whether to her ultimate advantage or her disadvantage, who could tell? It was almost a foregone conclusion that, for the moment, her difficulties were multiplied.
     I might add that my scruples on this point made me prefer the "company farm" to the farm operated by its owner with his family; there were no emotional entanglements. They were also the reason why, in that fall of 1912, I resolved to make a supreme effort to change my whole mode of life; why I contemplated, in doing so, the life of a hermit rather than that of a townsman.
     Meanwhile there was, in this casting-up of accounts, one thing which stood on the asset side, against much which I must necessarily put down in the list of liabilities. The one asset consisted in this: that I could truthfully call my knowledge of the pioneering section of the west of the North-American continent unique. At a glance I could survey the prairie country from Kansas to Saskatchewan or Alberta; and at a thought I could evaluate, in my own way, of course, the implications of pioneer life. I, the cosmopolitan, had fitted myself to be the spokesman of a race - not necessarily a race in the ethnographic sense; in fact, not at all in that sense; rather in the sense

of a stratum of society which cross-sectioned all races, consisting of those who, in no matter what climate, at no matter what time, feel the impulse of starting anew, from the ground up, to fashion a new world which might serve as the breeding-place of a civilization to come. These people, the pioneers, reaffirmed me in my conception of what often takes the form of a tragic experience; the age-old conflict between human desire and the stubborn resistance of nature. Order must arise out of chaos; the wilderness must be tamed. No matter where I looked, then as today, I failed to see that the task of recording that struggle of man with nature had ever adequately been done, not even by Hamsun who, for the sake of a pleasant ending, gave, to Isaak, Geissler. To record that struggle seemed to be my task. Perhaps, very likely even, I was foredoomed to failure in my endeavour; in fact, I seemed to see even then that I was bound to fail; but the attempt had to be made.
     The trouble was that I was no more than human. My roots were in my past; and that past was not one of pioneerdom. In Siberia I had, after all, looked at things from the outside only. The Kirghiz herdsmen had been a spectacle to me - a moving spectacle, it is true; one that had made my every faculty of response vibrate in a diapason of sympathetic resonance. But I had stood outside. So had I stood outside during my first years on American soil; had I not, I could not then have lived. I clung to Europe as my true country. But gradually, so it seemed, I was being sucked under; the desire to conform is as fundamental to human nature as the desire to differ.
     In the last analysis it all came down to an economic problem. In order to see things once more from the outside, I must regain my distance; in order to regain my

distance, I must, economically and otherwise, get away from my present milieu. How could I? If I was ever to do so, I must do so now; I was over forty years old.
     It was an economic question. It was a question of the daily bread.
     I examined the whole economic basis of my life, with surprising results. I was desperately poor; and, worse, the present fall showed me that my life lacked even the element of security: a series of rains could undermine it. Even a salaried man, liable to dismissal, builds on some sort of security. I knew none. What about my poverty?
     According to Shaw, poverty is the original sin; according to Thoreau, - a man, as a man, of a vastly more imposing stature - it is the supreme virtue. In my own evaluation, it was relative and irrelevant. It was my personal misfortune that I had been born and raised with expensive tastes. I could suppress them, it was true; but only so long as I focused my eyes on other things. I came to the conclusion that, even with my eyes focused on comprehension and achievement, there was one thing which I could not permanently bear; and that was ugliness. But where look for beauty in that dingy little back-room of the office, in which I lived?
     I have heard it said that, to men like myself - men, that is, who see their life-work, not in living, but in mirroring and interpreting life, the life of others - poverty is essential. Millionaires have told me so. It is nonsense. In any case, what is poverty? On no matter what economic level one may have to live, poverty is insecurity. Poverty, therefore, is the lot of all who strive to improve their economic status. If you have no matter what income, be it ever so small, and have no desire to increase it, you are not poor.

