Do you know why you are getting the best work to do here?" asked one of the new friends.
"Why?"
"It's because you're white."
This position he retained until May of the following year, meantime contributing to the editorial page of The Saturday Evening Post. Then an attack of typhoid lost him his position; but he had made loyal friends, who delighted to come to his aid. Something of the quality of his own loyalty is expressed in an entry in his diary shortly after leaving the hospital. "Many good lessons in human nature. Learned much about who are the real friends, who may be trusted to a finish, who are not quitters, but it shall not be written." During the period of his convalescence which he spent among the Shawangunk Mountains of Sullivan County, New York, he decided that if it were possible he would not go back to newspaper work. A friend had sent him a letter of introduction to the editor of Outing, which in August he presented, and was asked to bring in an article on the preservation of the Adirondack Park as a national playground. The article proved acceptable, and thenceforth most of his work was done for that magazine.
In September he wrote his friend, Mr. James A. Leroy.
"MY DEAR JIM,—I think that regardless of your frightful neglect I shall be obliged to write you another note expressing sense of under-obligationness to you for that letter. It is the best thing I've run up against so to speak. As a result of it I am to have the pleasure of hastening Detroitward. There I shall register at the House. I shall sit in the window with my feet higher than my head, and wear a one-hundred-and-fifty-dollar-a-week air of nonchalance. When the festive Detroit reporter shys past looking hungrily at the cafe, I'll look at my watch with a wonder-if-it's- time-to-dress-for-dinner air and fill his soul with envy. This has been the dream that has haunted me ever since those childhood days when you and I ate at Spaghetti's and then went to the House to talk it over. I shall carry out the dire scheme and then—well, then, if Fate says for me to hustle across the Great Divide, I'll go with the feeling that life has not been in vain."
Later, January 14th of the following year, to the same friend who was then in Manila as secretary to Dean Worcester.
"You may think it wondrous strange that I should be here in Canada in mid-winter when I could as well be south. There is a mystery, and since you are on the other side of the world I don't mind telling. I am here on a filibustering expedition. I made a firm resolution some months ago that a certain portion of Canada should be annexed to the United States. I am here fostering annexation sentiment, and have succeeded so well that the consent is unanimous, and the annexation will occur just as soon as L. H., junior, is able to pay board for two, which will probably be a matter of a few weeks. So don't be surprised if you receive a square envelope containing an announcement which reads something like this:
Mr. and Mrs. ______
of Bewdley, Ontario,
announce the ________ of their daughter
___________
to
MR. LEONIDAS HUBBARD, JR.
On his return to New York, a short time later, he was assigned a trip through the Southern States. Hence a telegram, on January 29th, to a quiet Canadian town. On January 31st a quiet wedding in a little church in New York, and then five months in the mountains of Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee, and among the forests and cotton plantations of Mississippi.