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THE 
 
 TDINGBAT OF ^RCADT 
 
By 
 MARGUERITE WILKINSON 
 
 New Voices 
 Bluestone 
 
THE 
 
 •DINGBAT 
 
 of 
 tAR CAD r 
 
 BY 
 
 MARGUERITE WILKINSON 
 
 THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 
 1922 
 
 All rights reserved 
 
 n 
 
 n 
 
 
 
 
Printed in the United States of America 
 
 
 Copyright, 1921 
 By CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS 
 
 Copyright, 1922 
 By THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 
 
 Set up and printed. Published, March, Jg22 
 
 CONDE NAST PRESS GREENWICH, CONN. 
 
 m 22 1922 
 ©C1.A6592'I3 
 
T'his is a book of memories. It tells 
 how Jim and I traveled on singing rivers 
 and blue bays in The Dingbat of Arcady^ 
 The Royal 'Dingbat^ and The Long Canoe 
 and on roads, brown, yellow, and white, 
 in Frankie Ford and Rover Chug-chug. 
 It is a most personal record of small, but 
 sprightly, adventures. It is dedicated to 
 my cousin, Poultney Bigelow, the only 
 other vagabond in my family, and to 
 his wife, Lilian Bigelow. 
 
ACKNOWLEDGMENT 
 
 (J^Y MOST cordial thanks for 
 permission to reprint this mate- 
 rial in this book are due to The 
 Editor of Scribners Magazine ^ 
 who first gave most of it to the 
 public. 
 
[I] 
 
[I] 
 
 To LIVE thirty years without ever feeling 
 the full energy of the sun, the rigor of wind, 
 the sweet instancy of rain — that, you may 
 say, would be a tragedy. Or perhaps you will 
 say that it would be impossible. But it is 
 not impossible. It was my tragedy. I did 
 not know sun and wind and rain because I 
 had always taken them for granted. My 
 body had suffered and enjoyed them dully 
 and half-consciously, being carefully pro- 
 tected from infancy to the years of indis- 
 cretion by a house, clothing, and the customs 
 of good society. In a spiritual sense I had 
 Hved most of my life indoors. To be sure, I 
 was acquainted with nature — spelled with a 
 capital and put inside quotation marks. 
 There is a great gulf, however, between 
 acquaintance and friendship. I could look 
 back to the days of my childhood when the 
 sane delights of dust and puddles were well 
 known to my small feet in spite of parental 
 prohibitions. I enjoyed a beautiful view when 
 it was not pointed out to me and I had sense 
 enough to dislike people who came and 
 
The Dingbat of Arcady 
 
 "quacked beside me" in the woods after the 
 manner described by Rupert Brooke. In 
 quiet fields I was often touched by beauty 
 that I did not analyze. Times came when a 
 great congregation of the clouds in the wild 
 air currents high above me thrilled me with 
 the marvel of a storm. But greater things 
 than these I had not found in nature, and 
 deeper things than these I had not known 
 when I was thirty years of age. I knew people 
 much better than I knew Nature, who has 
 been the condition of their life from the 
 beginning, who is the everlasting enemy and 
 the everlasting friend. 
 
 Since I was thirty years old I have been 
 intimate with the open world. I have felt 
 the sun putting the scent of sunburn upon 
 my body and the color of life into my mind. 
 My shoulders have been thrust against the 
 wind with a hardy and joyful will to over- 
 come it; my skin has tingled with it; my lungs 
 have been greatened with breezes. The rain 
 has cooled my forehead and throat and made 
 moist tendrils of my hair and softened my 
 voice. I have not killed lions in the jungle 
 as Roosevelt did, nor suffered in the polar 
 seas as Shackleton did. But I have known 
 the chimeras of darkness; I have borne the 
 
The Dingbat of Arcady 5 
 
 rasping hardships of heat and cold and pain. 
 I have been hungry for several days at a 
 time and thirsty hour after hour. I have 
 been in the open without even a tent for 
 shelter week after week. I have learned to 
 strive for that conquest of nature in myself 
 which begins with realization and ends with 
 the sublimation of all the forces of life for 
 ends most wise and serene. Without that 
 conquest Nature is the everlasting enemy; 
 with it she becomes the everlasting friend. 
 I have tried to let the sun strike fiery white 
 through work and play, to let the wind blow 
 clean and strong across stale ways, to let 
 the fertile rain fall insistently upon life's 
 barrenness. 
 