     I have not for nothing opened the discussion of this section with a mention of women. Once more I was to make a grievous mistake in the new ordering of my life which was the outcome of my present meditations, plus a chance encounter. In spite of my determination to keep women out of my new scheme of life, I was at bottom certain that, sooner or later, they would re-enter it. I was not, by the chemistry of my mind, a constitutional celibate; I was not even exempt from the desire for a home, for a family, for a lasting appeasement of urges which, at times, ravaged my mind as well as my body.
     But I kept that thought forcibly out of all my calculations. What I thought I wanted, yes, what I did want, was security in a bearable environment; that is, in one which, no matter how unpretentious, would not offend my aesthetic sensibilities. Naturally, I asked myself whether, at any time in the past, such a security might have been within my reach. For security was the indispensable prerequisite for that other thing, the leisure which I required for tackling my task.
     Mine was no random work. But I had no illusions with regard to such attempts as I had so far made to do it. Very likely the publishers, hundreds of them, to whom I had offered books were quite right in declining to publish them; very likely these books were mere preliminaries, mere class-room exercises, so to speak, done in preparation for my final work. But, unless I was willing, when I came to die, to accept the fact that I had wasted what gifts I had received - the viaticum as I have called it; plus all that had been added to it by my life and by what experience had brought me - I must continue on my path; I must go on striving after my aim.
     What was that aim? Briefly, it was to set down, in one

comprehensive picture, all that had crystallized out, in my mind, in reaction to all I had seen, heard, and felt. That picture I must at least aim at fashioning in a form which would stand forever.
     Such an issue, of course, lies on the knees of the gods. A mere human being can do no more than his best. But, as far as the aim is concerned, it is my aim today when, in all likelihood, I have entered upon the declining decade of my life. I would rather live and work with that aim in view than lower the mark and reach a lesser goal.
     One may ask - I have asked - why strive after the unattainable?
     The answer is simply because we are we. Human beings are so constituted, like children, that they reach for the stars; and does not that fact argue something about the stars as well as the atoms? I do not, never did, believe in a personal god, in some absentee landlord who, by some fiat, orders my life. But I believe in the unity of all life; in the unity of the urge which compels the atoms of quartz to array themselves in the form of a crystal; with the urge which holds the stars in their courses or which made me sit down to write this last will and testament of my life. I had looked into history; and again and again I had seen that desire for perfection which had made Homer compose his lines, which had made Michelangelo fashion his Moses, which had made Goethe scan the finest lyrics in the modern world. Wherever I had met that desire, that urge to create order out of chaos, I had responded to it. They all had striven after the unattainable; only the striving after the unattainable was in any sense worth while and worthy of human endeavour. That desire, that urge was mine. That desire, that urge I saw in everything, even in the crystal

or the snow-flake; and I also saw its frustration; a frustration often due to the very superabundance of the impulses making for some kind of order, exactly because there was no plan which teleologically directed that striving.
     It was my duty, then, somehow to order my own life.

***

     Had I done anything, so far, to bring about that order? For the staggering fact was that half my life had been lived; and I had done nothing.
     As that realization came home to me, in that bare little room, I was profoundly unhappy. I had been young; all life had lain ahead; I had been getting ready -for what? I was no longer young; and where did I stand? Nowhere. I was a failure, utter and absolute.
     I saw no way out. As for my books, past and future, I became sceptical; not with regard to my ability ultimately to do what was worth doing; but with regard to their ever finding enough of a public to secure my outer life, to give me an economic status which I myself could accept.
     I reviewed the past two decades critically, in a purely economic sense; and at last I asked the question what would be the minimum requisite for a life of security which would give me the leisure needed.
     The answer was that, if I had a definite, secure income of twenty-five dollars a month, I could laugh at the world; for I had no economic ambitions. With me it was simply a question of aesthetics. I am no aesthete. But I cannot bear the sight of ugliness day after day. The conclusion I arrived at, strangely, was that a satisfactory existence was possible for me on any economic level provided that level was definitely established.

     How could I secure a definite and certain income of twenty-five dollars a month? There was only one way I could find; I must have a capital of five thousand dollars invested at six per cent; or one of six thousand at five per cent.
     Could I secure it? If so, by doing what? Could I secure it by going on doing what I had been doing? If so, how long would it take?
     The question involved an examination into the economic basis of my existence during the last twenty years. I found that my income, at least for the last fifteen or seventeen years, had averaged around three hundred dollars a year plus my living for the five summer months. Most of that cash income had been spent on my trips to Europe. Suppose I had eliminated that expense? Suppose further that I had never spent any money on my life during the winters. On an average I had had winter work, feeding stock, once in three years. How much could I lay by if, from now on, I eliminated trips to Europe and found work every winter? The answer was that, with the most rigorous economy, I could lay by two hundred and fifty dollars.
     Suppose, then, I invested my annual savings instead of merely depositing them in a bank. Suppose I could get five per cent while saving. Suppose, suppose, suppose...
     The result of all my calculations was that it would take thirteen years to lay by five thousand dollars.
     Thirteen years!
     Yet the striking thing about it all was that, had I been a saver, instead of being, like my father, if on a different scale and in a different way, a spender, I might before this have reached the goal I now proposed for myself. From that I

