in my spare time, the plains with which I had for so long been familiar. On these rambles, made at temperatures hardly ever ranging above zero and often falling to forty below, I wore my old rain-coat and, under it, the one good lounge suit which I still possessed. It was not till I was established as principal of the Intermediate School at Winkler that I dared to have new clothes made.
     The district, south of the town of Morden, was flat as a table top. But most of the farmsteads were surrounded by windbreaks of tall cotton-woods, now bare of their brittle, triangular foliage and sticking out of the snow like huge, inverted, primitive brooms. The hamlet itself - if, consisting as it did of two stores and perhaps three or four houses, it could be called by so pretentious a name - was treeless. I had seen such places, indistinguishable in every feature, in the Russian province of Volhynia and on the steppes of Siberia. It lay in the western margin of the flood district which I have described in Fruits of the Earth.
     On school days my only leisure time fell between four and six o'clock in the afternoon; and I soon got into the habit of dawdling the interval away. When the weather was cold and settled, I either called on my only Anglo-Saxon neighbour, the station agent, a pleasant young man who used to bring his little boy to school on his shoulders; or I had a vigorous walk.
     Abe Spalding, central figure of Fruits of the Earth, a book still unwritten at the time, was very much with me; and I was beginning my studies on the behaviour of snow, later to be utilized in Over Prairie Trails. Nothing of this seemed to be work; it was rather a pleasant distraction in which I indulged. As far as my literary activity went, it seemed to me I was lying fallow.

     As for my week-ends, they, too, seemed to be wasted; and I was willing to waste them. I lived cradled, for the first time in my life on this continent, in a sense of security, with economic difficulties banished from consciousness. For the moment it was a sort of crepuscular contentment. I had escaped from the last two decades; and only now did I feel it as an escape. I did not care to think, much less to worry.
     When I had a class on Saturday, I remained at home, of course; and it happened often. Very early on Sunday morning, I invariably started out for a long tramp into the Pembina Mountains which were perhaps ten miles away. These hills were to be my final retreat. There was a central valley, densely wooded, and I picked the exact shelving terrace on which I meant to build my shack. Whenever I had it, so I said to myself, I should settle down to do my real work. Meanwhile...
     On one such ramble, I ran, in a clearing, across a schoolhouse very similar to the one in which I was teaching, except that it was surrounded by the woods instead of the plains. I happened to meet a farmer who was at work repairing a break in the fence enclosing the yard; and casually, almost absent-mindedly, just to say something, I asked who was the teacher there. I was told that it was a young girl. It being Sunday, I did not see her; nor was I interested. I was not inclined to run after young girls; and, of course, I could not know at the time that within two years this young girl of less than half my age was destined to be my wife.
     Sometimes, when I was not teaching on Saturday, I made use of one of the standing invitations I had to drop in at the house of one of the ratepayers, chiefly, I am afraid,

because, by so doing, I escaped the task of preparing my own meals.
     Early in spring the flood came down from the mountains; and for a fortnight or so I was a prisoner at the school. From the steps at the door, planks were laid across to a platform built for the purpose by the side of the gate to the yard. From all sides the fathers now drove the children to school, through water which everywhere covered the ground to a depth of from one to three feet; and the scholars alighted, from the wagon-boxes, on to the platform. I stood ready to lend them a hand as they tripped along the planks.
     Then, slowly, the flood ran out, spreading eastward, following the imperceptible slope to the Red River. Below the water, the ground remained frozen, of course.
     Next came mud, mud, mud; till, finally, roads and fields dried under the fierce winds of late April and early May.
     I became restless.
     As a teacher I had now been working for five or six months. During that time I had lived most frugally, many of my meals consisting simply of bread and butter, with coffee. But as a rule I had, on Friday night or Saturday morning, cooked a kettle of food to last me well through the coming week, a bean soup or something of the kind. When this became distasteful, I fell back on tinned goods and always on bread and butter, which was the most expensive item on my list.
     I could not secure my bread locally, or at least only rarely. The families of all the settlers, exclusively Mennonites, were large; and housewives could not be bothered baking for the teacher. "If the teacher needs anything," they said to their husbands who were the only people I saw during the week, apart from the chil-