 I may have learned some of the secrets 
 of the open world. They tell themselves 
 again to all that know them in the eyes and 
 voices and gestures of others that know them 
 and in the ways of their minds. I wish that 
 all mankind were of this free masonry. It 
 is sorrowful to realize that when a person 
 who is ruddy and athletic either in body or 
 in spirit enters a subway train the sensitive 
 must feel a shock of surprise. It is as if a 
 sunflower had entered. 
 
 What if a great wind, smelling of salt seas, 
 
The Dingbat of Arcady 
 
 or of pine woods, or of a sage mesa, were to 
 go roaring through the car, stealing all hats 
 away, whipping out hairpins, loosening collars, 
 carrying us all with it to the shores of the 
 ocean, or to unbounded forests, or to un- 
 dulating prairies and casting us down upon the 
 earth forspent with a passion of surprise? 
 What if a great silver rain descended upon us 
 from skies the color of gentians, washing us, 
 caressing us, cooling our fevers, releasing us 
 from all tension? What if the sun came out 
 upon us afterward with such an inspiriting 
 gladness that we all danced together over 
 boundless open spaces, lifting our hands and 
 arms toward heaven, forgetful of the world? 
 Is it not true that beauty and happiness would 
 come upon us? While the rapture lasted we 
 should be transfigured and we should keep 
 the memory of that transfiguration with us 
 always. For the soul, that moves forever 
 toward God as the summit of life and the 
 goal of living, takes the first step best, per- 
 haps, where life began and still begins, in 
 nature; and passes on from storm to storm 
 and from peace to peace, from swollen cloud 
 to cloud and from rainbow to rainbow, from 
 shadow to lovelier shadow and from light 
 to everlasting light. 
 
The Dingbat of Arcady 
 
 This may be why I am moved to tell of 
 my adventures in the open world with my 
 husband. I am not so devoid of humor that 
 I can think of myself as a discoverer of the 
 anguish and ardor of life out of doors. I 
 know that I am not even a pioneer. This trail 
 of the mind is worn smooth by thousands 
 who made it. But nobody else has traveled 
 on it with my body, my mind, my heart. 
 As I see it, it is unique. The joy of the way 
 comes back into my consciousness again and 
 again and thrusts itself upward through many 
 intellectual disciplines, asking for a chance 
 to be spoken with my hps. I am like the 
 proselyte of a new faith, eager to relate my 
 experience. Those who dislike such confes- 
 sions should lay down this book. 
 
 My first chance to go out into the open with 
 my husband came after a long winter of dis- 
 content, after a sharp struggle with poverty, 
 after a period of sorrow and anxiety. Jim 
 is a teacher. He had no summer work that 
 year. It was necessary to live, somehow, 
 until school began again in the autumn. 
 Poets, also, have to keep body and soul to- 
 gether in June, July and August. We had 
 very little to live on. We longed for rest, 
 change, adventure. We could think of nothing 
 
8 The 'Dingbat of Arcady 
 
 that would cost less than two months out of 
 doors. To be sure, I had never done any 
 camping. I had never even lived on a farm. 
 But Jim knew the whimsical windings of 
 rivers and he understood boats. We decided 
 to spend our vacation floating down a river. 
 We were living in the West at the time, and, 
 for some reason unknown to us even now, 
 we chose the Willamette River in Oregon. 
 
 Anybody who looks on the map can find 
 it, a short stream flowing through Oregon 
 into the Columbia. But though I shock the 
 geographers, I must tell them that for me no 
 map can fix it in place. For me it is a mystic 
 stream flowing past a certain saw-mill at 
 Albany, Oregon, past the place where it 
 slides into the Columbia, down the coast 
 and into San Diego Bay, thence under the 
 continent, emerging in the Saint John River 
 in Canada, flowing through Lake Champlain, 
 across the Hudson, under the Atlantic, min- 
 gling with the rivulets of Devon and joining 
 the Esk in Scotland. More than that, if I 
 live, I shall fancy that I find it flowing under 
 the next river on which we travel. It has cut 
 a channel in the deep places of my spirit. 
 