drew an encouraging thought, instead of a discouraging one; which was a mistake; for I failed to reckon with my own nature which, for better or worse, was that of a spender.
     There was one other point. If I restricted my expenditure to the absolutely indispensable things, I could perhaps raise my savings to two hundred and seventy-five dollars a year, thereby cutting the time needed by another year . . .
     Yet, even twelve years! In twelve years I should be fifty-two; and, being only forty, that seemed like a ripe old age to me. Would not my usefulness on the farm reach its limit before that time? Even men of forty were often left out when an employment agent picked those whom he wanted from a waiting crowd. However, for the moment this did not need to worry me; if in my later teens I had made the impression of being older than I was, I now looked much younger. Physically, I was changing very little; I was of the enduring type. No doubt, when I was fifty, I should be able to pass myself off as thirty-five or six. Nobody, at the time, would have taken me for older than twenty-eight or thirty.
     My attempt to reduce my annual cash expenditure to less than fifty dollars brought me up against another hopeful fact. A not inconsiderable fraction, if not the larger part, of such expenditure as I had, so far, considered indispensable consisted of postage paid for my manuscripts; and another, if smaller, fraction, was spent on writing material, such as paper and pencils.
     I had a complete list of the publishers in the United States, Canada, England, and continental Europe to whom I had offered one book or another, ever since I had first finished the initial, long version of A Search for

America. This book had, in the list of my manuscript works, been joined by ten or twelve others, all copied out in six copies of fine, copper-plate handwriting. Let me say that there were twelve volumes in all; then there were seventy-two manuscripts; and each of them had been sent out and received back at least three times, more likely five times a year. So that I had made, on an average, three hundred and sixty shipments a year, or one a day. I had, of course, long since given up insuring my parcels; I did not even register them any longer; I sent them by mail, as second-class matter. Some of them had been lost that way, but even at that the mere shipping had cost me an average of close to a hundred dollars a year. In sixteen years that had amounted to over fifteen hundred dollars. And on writing materials I had spent at least another hundred, though I had no record.
     If I had saved all that money and deposited it in some bank, at a bare two or three per cent, there would have been easily two thousand dollars. I had never received the slightest encouragement, to say nothing of an offer. That money had been a sheer waste. If I had saved it and, in addition, laid by ten dollars a month, the resultant capital would have amounted to what, by this time, seemed to me wealth incarnate.
     If only I had not suffered from that curse of the desire to write!
     I burned the incomplete manuscript I had in my bundle. What was to come of it all?
     I felt suspended in an utter void. What in the world was I to do with myself?
     I had burned my manuscript. But others would come back to me. What was I to do with them? Like bundles of out-dated newspapers they were, no doubt, following

me about at that very moment. I almost dreaded their arrival. I felt tempted to keep moving, so that they could not reach me; then the express office would have the responsibility of keeping them for me.
     But the moment I had burned that manuscript, I felt that the whole basis of my existence had collapsed under my feet. Manuscripts ground out under no matter what conditions formed the only justification for the sort of life I was leading. Without that justification everything seemed simply disgusting, as it seemed to so many others. Was I, to the end of my days, or at least of my working days, to go on being a hobo or a tramp, a member of what, by-and-large, is the lowest social, economic, intellectual order? Foregoing all those comforts which any kind of a settled existence offered to every clerk, every labourer? Could I fall so low as to sell carpet-tacks over the counter?
     I surrendered, for a few days, to a desperate longing for some sort of home, some place of my own, even for that which was farthest out of my reach - mere human contacts.
     I felt an exile. I was an exile. I did not live among people of my own kind; among people who, metaphorically, spoke my language; among people who respected my fierce sensibilities; among people who shared a single one of my interests. The only sort of what, with a stretch of the imagination, could be called literary art with which I ever came into living contact, consisted of the "tall" tales of the west; and they stood in flagrant contradiction to the squalid reality I saw all about.
     I wanted to be in touch with the finest and highest thought of the age. Instead, I was being rubbed the wrong way, day in, day out, by those who, for the mo-