dren, "take him a leg of beef or the shoulder of a pig." Consequently, I always had far too much meat. In the dead of winter I sometimes went west, after dark, to a point where the coyotes came down from the wooded hills, and threw them my surplus. I have always had a foible for coyotes. When the warm weather came, I asked the generous donors to discontinue their gifts; I could not keep them.
     But always I needed bread; and bread I had to ship in from Morden. I do not remember the exact rates; but I know that the cost of transportation exceeded the purchase price for which I had arranged to settle quarterly by about two hundred per cent.
     Another expensive item was water. There were only two wells within walking distance; and the fluid yielded by them was strongly alkaline, of abominable taste and of potent effect on the bowels. The half-dozen families that lived in the hamlet used it; perhaps they had adjusted their internal chemistry through years of habituation. On the farms, people used cisterns, huge, open waterholes with clay bottoms in which they caught the scanty rainfall and which, in spring, they filled with the slushy snow. As spring and summer came, these pools swarmed with the larvae of mosquitoes and other insects; frogs, toads, and newts bred in them by the thousand; cattle drank in their margins. The farmers, of course, boiled the water for their own use.
     During the winter I, too, had melted snow for my needs; but as the snow first became dirty and then disappeared, I had to ship in ice from Grand Forks in North Dakota, a distance of over a hundred miles. When the weather grew warm, I could often take some in a dipper, what was left after the rumbling trip.

     All of which added fearfully to the cost of living; and when I pondered my finances, I was dismayed. It is true, I still had some money in the bank at Winnipeg; and my salary had, voluntarily, been raised to seventy-five dollars a month, chiefly in recognition of the night work I was doing with my high-school class. But the long summer holidays were coming when there would be no earnings; and by this time I could see that my savings, out of salary, would not exceed a hundred dollars. If, in spite of what some people in the district called "my enormous salary", I could barely lay by enough to see me through the summer, what had become of my dreams of a future independence? However, let that go . . .
     Meanwhile, what of my literary activities? I did no actual writing; yet in its way this was to be the last period in years which was to prove fruitful. I did not even do any actual planning. "Planning" would not be the right word to use. A concrete example may serve to explain what was going on. I had, by the way, withdrawn all my manuscripts from circulation among the publishers; or rather I had discontinued sending them out again when they were returned. I felt that a new chapter had opened in my life. I should want to work all my older books over again - to refashion them, to bring them into accord with my widening outlook.
     A concrete example!
     Since, at a later stage, I shall have to speak of a final development in the genesis of Fruits of the Earth, it may be best to take that book for the present elucidation as well. In that way all the essential steps in the working out of at least one book will be recorded.
     Very nearly twenty years before the time with which we are dealing, in the fall immediately preceding my

writing A Search for America, I had been employed in hauling wheat from a so-called company farm to the railway, somewhere in the south-west of what had become the province of Saskatchewan. To make things clear, it is necessary to go back, for a moment, to that fall when I had been only twenty-two years old.
     The haul was of thirty miles, over a mere trail worn into the prairie sod, for roads were not yet being thought of. The way led through wild, rolling hills as yet unsettled. During such drives my mind has, throughout my life, always been extraordinarily active. Without ever putting pen to paper, I wrote, or rather dreamt, story after story. Some of them were actually written down later on, and they lie in the drawers of my desk today; I composed many volumes of verse. I have always had a remarkable memory for poetry; and some of the verse, never written down, still ticks through my mind as I sit at my desk trying to resuscitate the past.
     But back on my thirty-mile hauls the four horses needed no guiding; and as a rule there was absolutely nothing to distract my thought. I knew every contour of every hill, every shading of colour in fore-and background, so often grey in colour, though there were also the distant purples. One needs to have lived intimately with such a landscape in order to appreciate its shy, often desolate beauty; there is about it something of eternity and everlasting rest. The only living things were birds, amazingly numerous species of them, but individually few in number; and nearly all of them, with the exception of the meadowlark which is silent in the fall, had melancholy, screeching calls.
     Day after day, as I made these drives, coming or going, the sun shone as it is apt to do in that arid country.