 Our trip down the Willamette lasted seven 
 weeks by the clock, but by the tick of our 
 
The Dinghat of Arcady 
 
 feelings it has never ended. Sometimes when 
 I am at rest and retrospective I can close my 
 eyes and see the sinuous curving of that little 
 river, the mossy sides of the great firs and 
 maples near it, the strips of singing shingle 
 that made tunes for us under our boat as we 
 slipped down the stream over the shallow 
 ripples, the banks of clean sand where we 
 made our fires at night and sat watching 
 the thin strands of gray smoke unwinding 
 themselves upward. 
 
 The trip began at Albany, Oregon, whither 
 we had gone expecting to buy a flat-bottomed 
 rowboat. We found none of the right sort 
 for sale at a price which we could afford to 
 pay, and were obliged to build our own craft, 
 which was best, after all. For new ventures 
 new vehicles. 
 
 The building of a boat would seem to be 
 a difficult and complicated operation, but to 
 the simple all things are simple. We made 
 our task as easy as possible by working in 
 the open air, in front of a lumber mill, on 
 the bank of the river. Our lumber — pine 
 flooring — was cut to dimension for us in the 
 mill. Near us, while we worked, were piles 
 of sweet yellow sawdust like grated cheese 
 ready for the dinner of a giant, heaps of honey- 
 
lo The Dingbat of Arcady 
 
 colored shavings, like the fragrant curls of 
 a giant's daughter, and bundles of planks 
 smooth as warm-hued ivory. The mill was 
 owned by a noble old Titan who had gone 
 out to Oregon in his youth and brought up a 
 family of sons to match the land. In their com- 
 pany we worked happily for three days, listen- 
 ing to the whine and drone of the saws in the mill 
 and to the good American voices of the work- 
 men. On the third day we finished our boat. 
 
 The actual building of her was done in 
 a day and a half. She was fourteen feet long 
 and two and a half feet wide and the shape 
 of a cigar box, save that there was an angle 
 at the bow and another at the stern where 
 the floor tilted upward to the top. Not a 
 curved line in her whole structure! Her sides 
 were fourteen-inch planks, fairly stout. Her 
 floor was of cheap pine boards fitted together 
 in the usual way with grooves and ridges. 
 They were laid on at right angles to the sides. 
 The two ends, where the floor sloped up, 
 were covered with planks and one plank 
 at each end could be lifted out and set back 
 at will. Thus we had two cupboards in which 
 to store clothing, food, blankets, tools, kitchen 
 utensils, and the small typewriter that is to 
 us what Mary's lamb was to Mary. 
 
The 'Dingbat of Arcady 1 1 
 
 While the boat was building the big men 
 in the mill showed much kindly interest. 
 They would stand around at the lunch hour 
 smoking malignant tobacco and giving us the 
 most benevolent advice. I was a problem 
 to them — a woman who could pound nails 
 and was willing to go on a wild expedition of 
 the kind that we were planning. They would 
 watch me curiously as I filled the grooves 
 in the rough boards with white lead and fitted 
 them into place. They were almost as much 
 interested as we were when, on the second 
 day, at noon, our craft was structurally com- 
 plete. It remained to make her water-tight 
 and to paint her. 
 
 Some of the men advised us to fill the cracks 
 with putty. Others suggested pitch and 
 oakum. In order to be on the safe side and 
 in order to accept all proffered suggestions 
 with obliging courtesy, we used all three. 
 When we thought that we had done all that 
 was necessary we slapped on a coat of sky- 
 blue paint, a rich, conspicuous shade (one 
 might say ''vulgar-rich'' in this connection) 
 and left her to dry over night. The next day 
 we were to launch her and begin our cruise. 
 
 The friendly men asked us to let the launch- 
 ing be at noon so that they might see us off. 
 
1 2 The Dingbat of Arcady 
 
 So Jim spent the morning putting the finish- 
 ing touches on a pair of rough wooden oar- 
 locks whittled out of two small blocks of 
 pine, and arguing with me about an appro- 
 priate name for our floating palace. We 
 wanted her name to be both romantic and 
 humorous. It happened that Jim's favorite 
 slang word at the time was "dingbat" of 
 Sunday-comic-supplement origin. To him it 
 expressed the final degree of insignificance. 
 He remarked casually that we ought not to 
 be disturbed about a name for such a poor 
 little "dingbat*' of a boat! Whereupon we 
 suddenly agreed that she should be called 
 "The Dingbat" and that her port was Arcady. 
 Hence, "The Dingbat of Arcady." 
 