ment, were my social equals - whom others would have called the scum of the earth; the people who, like myself, were crowded over the edge and into the abyss. An economic absurdity had banished me to a new Siberia. I wanted to take decent clothes for granted; I wanted to have a daily bath in something larger than a saucepan; I wanted economic continuity and security, so that I should never again have to look upon a steadily-decreasing store of savings as my only defence against actual want in a hostile winter climate.
     Above all, I wanted to write. I had things to say. I have since said a few of them.
     In Europe, I knew at last, I could no longer live for any length of time. I did not feel an exile from any definite country. I was no longer a "good European"; let Europe take care of her own troubles; I was rapidly becoming extra-European, partly perhaps on account of my failure to take a sixth trip to Europe. Europe, to me, had suddenly ceased to exist.
     But I felt an exile from my youth and its promise; from a life in which the necessities and perhaps even a few of the luxuries of civilized life were taken, could be taken, for granted. Yet there were even then memories, geographical memories; of Italian coves in the Gulf of Amalfi; of woodlands in Sweden; of cared-for countrysides in France and England; of the dune country of the Pas de Calais, on the English Channel; of the cliff country of Brittany; of sea-ports like Marseille, Capetown, even Vladivostok. Visions arose of the Thuringian Forest in Germany, of the Erz and Riesengebirge on the Bohemian border, of the Dolomites in the Austrian Alps, of the Dalmatian coast on the Adriatic. I wondered whether all that was still in existence. But beauty in landscape

was not absent from America, either; and though perhaps I might never succeed, should I ever again hear the third, slow movement of the Ninth Symphony, in substituting American landscape for the Austrian one in poignant visualizations, yet Tchekhov and Tolstoi could be interpreted by America as well as by Russia.
     A new nostalgia arose; for a place of refuge where I might live if I ever realized that minimum income. A vision arose quite spontaneously, the moment the idea had taken shape. I would build a shack on some hillside overlooking a stream and the woods. I seemed to see the shack and the whole of its setting. I wondered where it might be. It was days before I recognized the elements out of which that vision was compounded; and with a sort of surprise I came to the conclusion that I was within a few hundred miles of the very place; it was in the Pembina Mountains, on the Canadian side, not very far from the little town of Manitou in Manitoba.
     That was encouraging. There was a spot in America which had taken hold of me and of which I thought, not as a holiday resort, but as the scene of a life of work.
     If only...
     I wondered whether there might not be a way to shorten that interval of from twelve to thirteen years during which I must unremittingly slave in order to realize a dream. I should have taken warning at once. In life, there is never a short-cut. If you have mapped out a path for yourself, follow that path, no matter how long it may be; let nothing distract you. If a short-cut seems to offer, it is bound to lead through new valleys and over new hills where you want to linger. You will lose sight of your goal. In life, as often as not, a shortcut is a side-track on which you will go astray.

     Yet, when, out of the blue, such a short-cut offered, I took it.
     It so happened that, at the beginning of the season, I had ordered, from a New York bookseller, a copy of Baudelaire's Fleurs du Mal. I had paid for it in advance and given instructions to send it to me, at Fargo, on October 15. Since my arrival on the Mackenzie farm it had rained, rained, rained. I had heard Mr. Nelson, the superintendent, say, "I don't suppose we'll thresh now till the stooks freeze dry." I was not writing. I was doing nothing. I wanted that book. I might have written to the postmaster and asked him to forward it to Casselton whence the mail for the farm was fetched daily. But somehow I had postponed doing so. One day, when Mr. Mackenzie dropped in at the office, I asked him, instead, for a day off. "Sure," he said, "take any amount of time you want; you're entitled to it. But, what I was going to say: better make out a cheque for Pat Parker. He's leaving." Pat Parker was one of the engineers who operated a "Twin-City" tractor. There was no work for him; and, like myself, he drew a salary. Now I knew that Pat Parker had come in a Ford car; no doubt he was going to return to St. Paul whence he hailed in that car. So, when I asked him about the route he was going to take, his reply was that he was going via Fargo; sure, he would give me the ride; glad to; for even with chains on he would have to push the bus a good many times.
     We were lucky, for there was a lull in the rain. In places, it was true, our progress could hardly be called driving; it was navigation, rather; but we made Fargo, twenty miles away, in three hours. For the return trip, I should walk, of course, using the cindered track.
     As soon as I was alone, I went to the post office and