     Then, one day, I had an adventure. Somewhere towards the end of my outward drive, to town, I saw a man; and what is more, he was ploughing straight over the crest of a hill to the west, coming, when I caught sight of him, towards my trail. The town which I was approaching lay on the railway, in the dry belt of the country; the general verdict was that the surrounding district was unfit for farming. The mere fact, therefore, that this man was ploughing as he came over the crest of the hill was sufficiently arresting and even startling. Besides, outlined as he was against a tilted and spoked sunset in the western sky, he looked like a giant. Never before had I seen, between farm and town, a human being in all my drives.
     In my surprise, I drew my horses in and stopped, waiting; and as, following his hand-plough down to the trail, he, too, stopped, there were a few minutes of desultory conversation. I learned that he had, that afternoon, arrived from Ontario; that, finding the land-titles office open in town, be had promptly filed on a homestead claim of a hundred and sixty acres; that he had unloaded his horses and chattels from the waiting freight-car; and that he had come out to look at, and perhaps to camp on, the land which was prospectively his. Having arrived an hour ago, after a two-thousand-mile train-ride, he was now ploughing his first field!
     "You aren't losing much time about it," I said.
     "Nothing else to do," he replied.
     And then I went on to town.
     The next day, and the next - in fact, while I remained in the employ of that company farm, reading and writing in my scant leisure hours, I went, when taking wheat to town or returning thence, with my grain-tank empty,

over a different trail. It seemed imperative that I should never see, never hear that man again.
     Already, while he was standing by the side of the trail, with me reclining on top of my load of a hundred bushels of wheat; and more especially when he had uttered the last few words, he had not seemed to me to be quite the sort of giant I had imagined when he had first topped the crest of the hill. Yet, somehow he had bodied forth for me the essence of the pioneering spirit which has settled the vast western plains and with which I had, through scores of concrete manifestations, become familiar during the preceding year.
     The important thing was this. His first appearance, on top of the hill, had tripped a trigger in my imagination; he had become one with many others whom I had known; and an explosion had followed in the nerve-centres of my brain because I had been ready for it. I had, for some time, been ready for the pains of birth. A, to me, momentous thing had happened: the figure of Abe Spalding, central to the book which, forty years later, was published under the title Fruits of the Earth, had been born in my mind, fully armed as it were, and focalizing in itself a hundred features which I had noted elsewhere. This man, a giant in body, if not in mind and spirit, had furnished the physical features for a vision which had, so far, been incomplete because it had been abstract.
     If I had seen the entirely casual occasion - that is all I can call him; he was not the prototype - of this figure again, if I had heard him speak as no doubt he had been used to speak, without relevance to my creation, that mental vision of mine would have been profoundly disturbed. A perfectly irrelevant actuality would have been superimposed upon my conception of a man who, as I

saw him, had perhaps never lived; for he lacked that infusion of myself which makes him what he has become. From a type and a symbol, he would have become an individual; he would have been drained of the truth that lived in him; he would have become a mere fact.
     This birth of a figure has remained typical for all my work.
     From that day on, then, a new character had been present to my consciousness. At first, there had been neither a story nor a life lived by that figure; and consciously I had never made any attempt to construct such a story or such a life.
     But as, in the fall of 1912, I had, after my interview with the Roman Catholic priest, come up through the northern prairies, skirting rain-drenched fields, threading miry roads which smacked their lips at every step I took, Abe Spalding, living in some province of my mind, had saved his wheat in the manner later recorded in Chapter X of the book as, eleven or twelve years later, it came to be written. Similarly, during that spring on the prairie, while I was teaching in the little rural school at Haskett, Abe Spalding saved his district which, by this time, had become localized some forty miles east of where I was, during the Great Flood described in Chapter VI.
     I lived my life, he his. As I grew older, he did, slowly maturing, slowly changing, slowly shaping his life as best he could. We were never one; though I felt with him, we remained two; I had suffered too intensely from his nature to identify myself with him at any time.
     And Abe Spalding was not the only figure that lived with me in this way; Len Sterner went through his struggles for an education, in the northern bush-land of Manitoba; Niels Lindstedt was taking up his homestead there

and fighting the devils in his blood; Felix Powell had started on his career in an eastern city; the Clarks, of The Master of the Mill, were accumulating their millions; John Elliot, the old man of the Sedgeby district in Saskatchewan, was quarrelling with all his children; and snow and sleet, fog and rain had become living things to me. Even when dealing with human beings, I have always been somewhat of a naturalist.
     What inner vitality I had was spread out over a province, yes, over an empire. I could switch my attention from one point of it to another, as though, from the summit of a mountain, I were looking down over hundreds of miles, piercing the distance with telescopic vision which enabled me to see the minutest details no matter how far away they might be. And wherever I looked, in this whole region of the Canadian West, there were figures moving about which were the creations of my brain, at the same time that they were the mirrorings of actual conditions. These figures did not all of them command my own sympathies; with some of them I lived in an everlasting conflict; but they shared my blood and my vital strength. I could not have fashioned them had I not seen their side; and, I believe, I have been just to them.
     That, then, while I taught day and night school, and while I roamed the country around Haskett, was the extent of my literary work. It was not I who was working; it was working; no matter what it might be . . .
     When, next fall, I opened the term as principal of the Intermediate School of Winkler, that happened which I had been afraid of when I first made up my mind to follow the advice of the Roman Catholic priest. I became absorbed in the work which yielded my living; not so much, perhaps, in the actual work of teaching; at least I