 This decided, the choice of a fluid suitable 
 for her christening troubled us. Champagne, 
 we knew, was the conventional thing. In 
 those days it could be had for its proper price. 
 But we could not afford to treat the eight 
 or ten friendly men and to favor the inanimate 
 'Dingbat with such an expensive drink while 
 permitting the animate palate to suffer thirst 
 — that would have been insulting. Any cheap 
 drink of the hard variety would have been 
 vulgar for the christening of a boat hailing 
 from Arcady. Finally we decided to christen 
 
The Dingbat of Arcady 13 
 
 her with the juice of Oregon cherries, than 
 which none are more delicious, and to add 
 a huge bag of them to the dinner of our friends. 
 At twelve o'clock of the third day of our 
 stay in Albany Jim nailed the wooden oar- 
 locks into place, gave me the oars to carry, 
 and then, with the assistance of the workmen, 
 picked up The Dingbat of Arcady and carried 
 her down the pebbly bank to the water. 
 Everybody helped. Even the old Titan must 
 lend a hand. Jim got in and took the oars. 
 I climbed over the stern and sat down in 
 my place on top of the pantry cupboard. 
 The current caught us. We were off. We had 
 begun a new life that is not yet ended. The 
 men on the bank waved and cheered. As we 
 looked back from midstream they seemed as 
 beautiful as trees, standing there in their 
 rough strength. They were John Masefield's 
 
 "Oregon men of six-feet-seven 
 With backs from Atlas and hearts from 
 Heaven." 
 
 By this time all who are wise in the ways 
 of boats will be wondering whether The 
 Dingbat leaked. Of course she did. Slow drops 
 oozed up through unsuspected interstices 
 around knots in the planks. Small rillets 
 
14 The 'Dingbat of Arcady 
 
 trickled in at the seams and ran across the 
 floor. While Jim directed our course easily 
 enough with the oars, I worked much harder, 
 bailing with a small saucepan and great de- 
 termination. In spite of all that I could do 
 the water got ahead of me. I learned that I 
 could not hope to keep my feet dry. I took 
 off my shoes and stockings. Jim followed my 
 example. It is more comfortable and wiser 
 to sit all day with bare feet in a couple of 
 inches of water than it is to get chilblains 
 from enforced intimacy with wet leather. I 
 might remark, parenthetically, that we kept 
 our shoes and stockings in the pantry cup- 
 board for most of the seven weeks of the 
 cruise, wearing them only when we entered 
 towns or visited farms or met our fellow 
 man. The boat leaked for three weeks. By 
 the time she was water-tight we had lost all 
 interest in shoes and stockings for their own 
 sakes. We respected them and wore them 
 merely as a part of good manners. 
 
 The Dingbat leaked so badly on that first 
 afternoon of our trip that I thought it would 
 be necessary to call all hands to the pumps. 
 It was. Jim pulled her to the shore while 
 I bailed rapidly. We lifted her on her side 
 and poured the water out. Then we put 
 
The Dingbat of Arcady 1 5 
 
 pitch and oakum into the perceptible cracks 
 — the putty proved to be a delusion and a 
 snare — and pushed her out into the water 
 and went on again. The process had to be 
 repeated several times that day. But we 
 were not annoyed. The novelty of the experi- 
 ence was captivating. The cruise had begun. 
 That very night we were to sleep on the 
 ground. I wondered what it would be like. 
 
[II] 
 
[11] 
 
 ff^HEN I was a little girl I despised the 
 princess in the fairy tale who could not rest 
 easily on her seven quilts of silk and down 
 because, underneath the last and lowest of 
 them, a rose petal lay crumpled. Now I 
 have compassion for her. For those who 
 recline on sevenfold silk and down spread 
 between themselves and rugged reality never 
 rest at all. If there be no crumpled petal, 
 the thought of one suffices to disturb them. 
 Pillowed upon a softness that thwarts or 
 denies reahty we may have witless slumber 
 and illusory dreams, but valid repose is for 
 those who do not fear that which is hard. 
 Our rest is in reahty. 
 
 Our peace is in reality. This thought I 
 have found growing near the gnarled roots 
 of trees that have sheltered me when I have 
 slept in the woods at night. I have found it, 
 also, flourishing in the hard sand at the heavy 
 ocean's edge. Whenever and wherever I 
 have slept upon the ground at night I have 
 caught glimpses of it by the light of the first 
 stars. And I have looked at it again in the 
 
20 The Dingbat of Arcady 
 
 morning as soon as a new dawn has made it 
 possible to see thoughts growing. I have tried 
 to transplant it into my mind. 
 
