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It was at this time that I was writing the half-dime novels, or killing Spaniards. I spent the summer in the home of an old sea captain, in the little town of Gananoque, Ontario, on the St. Lawrence River. The old captain was ill of tuberculosis, and his wife fed me doughnuts for breakfast and ice cream left over from the night before, and whenever I caught a big pike, we had cold baked fish for three days.
I did my writing late at night, when everything was quiet; and one night I was writing a vivid description of a fire, in which the hero was to rescue the heroine. I went into detail about the starting of the fire, portraying a mouse chewing on a box of matches. Just why a mouse should chew matches I do not know; I had heard of it somehow, and no guarantee went with my stories in those days. I described the tongues of flame starting in the box and spreading to some papers, and then licking their way up a stairway. I described the flames bursting from a window; then I laid down my pencil—and suddenly the silence of the night outside was broken by a yell of “Fire!”
For a moment I wasn’t sure whether I was still in my story or outside it. I looked out of the window and sure enough, there was a cottage in flames. I helped to rouse the people in it, and watched, with the amused superiority of a New Yorker, the efforts of village firemen to put out the blaze. I remember how they squirted the hose in at one window, and the jet came out at the opposite window. I will leave it for specialists in the occult to explain whether the fire was caused by the excessive vividness of my writing, or whether it was a case of clairvoyance, or possibly telepathy from the mind of a mouse. (Perhaps I ought to explain that the above is meant as humor, lest someone cite it as one more example of my credulity.)
Early that spring I had taken a fishing trip to the far north of Ontario, traveling on several railroads and then on a bicycle, and staying in a pioneer cabin near a tiny jewel of a lake. I did not get many fish, for the reason that I absent-mindedly left my tackle behind in a railroad station along the way, and it did not arrive until the day I departed; but I saw wild geese and a bear, which was a grand thrill; also I saw mosquitoes in clouds that darkened the sky and made me run through the swamps for my very life. On my way back to the railroad I came upon that field of deep clover in the twilight, and experienced the ecstasy I have described.
It was a good thing for a youth to see how our pioneer ancestors lived on this continent. The family with which I stayed lived on flour and bacon; they didn’t even have a cow. Once or twice a year, when they traveled to a store, they traded skins for salt and cartridges. Later that summer, on a canoe trip, I stayed with some old people who had a cow, and lived on skimmed milk and potatoes, trading butter at the store for tea and sugar. On another trip I met a French-Canadian settler, with a swarm of half-nourished babies, who did not even have a rifle to keep the bears out of his pigsty.