For a moment I wasn’t sure whether I was still in my story or outside it. I looked out of the window and sure enough, there was a cottage in flames. I helped to rouse the people in it, and watched, with the amused superiority of a New Yorker, the efforts of village firemen to put out the blaze. I remember how they squirted the hose in at one window, and the jet came out at the opposite window. I will leave it for specialists in the occult to explain whether the fire was caused by the excessive vividness of my writing, or whether it was a case of clairvoyance, or possibly telepathy from the mind of a mouse. (Perhaps I ought to explain that the above is meant as humor, lest someone cite it as one more example of my credulity.)

Early that spring I had taken a fishing trip to the far north of Ontario, traveling on several railroads and then on a bicycle, and staying in a pioneer cabin near a tiny jewel of a lake. I did not get many fish, for the reason that I absent-mindedly left my tackle behind in a railroad station along the way, and it did not arrive until the day I departed; but I saw wild geese and a bear, which was a grand thrill; also I saw mosquitoes in clouds that darkened the sky and made me run through the swamps for my very life. On my way back to the railroad I came upon that field of deep clover in the twilight, and experienced the ecstasy I have described.

It was a good thing for a youth to see how our pioneer ancestors lived on this continent. The family with which I stayed lived on flour and bacon; they didn’t even have a cow. Once or twice a year, when they traveled to a store, they traded skins for salt and cartridges. Later that summer, on a canoe trip, I stayed with some old people who had a cow, and lived on skimmed milk and potatoes, trading butter at the store for tea and sugar. On another trip I met a French-Canadian settler, with a swarm of half-nourished babies, who did not even have a rifle to keep the bears out of his pigsty.

XI

Having arranged to meet my mother and some friends at Charleston Lake, which lies at the head of the little Gananoque River, I bought a canoe, bundled my stuff into the bow, and set off—so eager for the adventure that I couldn’t wait until morning. I paddled most of the night up the misty river, with bullfrogs and muskrats for company, and now and then a deer—all delightfully mysterious and thrilling to a city youth. I got lost in the marshes—but the mosquitoes found me, rest assured. After midnight I came to a dam, roused the miller, and went to sleep in his garret—until the miller’s bedbugs found me! Then I got out, watched the sunrise up the river gorge, and stood on the dam and threw flies for black bass that jumped half a dozen at a time.

I paddled all that day, and stayed a while at a lonely farmhouse, and asked a hundred questions about how pioneer farmers lived. I remember coming out onto Charleston Lake, very tired from paddling and from carrying my canoe over the dams; the wind was blowing up the lake, so after getting the canoe started, I lay down and fell asleep. When I woke, my frail craft was grating on the rocks at the far end of the long lake. I paddled to the hotel; there was a dock, and summer guests watching the new arrival. I had made the whole journey without mishap; but now I put out my hand to touch the dock, a sudden gust of wind carried me out of reach—and over I went into the water with everything I owned!

This lake was a famous fishing resort, and there were rich men from the cities amusing themselves with deep-water trolling for large lake trout. They had expensive tackle, and reclined at ease while guides at four dollars a day rowed them about. I paddled my own canoe, so I did not catch so many trout, but I got the muscular development, which was more important. Doubtless it was my Christian duty to love all the rich persons I watched at this and other pleasure resorts; but here is one incident that speaks for itself. The son of a wealthy merchant from Syracuse, New York, borrowed a shotgun from me, stuck the muzzle into the sand, and then fired the gun and blew off the end of the barrel. I had rented this gun in the village and now had to pay for the damage out of my slender earnings; the wealthy father refused to reimburse me, saying that his son had had no authority to borrow the gun.

You may notice that here again I was meeting rich and poor; going back and forth between French-Canadian settlers and city sportsmen.

XII

By the beginning of the year 1900, the burden of my spirit had become greater than I could carry. The vision of life that had come to me must be made known to the rest of the world, in order that men and women might be won from their stupid and wasteful ways of life. It is easy to smile over the “messianic delusion”; but in spite of all smiles, I still have it. Long ago my friend Mike Gold wrote me a letter, scolding me severely for what he called my “Jesus complex”; I answered, as humbly as I could, that the world needs a Jesus more than it needs anything else, and volunteers should be called for daily.