could have overcome that absorption; but in the sociological dilemma which was defining itself in the district. Consciously I was still determined to strike straight for my financial goal; and, had I known in advance what I was letting myself in for, I believe, I should have declined to take the school.
     The first trifling set-back to my expectations was purely economic. I found that I had to live at the hotel; which meant that, out of my precious eighty-five dollars a month, I had to pay twenty-five for board and lodging. It is true, that was less than my living had cost me at Haskett; but it seemed high nevertheless.
     Slowly, however, all economic considerations receded before a, to me, appalling situation which defined itself. I must speak of it here for two reasons: first, because it entirely defeated all my plans; and second, because it throws light on conditions prevailing in Manitoba at the time.
     Thus, two teachers of my staff, excellent teachers though both of them were, were working, as I had done, on "Permit" only; which means that they held no certificates; and in their cases they had never had enough schooling to obtain them. Both, therefore, would at some future time, when there might be no scarcity of candidates, be struck off the list of permit-holders; and that very likely at the precise moment when the experience they had gained would more than have compensated for their lack of academic "standing", making it most desirable that they should continue in the profession.
     Further, in the district surrounding the town, there were numbers of other teachers, most of them, strange to say, men, who held nothing but similar permits; the reason being perhaps that the schools they served were

so-called bilingual schools where German was lawfully taught by the side of English; for the whole, huge settlement was Mennonite; and bilingual teachers were hard to find. This situation unfolded itself at once because nearly all these men, realizing the precariousness of their tenure, were trying hard to cover, by themselves, the high-school work which they had never had the chance to take at school. They came to me with the difficulties which proved stumbling-blocks to them. All they expected, so far, was a little occasional help. Sometimes I was amazed at the elementary nature of their questions; these teachers were, in scholarship, barely ahead of their scholars. To top it all, some were married men and had children to support; one or two had even acquired or built houses for themselves, near their schools; for in the open country, there were no dwellings for rent. Among them was one who had so impressed his very exceptional native teaching ability upon the school-inspector that, on the latter's recommendation, his permit had been renewed for many years beyond the time authorized by law. Yet, for the lack of a little guidance and explanation, he was hopelessly floundering about and wasting his time though, by now, middle age had crept upon him. More than one of these men harboured a real ambition, yes, a high aspiration. It was a pitiful situation; and I soon saw that something radical had to be done to remedy it.
     I talked matters over with the inspector; and he, himself distressed, assumed as a matter of course that in me he had at last found a ready helper and ally; as, indeed, he had. I had been in town for less than a month when I announced my intention of holding a night-school for teachers. It was a plain duty, not to be shirked.

     By that time, the reason for the condition prevailing had also become clear to me. As I have said, this was an Intermediate School; that is, one in which a single department was devoted to high-school work; in that department, only the first two grades of high-school work were supposed to be taught; and, so far, this restriction had been observed. In other words, those who wished to continue their schooling, either in order to get matriculation standing, or a standing which, after eleven weeks of attendance at a short course of the Normal School, would entitle them to take positions as qualified elementary teachers, had necessarily to go elsewhere. At some other centre they had to board themselves for at least a year; and that made the question of this "free" education one of the financial ability of their parents. In some cases, the first two years in high school had been just sufficient to whet the appetite of the pupils for more; in others, they had their hearts set on a career which, without a higher standing, remained closed to them. All of which was the cause of much mental and emotional distress in the district.
     A brief exploration convinced me that I had to do with a very exceptional community. Even in town, such of the population as was not Jewish was Mennonite; and parents as well as pupils held high educational ideals. "An education" - in the static sense; you have it or don't have it; and when you have it, you cease to acquire further slices of it - was to them the most precious, the most sought-after thing on earth, far above wealth. It was the open-sesame, not only to so-and-so many careers, but to religious wisdom as well. And in this district all but the most elementary foundation was denied them.
     Again I talked matters over with the inspector who

