[larger]

"Fallible and frail, a bit of pulsating, jelly-like life—it is all I am. About me are the great natural forces—colossal menaces, Titans of destruction, unsentimental monsters that have less concern for me than I have for the grain of sand I crush under my foot. They have no concern for me at all. They do not know me. They are unconscious, unmerciful, and unmoral. They are the cyclones and tornadoes, lightning flashes and cloudbursts, tide-rips and tidal waves, undertows and waterspouts, great whirls and sucks and eddies, earthquakes and volcanoes, surfs that thunder on rock-ribbed coasts, and seas that leap aboard the largest crafts that float, crushing humans p010 to pulp or licking them off into the sea and to death—and these insensate monsters do not know that tiny sensitive creature, all nerves and weaknesses, whom men call Jack London, and who himself thinks he is all right and quite a superior being.

"In the maze and chaos of the conflict of these vast and draughty Titans, it is for me to thread my precarious way. The bit of life that is I will exult over them."

And again:

"Being alive, I want to see, and all the world is a bigger thing to see than one small town or valley. We have done little outlining of the voyage. Only one thing is definite, and that is that our first port of call will be Honolulu. Beyond a few general ideas, we have no thought of our next port after Hawaii. We shall make up our minds as we get nearer. In a general way, we know that we shall wander through the South Seas, take in Samoa, New Zealand, Tasmania, Australia, New Guinea, Borneo, and Sumatra, and go on up through the Philippines to Japan. Then will come Korea, China, India, the Red Sea, and the Mediterranean. After that the voyage becomes too vague to describe, though we know a number of things we shall surely do, and we expect to spend from one to several months in every country in Europe."

The article in the magazine, which had first drawn my attention to the proposed trip, had given me little knowledge of the man with whom in all probability p011 I was to spend the next seven years of my life. The nearer I came to Oakland, the California city in which the Londons were then living, the more intense grew my curiosity. Worst of all, I was haunted by a fear that if I didn't hustle and get there, Jack London would have changed his mind, and I should be obliged to come back in humiliation to Independence.

It was about nine o'clock in the evening when I arrived in Oakland. As soon as I was off the train, I hunted a telephone and called up Jack London. It was London himself who came to the 'phone. When I told him who I was, I heard a pleasant voice say: "Hello, boy; come right along up," and then followed instructions as to how to find the house.

They lived in a splendid section of the town. I had no difficulty in finding them. When I rapped at the door, a neat little woman opened it, and grabbing my hand, almost wrung it off.