found the book waiting for me. I had the day off; I did not intend to start on my way back to the farm till late in the afternoon. What do meanwhile? I bought a few sandwiches and repaired to the station, to sit there in the waiting-room and to read.
     I had been there for perhaps an hour when a Roman Catholic priest entered and sat down by my side. Meanwhile I was slowly munching my sandwiches and intoxicating myself with the verse which I had not read for two decades.
     Suddenly the priest by my side spoke to me in French. My book had caught his eye; and since he did not know it, he based his desire to speak to me on nothing but the fact that it was French. Had he been familiar with its contents, he might, instead, have moved away.
     As often happens in such chance acquaintances, we were soon speaking of all sorts of things. He told me that he came from St. Boniface, near Winnipeg, and was on the way to St. Paul where he was going to stay with friends. I, on my part, gave him a few data with regard to myself; and, still laughing at something I had said, he suddenly turned serious and began to question me.
     Within half an hour we were on a strange footing of intimacy.
     He was an immigrant himself; he was French, not, as I had supposed, French-Canadian. He came from the neighbourhood of Etaples which I knew well and where I could still name people whom he knew.
     Naturally this led to my telling him of the circumstances under which I had known France, not on my recent trips, but in my earlier days. He became very pensive; and he asked another question.
     "Why don't you teach?"

     I hardly knew what to say. "I'd need certificates," I said at last.
     "They can be secured."
     I told him of the trifling amount of teaching I had done. "I don't mean that sort of thing," he said. "I mean teaching in a university; at a college; at the very least in a high school."
     Such a thing, of course, had never occurred to me.
     He went on telling me of the Deputy Minister of Education in the province of Manitoba whom he knew, advising me to call on him and to tell him what I had just revealed of my academic antecedents. He mentioned the salaries which he thought high-school teachers received.
     Soon after, the train for which he was waiting pulled into the station; and we were forced to part. As a last thing he gave me his name and address, in a monastery at St. Boniface, and asked me to let him know how I fared if I followed his advice. Strange to say, I never saw him again, for before long I read in a newspaper that he had been killed in a railway accident.
     Naturally, when I was back at the farm, I plunged once more into calculations. For almost anyone in my position, the priest's suggestion would have held the solution for all his troubles. The salary he had mentioned as, "if he remembered right", being received by high-school teachers was around sixteen hundred dollars. Could it solve my troubles?
     Could I, for instance, at that salary, lay by a thousand dollars a year? I did not know. If I could, it would clearly be to my advantage to do so, even if I had to give up any attempt at writing. It was not so much the economic aspect that troubled me. During the five years needed, at that figure, to lay by five thousand dollars,

I should very likely be boarding; which meant living in any environment which might offer. In a way, it would prolong the very thing I objected to in my present status, but . . . for only five years.
     There was another point to be considered. In the past twenty years I had spent what I had earned for a purpose. That purpose was to defend myself against my environment. I could have saved my earnings only at the cost of adapting myself to, of submerging myself in, that environment to which it had been essential to me to remain in an at least artistic opposition. In the life of any artist, this opposition is the decisive factor; the artist cannot proceed in predetermined grooves. Without such an opposition, he cannot keep the distance from his experience which is necessary for an objective view; without it, he cannot laugh at his own experience; and for any sort of artistic formulation that laughter, a divine laughter - such as speaks out of Beethoven's Eighth Symphony, is indispensable. In other words, he cannot preserve his bird's-eye view. If I took up this new career which seemed to offer, would I not have to fear that it would engulf me; that I should become absorbed; that my whole inner life would be side-tracked?
     Any adaptation to the environment in which I had now spent two decades would have involved a submission to what, to most eyes, and possibly to my own, would have appeared as adversity. From such a submission, in which I should of necessity have become "the man who has seen better days" I should have suffered intensely; I have always abhorred the type. When, in northern Siberia, I had submitted to privation and hardship, I had been seeing the best days I had ever had. One does such a thing and one leaves it behind: that had always

been my attitude to the sort of life I had led in the American west. If I had come through without a sense of profound humiliation, I owed the fact to that very opposition which took life experimentally, as it were. Insolence on the part of my employers and others, even insult, I had more often encouraged than resented, taking my revenge by nothing more than a careful observation and study of their expression - not in a photographic or phonographic, but in a psychologic sense. Anything that came to my mill was grist.
     Now I said to myself that the task of teaching might hold a very much greater danger of "getting under my skin" than what I had been doing. Against that I argued that the average teacher is very much an average man; that, after all, my antecedents would protect me. Even among university men, even in Europe, it was not easy to find men who had seen something of every continent on the globe, who had gone through such fundamental upheavals as I had gone through in Siberia; above all, who had lived through what I had lived through during the last twenty years and come out alive; and not only alive, but strengthened instead of weakened. No, I decided, if anyone could afford to enter "that common but most perfidious refuge of men of letters . . . the profession of teaching" - to borrow a phrase from Matthew Arnold, without danger to his soul, it was surely I. And with that decision the matter was settled.
     I at once began to plan my cottage: single-roomed if need be; in fact, preferably single-roomed; to be built on the hill-slopes of the Pembina Mountains, above the ravine of the turbulent Pembina River.
     I could not have existed, in the long run, without the sight of living water. There, five or six years hence, I