locally represented the department of education; and again he entered enthusiastically into the views I unfolded to him.
     I approached the school-board with the plan of a complete reorganization of the school which, I assured them, would not impose further burdens on the ratepayers; they were already taxed to capacity by the existing facilities. On the other hand, the plan would impose considerable additional work on all the teachers. Under pressure from the inspector, the board gave me a free hand.
     I called the teachers together and submitted to them that there was a social injustice involved in the situation. They knew it, of course; but they had never thought about ways and means to remedy it; it had seemed that it could not be helped. I outlined my plan. So far, the high-school department, mine, had also comprised the entrance-to-high-school class. To make room at the top, for the third high-school year, which conferred matriculation standing, I proposed to move the last public-school grade down into the next lower room; thence one into the second room; and one from the second room into the first. The greatest difficulty arose in connection with the primary department, for the change proposed would bring its enrolment up to sixty-three pupils. Not one of the teachers, however, refused to shoulder the additional burden. The primary teacher, by the way - a pedagogical genius - was that young girl whose school I had seen in a clearing of the Pembina Mountains.
     The announcement of the change was, therefore, made public; and the scholars poured in. Within a week I had the third high-school class organized.
     Simultaneously I taught, in night-school, the second, third, and fourth high-school grades, the fourth con-

ferring senior matriculation and, for teachers, so-called First-Class, Grade B, standing - the same which, for the moment, I had been provisionally granted. Only the principalship of a full high-school, with at least two high-school teachers, demanded, at the time, a university degree. In day-school, the ages of my pupils ranged from twelve to thirty-four years; in night-school, from twenty-one to nearly forty.
     Before I proceed to the point which in all this vitally affected me and my further fortunes, I might add that the scheme proved an unqualified success. Not only did all my pupils pass their examinations next summer, with an unusual number taking high honours, but, when, after two years, I left the district for financial reasons, my own place was taken by one of my night-pupils who, in two years, had raised his standing from that of a permit-teacher threatened with being struck off the list to that of a First-Class, Grade-B teacher with a provisional certificate like my own.
     So much for the success; and now for the failure which was personal to me.
     When I persuaded the school-board to accept my plan, which they readily acknowledged to be in the interests of the district, they stipulated that it must not involve any additional burden for the ratepayers.
     But among the subjects taught in the third and fourth high-school grades were chemistry and physics. There was no laboratory; there was no equipment of any kind.
     To cut a long story short, I pressed a small teachers' office into service as a laboratory and provided the apparatus needed at my own expense, assuming the purchase price, by arrangement with the supply house, as a personal debt. Out of my monthly salary I retained hence-

forth just enough to pay for my board at the hotel and to leave me a modicum for pocket money; the balance went to the supply house, in payment, on account, for the equipment.
     One more point needs to be mentioned. Apart from the Mennonites, nearly all of whom were academically gifted, there were, among my scholars, a few Jews; and these, strangely, were manually inclined. There were also, throughout the eight public-school grades, numbers of boys who used their spare time, after four and on Saturdays, to get themselves into various kinds of mischief; some even, to prepare themselves for careers of crime. I decided that we must have a manual-training class which would take up the slack of misused leisure. For such a purpose the basement of the school was well adapted; and the second public-school teacher, who attended my night class, was gifted in wood-work. Once more I approached the school-board, with the same result as in the case of the laboratory. I installed the manual-training equipment at my own expense. I believe that, by doing so, I saved at least two or three boys from moral degeneracy.
     My finances, however, were now in a state of complete disarray; it took me two years to extricate myself from the debt which I assumed.
     Besides, my whole day was filled with work.
     It must not be assumed that, after having been out of school myself for twenty-five years, every detail of the work was at my finger-tips. The things which, academically, I excelled in, classics and moderns, counted for little or nothing. Thus I had to teach history - a smattering only, it is true - from the days of Babylon to the present day; and I was rusty on dates. Mathe-

