When the fall term opened Jim returned to school with over $200.00 in his pockets. He now had sufficient funds to provide himself with a little relaxation and some luxuries. The year of 1900 was to prove one of the most enjoyable and changing periods in all his life.
Because he was now better off, financially, Jim decided to take larger quarters, so he rented a two-room apartment on Jefferson Street. Then he bought a new suit of clothes which materially changed his appearance. With a pipe and a mandolin, previously acquired, he became a typical “college man.”
“As a sophomore I devoted only a little attention to the incoming freshmen. The enthusiasm with which I had entered into under-class rivalries the preceding autumn had worn itself out, or rather, had been supplanted by my interest in newspaper work.”
What with his writing, his difficult studies and the planning of his work, Jim was truly as busy a man as there was on the whole of the campus. He spent his spare time, as little as there was of it, in strolls about the campus and the wooded sections on the outskirts of the city. Here he loved to walk along slowly and take in nature as it actually was. He loved to watch the birds flit from tree to tree, to see the chipmunks, the squirrels and the various other creatures of the wild in the throes of their work and play. They always appeared so industrious to him. But Jim Curwood did not watch them merely for the thrill of it all, but because he studied their every move. Here it was that Jim discovered that he cared for nature almost selfishly. At times it seemed as if he could not break away from his wanderings in the forests and along the lakes long enough to accomplish anything else. The birds, the trees and the rippling waters entranced the young man. The many squirrels and rabbits that infested the places that man did not go held constant fascination for him.
Jim watched nature and wildlife with gifted eyes. He would see creatures of God where no other human eyes could detect them. Jim Curwood was a staunch believer that everything on the face of the earth was an important item in the worldly scheme of things.
“If I did not believe a tree had a soul I could not believe in a God. If someone convinced me that the life in a flower or the heart in a bird were not as important in the final analysis as those same things in my own body I could no longer have faith in a hereafter.”
Those words seal the case of Jim Curwood’s love of nature and of all living things.
* * * *
The sophomore year at the University of Michigan came and went almost as fast as had his previous year as a freshman, with but one exception. Jim Curwood had begun to take a keen and glowing interest in the young women of the campus. Previously he had hardly looked at girls and at times hardly realized that there were such lovely creatures about him, save for his childhood sweetheart, “Whistling” Jeanne. Those memories of Jeanne Fisher, however, were not haunting him now, for the beautiful women of the University were taking her place. Jim began to notice their pretty dresses, their hair-do’s, and their feminine pulchritude. It was the glory of womanhood and all it stood for that made Jim happy. He began to realize more and more that womanhood was probably the most wonderful of all things on the earth. He began to glorify them in his stories as he had the creatures of the wild and all nature about him.
“Then I began to understand that no matter how successful a man may be, how much money he may amass, or how many honors he may acquire, his life is woefully incomplete unless a woman fully shares it with him. As the tired-eyed factor at Fond du Lac once said, while he stood beside the lonely grace under a huge spruce: ‘No country is God’s Country without a woman.’”