 Whenever and wherever I have found this 
 thought growing I have found rest. The 
 ground, the underlying reality for our bodies, 
 that from which there is no falling away, is 
 the best of all beds. It is the bed of heroes 
 before they die in battle and find rest in it 
 forever; it is the bed of hermits who keep 
 vigil for the souFs sake; it is the bed of the 
 quaint company of the poets who wander 
 up and down the highways of the world for- 
 ever, seeking the tunes that will echo longest 
 in the minds of men and the images that 
 men's tears will never wash away. The 
 ground is the bed on which Christ slept in 
 the wilderness. It is the clean refuge of the 
 poor. Resting on it makes the body firm, 
 the mind joyful. 
 
 To find this firmness and joy, to achieve 
 this rest upon reality, nobody needs to endure 
 more than all manhood and womanhood 
 should be able to endure. Nobody needs to 
 be miserably uncomfortable night after night. 
 Times will come when no amount of foresight 
 can prevent a certain amount of discomfort. 
 But this humorous hardness merely sym- 
 
The Dingbat of Arcady 21 
 
 bolizes that discipline of heart and mind with- 
 out which we reach no intellectual or spiritual 
 reality. As a rule, after the first two or three 
 nights spent in the open, aching bones are 
 either a myth or a stupidity. It seems strange 
 to me now that I hved thirty years in a world 
 of groves and wild skies before I ever spent 
 a night on the ground under the stars. 
 
 Our first night on the ground was spent in 
 a grove of mighty maples. We made The 
 'Dingbat fast to a sapling on the bank and, 
 after a hot supper previously purchased in 
 Albany and cooked over a fire near the water's 
 edge, Jim set about the task of bed-making. 
 First we carried our blankets and two long 
 strips of heavy canvas up into the grove. 
 Then we sought a good bit of ground. At 
 length, quite near the edge of the grove, we 
 found a huge maple with a stretch of level 
 earth under it about eight feet square and 
 sloping away from the foot of the tree. The 
 branches above were in full leaf — a shelter 
 not to be despised in time of rains and a 
 grateful shade in hot weather. 
 
 I leaned against the trunk that we promptly 
 christened **our tree'* and watched while 
 Jim loosened the earth of the level space with 
 a hatchet. He made a hollow in the middle 
 
22 The Dingbat of Arcady 
 
 of the stretch of loose earth. This is an essen- 
 tial of comfort in a bed on the ground, for 
 in it the hips can rest. A perfectly flat surface, 
 even when it is well covered with blankets, 
 is the enemy of rest for most human beings. 
 The spine is wearied when it is held at an 
 angle all night. Jim and I had heard that 
 cowboys in the desert dug such slight hollows 
 for their beds at night. We did likewise and 
 were glad. 
 
 This done, in about five minutes, Jim spread 
 out one piece of heavy canvas on the open 
 space. Then he laid half of another twelve- 
 foot strip on top of it, leaving about six feet 
 by six to be turned up over the top in case of 
 rain. These strips of canvas prevented the 
 ground-damp from coming up to our bodies 
 rapidly. The new camper is frequently sur- 
 prised to learn that the chill which goes 
 through him to the bone comes oftenest from 
 the ground under him, not from the air around 
 him. On the canvas Jim laid woolen blankets. 
 On these he put a double cotton blanket, — 
 the "sleep-between" used instead of sheets. 
 This could be washed with little difficulty 
 and served as protection against the dust 
 that always gathers in camping blankets. On 
 top of this were more woolen coverings. 
 
The Dingbat of Arcady 23 
 
 We had no tent, for we had been too poor 
 to buy one. We had nothing between us and 
 the heavens, nothing but the broad, deeply- 
 cleft leaves of our tree. On one side even these 
 didnothidethesky. On that side there was not 
 even a mist to mask the street lamps of the 
 eternal cities above us as a light fog from the 
 harbor sometimes veils the stars that are New 
 York at night. Climbing through that aper- 
 ture in the branches on rays of starlight, 
 my vision rose into the everlasting blue. 
 
 There was nothing between us and the 
 voice of the river to deaden the long sound 
 of its chanting, nothing but the placid air 
 through which that chanting came. My lips 
 moved with a desire to shape words to the 
 tune of it and I gathered vague syllables 
 together into heaps in my mind as I listened, 
 only to throw them all away again at last. 
 It had to be a song without words. 
 
