"I don't know, but I think they will take the form of a chronicle, a kind of diary, wherein each chapter will be called a camp. Camp One, Camp Two, and the like."
"That sounds original and promising," he said, and with his encouragement I set to work.
Israel Zangwill was often in the city and we met frequently during January and February. I recall taking him to see Howells whom he greatly admired but had never met. They made a singularly interesting contrast of East and West. Howells was serious, almost sad for some reason, unassuming, self-unconscious and yet masterly in every word. Zangwill on the contrary overflowed with humor, emitting a shower of epigrams concerning America and the things he liked and disliked, and soon had Howells smiling with pleased interest.
As we were leaving the house Zangwill remarked in a musing tone, "What fine humility, or rather modesty. I can't imagine any other man of Howells' eminence taking that tone."
Kipling had just returned to America, and I went at once to call upon him. I had not seen him since the dinner which he gave to Riley and me in the early Nineties, and I was in doubt as to his attitude toward the States. I found him in a very happy mood, surrounded by callers. In the years of his absence the American public had learned to place a very high value on his work and thousands of his readers were eager to do him honor.
"They come in a perfect stream," he said, and there was a note of surprise as well as of pleasure in his voice.
He inquired of Riley and Howells and other of our mutual friends, making it plain that he held us all in his affections. I mention his youth, his happiness, his joy with special emphasis for he was stricken with pneumonia a few days later and came so near death that only the most skillful nursing was able to bring him back to health. For two nights his life was despaired of, and when he recovered consciousness it was only to learn that one of his children had died while he himself was at lowest ebb. It was a most tragic reversal of fortune but it had this compensation, it called forth such a flood of sympathy on the part of his public that the daily press carried hourly bulletins of his conditions. It was as if a great ruler were in danger.
On Saturday the eleventh of February, I attended a meeting (the first meeting) of the National Institute of Arts and Letters. Charles Dudley Warner presided, but Howells was the chief figure. Owen Wister, Robert Underwood Johnson, Augustus Thomas and Bronson Howard took an active part. Warner appointed Thomas and me as a committee to outline a Constitution and By-laws, and I set down in my diary this comment, "Only a few men were out and these few were chilled by a cold room but nevertheless, this meeting is likely to have far-reaching consequences."
In these months of my stay in New York I had a very busy and profitable time with Howells, Burroughs, Stedman, Matthews, Herne and their like as neighbors but after all, my home was in the West, and many times each day my mind went back to my mother waiting in the snow-covered little village thirteen hundred miles away. As I had established her in Wisconsin to be near me, it seemed a little like desertion to be spending the winter in the East.
My thoughts often returned to the friendly circle in Taft's studio, and late in February I was keenly interested in a letter from Lorado in which he informed me that Wallace Heckman, Attorney for The Art Institute, had offered to give the land to found a summer colony of artists and literary folk on the East bank of Rock River about one hundred miles west of Chicago. "You are to be one of the trustees," Lorado wrote, "and as soon as you get back, Mr. Heckman wants to take us all out to look at the site for the proposed camp."