matics had to be taught from advanced arithmetic to elementary trigonometry and analytical geometry - a task which involved my working every problem over beforehand. In physics and chemistry, the experimental work had to be carefully planned and often tried out; for I lacked laboratory technique; and much of the apparatus I had to invent and construct before I could use it. This latter task I performed on Saturday mornings, preparing for the coming week in advance. When you teach the fifty-odd subjects of four high-school grades, you cannot afford the luxury of repetition after false or unplanned moves. In the class, you have to switch over, every fifteen minutes, from one subject to another often unrelated to the first. The loss of even a few minutes is a serious matter.
     I, therefore, rose at six in the morning and was at work before I was dressed. Often, when planning a lesson, I consulted three or four manuals on method. Incidentally, this was the time when I assembled the books which I had bought during my two decades as a farm-hand; and my bed-sitting-room at the hotel soon resembled a small library. As for the pedagogical works which I needed, I tried to make some arrangement with the Winnipeg Public Library; but the librarian intimated to me that city libraries could not undertake to cater to needy rural teachers.
     From nine to four, of course, I was kept busy in day school. After four, I took a short time off for the indispensable exercise. From four-thirty to six-thirty I prepared the evening lessons which on Saturdays - for Saturday work soon proved to be necessary - I gave in the afternoon. At six-thirty I had supper in the dining-room of the hotel, mostly with a book propped against the

salt cellar; and from seven to ten and often eleven I taught night-school. Sunday was almost invariably spent in preparation; or else I drugged myself with reading.
     During the first year I received no remuneration for the night work; but during the second year my pupils proposed of their own accord to pay me a small fee. Besides, my conspicuous success, both in day and night-school, had by that time drawn the attention of the provincial Department of Education; and, early in the second year, my salary having incidentally been raised to a thousand dollars, I was unexpectedly honoured by the visit, during school hours, of the two superintendents of education, the one for the city of Winnipeg, the other for the province; the outcome was that I was given a night-school grant, out of provincial funds, of one hundred dollars. Characteristically when this grant was paid, it was made out to the district; and I had some difficulty in securing it for myself, in spite of the fact that the district had made no contribution towards operating this night-school apart from keeping the class-rooms needed at a temperature which often was no more than just bearable. In being re-engaged for the second year, at the higher figure, I had had formally to surrender my property rights in the laboratory and manual-training equipment, neither of them being yet fully paid for; the school-board took the goods but left the settlement of the debt to me. If I had not been intensely interested in solving the educational problems of the district, I should have left then and there; for the Department of Education intimated to me that I might accept any position in the province which I cared to apply for.
     I might have left then and there, I said; but there were other reasons for my remaining another year - reasons

which will shortly appear. One thing, strangely, seemed to urge departure; my position in the town was not a pleasant one. There were numbers of people to whom my salary again seemed "monstrous" - ungeheuer; and others asserted that I was doing what I was doing for purely selfish reasons. The point was that I was doing too much. If I had done a little only, I might have earned recognition and even gratitude - not that I asked for either; but these innocent people, one of my colleagues among them, could not understand my desire to make a complete job of it; and so there arose a certain amount of agitation against me. On mature deliberation, I did not allow myself to be deterred by that fact.
     Once more I have had, in this section, to revert to matters financial. My trouble was that I could not do things by halves. What, so I asked myself over and over again, did my money worries matter when compared with the educational distress of a whole district?
     Meanwhile I was, of course, mentally doing certain things for my literary work. Especially did the figure of little Len Sterner receive certain essential accretions; but for over four years I did no actual writing beyond the taking of occasional hurried notes which, later, were never consulted; I am not the note-book kind.
     Of financial pressure a good deal more will have to be said later on; for, if this was the first time that the imperative need for money entered into my scheme of things, it was not the last. One cannot live in civilization without externalizing one's aims.
     A few concrete details are needed to define my position. As for books, I had even as a farm-hand rarely spent less than fifty, and on occasion I had spent as much as a hundred dollars within a year. As for clothes, I had at

last an overcoat and a second suit, in addition to the most indispensable underwear; but, horrible dictu, I had no sort of night-wear; I simply could not afford it. My scanty allowance of pocket money went largely for tobacco and oranges. I smoked only in my hotel room, by an open window; or in the fields surrounding the town, out of its sight. My oranges I ate while teaching night-school, often sharing them with my pupils; but, while they consumed a modest one or two each, I ate half a dozen or more; my internal chemistry seemed to demand them; and when, towards the end of the month, it happened that my pocket money gave out, it was a severe deprivation to be without them.
     My life was not an easy one; and at times it seemed futile.
     I felt poignantly that circumstance had once more defeated me; circumstance and my own nature. Yet I did not regret the step I had taken. If I was going at an inexorable pace, I had a task which demanded to be done. It had simply fallen to my share to do it.