 There was nothing between us and the nerv- 
 ous life that plays sensuously upon the surface 
 of the earth. The ground whispered when an 
 insect moved over it or in it. The hush of 
 night was broken, occasionally, by the pass- 
 ing of the little night-hunters of the wood 
 scurrying across leaves and twigs to and from 
 their hidden homes, talking with their quick 
 
24 The 'Dingbat of Arcady 
 
 feet. Sometimes something fell. Then silence 
 closed in again, deeper than before. The air, 
 near the earth and near my face, was moist 
 and cool and full of sober fragrances. I 
 wanted to stay awake all night and get the 
 uttermost joy out of the experience. But 
 even as I resolved to keep watch over the 
 earth with the stars I lost them. 
 
 In the woods, although I wake earlier than 
 when I am at home, I usually wake more 
 gradually and beautifully. If the grove be 
 thick or the day cloudy, my first awareness 
 of waking may be the half-conscious answer 
 of the mind to the calling of birds near at 
 hand that seem, in my dreamy state, to be 
 very far away. At first I lie perfectly quiet 
 with no desire to move a finger, opening my 
 eyes for an instant from time to time to see 
 the robust trunks of trees define themselves 
 and emerge from vanishing mist or kindly 
 shadow. Then I reaHze that the tip of my 
 nose is cold. I lift a hand to my hair and feel 
 that it is heavy with dew. I turn stiffly. 
 I give conscious attention to the bird-song. 
 One by one more trees add themselves to 
 the number of those that I can see. A shaft 
 of keen light falls through arching branches 
 
The Dingbat of Arcady 25 
 
 upon the floor of the grove. The grass, if 
 there be any, becomes visible, spangled and 
 stiff. If there be flowers near my bed, I notice 
 them. Then it is time to get up. 
 
 On this first morning of the trip it happened 
 in this way, the waking and the rising. I 
 walked slowly down to the river, getting 
 used to my legs almost as if I were learning 
 to walk. The stream was smooth from bank 
 to bank as if the ripples still slept. It steamed 
 with a light, white mist. An evanescent foam 
 or scum clung to the small reeds near the 
 shore and in quiet places bubbles floated. 
 A fish jumped. The sun stared at me ruddy 
 and imperturbable from his low house in the 
 East. I saluted him. Then I plunged into 
 the river and swam rapidly for a minute or 
 two. After the swim I gathered bits of dry 
 wood, barkless and bleached, like the bones 
 of a tree, and made a fire and cooked break- 
 fast. My mood that had moved to an ex- 
 pectant andante was now attuned to a happy 
 allegro. The day had begun. 
 
 On the next night of the trip, and on several 
 succeeding nights, although there was as 
 much beauty, there was more hardship, for 
 it rained. On our second night out we made 
 our camp in another maple grove farther down 
 
26 The Dingbat of Arcady 
 
 the river. When we had been asleep only a 
 short time we were awakened by a restless, 
 unfamiliar noise, the shy, slow, disturbed 
 fluttering of the top branches of the maples 
 shifting in an intermittent breeze and the 
 first gentle pattering of rain upon their leaves. 
 The thought of a shower roused us, for, as I 
 have said, we had no tent. We put all of our 
 clothing under the canvas folded on top of 
 our blankets. Then we waited, wondering 
 how soon the rain would fall upon our 
 faces. 
 
 For quite a long time not a drop of water 
 came through to fall upon us. The leaves 
 held the first fallen drops until their surfaces 
 were thoroughly wet. Then the shower be- 
 came too heavy for them and they began 
 to drip. It was like William H. Davies' lyric, 
 "The Rain," exactly Hke it. 
 
 "I hear leaves drinking rain; 
 
 I hear rich leaves on top 
 Giving the poor beneath 
 
 Drop after drop; 
 *Tis a sweet noise to hear 
 Those green leaves drinking near." 
 
 From layer to layer of leaves the water fell 
 and then splashed on our canvas. The outside 
 
The "Dingbat of Arcady 27 
 
 of it became wet but it was an effectual pro- 
 tection for our blankets. We had to choose 
 between keeping our faces out in the open 
 and keeping them dry. We decided to let 
 them get wet. In the morning I looked like 
 pussy with wet fur. My hair was so drenched 
 that I had to wring it out, but otherwise I 
 was warm and dry. W^e put on sweaters and 
 hunted for wood dry enough for a fire. We 
 found it under fallen trunks or in the hollows 
 of trees and boiled our matutinal coffee while 
 occasional drops of rain sputtered against the 
 hot sides of the pot. 
 