should live as a hermit and a bachelor, writing my books. For, in spite of my recent despondency, I felt more than ever convinced that I had it in me to say what I wanted to say, and in a manner which would stand with the best a tortured and unbalanced age could produce. Whether I found my public within my lifetime or not, did not matter. The practical aim did not matter. Happily, indeed, this renewed dream of literary production, literary creation, was at last entirely dissociated from economic necessities; even unwritten books did not need any longer to be expected to sell.
     I did not see it at the time; but, as a matter of fact, I was falling back upon the classic device which had been in my mind in 1892 when I became a waiter, of first "making my pile" and then doing my work. I had merely reduced the capital needed from forty to five thousand dollars, thereby reducing the time that would be needed for its accumulation. For the moment I felt entirely happy; what a boon that one can never see the future ahead . . .
     Having arrived at this point, I wrote to the Manitoba farmer with whom I had left my suitcase, asking him to forward it to Winnipeg, by express, charges collect; and my earnings, plus the small balance of my savings which I had drawn - some seventy-five dollars in all - I deposited in the bank of the nearby town of Casselton, with instructions to have them transferred to the bank at Winnipeg where I kept my reserves.
     Next, I amicably resigned my job; and, with less than five dollars in the pockets of my jeans, I started out on the last three hundred-mile tramp of my life as far as it has been lived to date.
     It was with a feeling of immense relief that I turned my

back on manual labour; for what the priest had said left no doubt in my mind with regard to my coming success. I was going to be a state-sanctioned pedagogue - a thing which filled me with vast amusement. I, who had looked below, who had, for so long, lived below the surface was to enter a profession which concerns itself with nothing but what lies on that surface. I had no illusions; pedagogy, state-sanctioned, had never yet, in the last two thousand years, concerned itself with education; what it had concerned itself with would, more properly, be called inducation; for it had tried to induce young unformed, unspoiled minds to accept all the errors of the past, including those of method, instead of projecting them into a future in which the part of error might be reduced. I, who had seen, and fought with, error, was now to inculcate it. While it rained and rained, I laughed and laughed. That matter of English spelling, for instance! Or that of the British weights and measures! To mention only trifles. Slavery, slavery to the sluggishness of tradition.
     I did not see, of course, that my whole attitude to any state-sanctioned system of "education" bore in it the germ of revolt which would of necessity end my career in the profession. Had I seen it, it would not have mattered. It was a question of only five or six years.
     I might have to pass examinations; it never occurred to me to write for the documents which would have testified to my academic standing in Europe. I might have to attend a teachers' college. I should find means to attend it, though that might delay the achievement of my goal, but, surely, not for more than a year at most. Once the idea had been planted in me, I felt certain that I could carry it out. So far, the priest had said, my problem consisted in convincing "the authorities" that I possessed

certain qualifications for the work I proposed to do. If I had not attempted this thing long ago, the reason was simply that it had never occurred to me. Had it occurred to me, I should probably have considered "the authorities" as quite unapproachable. In that sort of thing, I should have thought, one must, within the country, have gone through the proper channels.
     Another argument in favour of my venture occurred to me ex-post-facto: In America the teaching week had only five days; the teaching year, at the worst, ten months. I was floated along on a tide of optimism.
     The personal belongings which I carried consisted largely in what I wore; underwear, overalls, sweater, and an old, worn-out raincoat, a remnant of the wardrobe I had brought from Europe. A bundle contained, besides, a heavy blanket, a change of linen, towel, soap, and my now twenty-six-year-old razor with its accessories. This bundle, covered with water-proofed canvas, I carried on my back.
     In other words, after twenty years of toil in America, I was, for the moment, back at the exact point where I had been when I had spurned American "business" which, at the time, I had considered the most iniquitous thing on this globe.*
     In starting out, I had, of course, hoped that on my way north - "home" as I called it - I should pick up an occasional day's work here and there; but I was disappointed.
     It was the wettest fall I had ever lived through in the middle west, calculated to shake one's belief in its semiaridity. Everywhere the fields were swamps; the stooks
*See A Search for America, 4th edition, Ryerson Press, pp. 107-222.