Whitman, Shakespeare, Scott, Shelley, Byron ... Speke, Burton, Stanley ... my real comrades!... my real world! Rather a world of books than a world of actuality!...
I was so glad to be among my books again that for a month I gave no thought to the future. I did nothing but read and study ... except at those times when I was talking to people prodigiously of my trip and what I had seen and been through. And naturally and deftly I wove huge strips of imagination and sheer invention into the woof of every tale or anecdote....
I captained ships, saw Chinese slaughtered by the thousands, fought bandits on the outskirts of Manila, helped loot the palace of the empress in the Sacred City at Pekin ... tales of peril and adventure that I had heard others relate at camp-fires, in jail, in the forecastle, on the transport, I unhesitatingly appropriated as my own experiences.
All the papers printed stories about me. And I was proud about it. And I became prouder still when I sold a story in two parts to a New York Sunday paper ... I liked the notoriety....
But as usual, the yarns I retailed struck in upon my own imagination, too ... just as had my earlier stories of killing Indians. Particularly the tale I had related of having seen dead Chinamen in heaps with their heads lopped off. A nightmare of this imaginary episode began to come to me. And another dream I had—of a huge Boxer, with a cutlass, standing over me. And he was about to carve me piecemeal while I lay bound and helpless before him. The dream persisted so strongly that, after I awoke, I still seemed to see him standing in a corner of my room. And I cried aloud. And felt foolish when it brought my father in. So I stopped making up adventures, especially the disagreeable ones, because they eventually had more effect on me than they did on my auditors.
My father had changed boarding places ... but, as usual, it was not better food, but a little, dark widow that attracted him to that boarding house.
I now devoted myself exclusively to poetry—the reading of it. I always had a book in my pocket. I read even at meals, despite my father's protests that it was bad-mannered.