 Since those days we have learned to carry 
 calcium carbide which, when dropped into 
 water, makes a gas that burns well and will 
 dry twigs for a fire in no time. In this way 
 we can cook in the wettest weather. We have 
 learned, also, to dig a V-shaped trench, in- 
 verted, at the head of the bed so that water 
 running down the slope on a rainy night will 
 drain off at the sides instead of flowing down 
 one*s neck. But we were novices in those far 
 away days and had not learned how very 
 comfortable it is possible to be out of doors 
 even in rainy weather. Nevertheless we were 
 quite cheerful. We were hke children in our 
 enjoyment of the thought that we had slept 
 
28 The Dingbat of Arcady 
 
 out all night in the rain and cooked breakfast 
 in the rain successfully. 
 
 When rainy day followed rainy day and 
 rainy night followed rainy night for the better 
 part of two weeks I must admit that we were 
 not always cheerful. Once Jim and I agreed 
 that we would keep a fire all night. I was to 
 stay awake and guard it until twelve o'clock. 
 He would have the second watch. He needed 
 rest first for he had been rowing all day. And 
 what woman is not a sentry? But when twelve 
 o'clock came Jim slumbered as deeply as one 
 of the logs he should have been chopping into 
 lengths for the fire, and, although he is usually 
 the best sport in the world, I simply could not 
 rouse him. There was nothing for it but to 
 turn in and let the fire die. Through all the 
 rain we kept well. Not a twinge of rheuma- 
 tism, not a hint of a cold, not a sign of a sore 
 throat did either of us have though we 
 traveled all day in the leaky 'Dingbat and 
 slept at night in blankets that finally got 
 somewhat damp since there was never any 
 sun in which to sun them. 
 
 Then came a day when we saw the sun 
 again, hot and glorious, a day of emeralds 
 and diamonds. In the strong light of that 
 surprising sun we saw that everything we 
 
The Dingbat of Arcady 29 
 
 owned was muddy. We must have a washing 
 day at once while the sun stayed out. But 
 we needed to go on down the river, too, for 
 we needed certain kinds of food that could 
 be bought only in towns. How could we do 
 our washing and travel at the same time? 
 That was the question. 
 
 Jim answered it. He bored a hole in the 
 cover plank at each end of The Dingbat, In 
 these two holes he inserted sticks about five 
 feet tall. From the top of one to the top of 
 the other he tied a stout cord. That was to 
 be the drying line. Then, while The Dingbat 
 floated on down stream, carefully guided by 
 Jim, I leaned over the stern with a cake 
 of laundry soap in one hand and a dingy 
 garment in the other, rubbing and scrubbing 
 to my heart's content. We left a thin trail 
 of suds in our wake. We flaunted personal 
 banners in the sun. 
 
 For a time the breezes were the only ones 
 to see them. But at noon, while a large part 
 of the wash was still on the line, a canoe, 
 with two men in it, passed us, going up stream. 
 They took several long looks before they 
 could quite believe what they saw, — a sky- 
 blue Dingbat^ two flushed travelers, a clothes- 
 line like those that hang between tenements 
 
30 The Dingbat of Arcady 
 
 in the city! Then they roared mirthful greet- 
 ings and asked us whither we were going. 
 It embarrassed us to remember that we did 
 not exactly know. We had not bothered to 
 decide on a destination. 
 
 "To Astoria?" they shouted. 
 
 "Don't know!'' we answered. 
 
 "I guess not/' they answered, decidedly; 
 "it'd take you a year in that — boat!" 
 
 It was at that moment, I think, that I 
 became aware of my deep and undying affec- 
 tion for The Dingbat, We never know how 
 much we love our friends until they are sub- 
 jected to the derision of the world. And it 
 was only a few moments later, when we left 
 the bright canoe behind and rounded a bend 
 of the river, that we found a lovelier destina- 
 tion than Astoria, a place so beautiful that 
 it seemed as if it might be The Dingbat's 
 home port of Arcady. 
 
 It was merely a strip of shelving pebbly 
 beach with a clump of birches white in the 
 dazzle of sun and flutter of air. A current 
 flowed past the sandy edge of the beach 
 swiftly enough to keep it clean. A virginal 
 freshness of atmosphere made the place seem 
 delightful to us who had struggled so long 
 with rain in the thick, dark groves. In all 
 
The Dingbat of Arcady 3 1 
 
 directions was wild, untouched country, show- 
 ing no signs of the presence of man. What a 
 place for a rest and a change and a frolic! 
 It was excessively hot. We decided to row 
 on later in the day when sundown made 
 the air cooler. Why not stop and wash 
 blankets? We did. We put on bathing suits, 
 went to work, and to play in that gracious 
 water. 
 
 W^e had a happy afternoon. I stepped into 
 the river and sat down comfortably where 
 the current flowed past on a level with my 
 shoulders, ducking from time to time to let 
 it have the fun of tugging at my hair. It is 
 inherent in living streams to desire to pull 
 all flexible things. I washed the "sleep- 
 between** and Jim hung it on the bushes to 
 dry. Then I gave myself up to joy in the 
 weather. I was wild with delight of sun and 
 blue water and solitude. One swim was not 
 enough. All afternoon I ran in and out of 
 the rollicking current. Jim washed the boat 
 and rested under the birches. At five o'clock 
 we folded our clean, dry things, got into a 
 clean, dry Dingbat and went on to finish our 
 day*s cruise and find a camp for the night. 
 We were to travel until about eight o'clock 
 to make up for the afternoon of leisure. We 
 
32 The Dingbat of Arcady 
 
 did not know, then, that it would have been 
 wiser to remain where we were. 
 
 But soon after we were launched and float- 
 ing down with the current again I felt a 
 strange, drowsy pain waking in my feet. I 
 paid no attention to it at first. But it per- 
 sisted. A sudden twinge when I moved one 
 of them clamored for attention. I looked at 
 my bare feet and saw that something quite 
 unprecedented was happening to them. They 
 were rosy purple in color and in form they 
 resembled the chubby feet of Michelangelo's 
 cherubs. I tried to stand and discovered that 
 it had become an agony simply to bend them 
 at the ankles. I sat down in limp distress. 
 It was an exceedingly bad case of sunburn, 
 the result of my immoderate reveling in sun 
 and water. 
 
 It was perfectly evident that we could not 
 pitch camp for the night anywhere where 
 walking would be necessary and that we had 
 better stop at the first flat beach. When we 
 found a suitable place my feet had already 
 swollen to about twice their normal size and 
 it was impossible for me to walk. Jim had 
 to lift me out of the boat and set me down 
 on the shore like a bundle. I was suflFering 
 intensely. We had no curative lotion with us — 
 
The 'Dingbat of Arcady j,'^ 
 
 nothing but a little lard left over from our 
 cooking. Jim made a bed on the beach and 
 put me on it with my melancholy feet up- 
 lifted on a suitcase and the perennially useful 
 typewriter. It was long before I could sleep 
 and only toward morning did the pain ease 
 somewhat and permit a few hours of rest. 
 
 I was awakened early by a shadow directly 
 over my face and looked up into the counte- 
 nance, humorous and pointed, the two beady 
 eyes and sharp snout of a little pig. To show 
 him that I was not good to eat and did not 
 intend to be eaten I said "Hello!" Whereupon 
 he replied with an exquisitely modulated 
 **0i, oi, oi," like the same Greek syllable 
 without the rough breathing. After this polite 
 salutation he trotted away. But for me he 
 was symbolic. Never since then have I let 
 intemperate delight lead to sunburned feet. 
 
 By the time they were well again we had 
 succeeded in stopping all of the leaks in The 
 Dingbat with pitch and oakum and we some- 
 times found it convenient to sleep on the 
 floor of her while she rocked quietly all night 
 on the lonely waters of that little river. When 
 evening came we would tie her securely by 
 her long rope to some sapling on shore and 
 then let her float in a cove or shallow, or on 
 
34 The Dingbat of Arcady 
 
 the port side of a log-boom. When we first 
 thought of sleeping in her in this way we cov- 
 ered the floor with branches from firs, laying 
 our blankets on top of them. They made a 
 fairly good bed, though less comfortable than 
 the ground in the forests. Then, one day, 
 we met a farmer who told us that there might 
 be woodticks in the fir branches and offered 
 us hay for the bed instead. Woodticks are 
 not desirable companions, so we threw the 
 fir branches overboard and accepted the hay. 
 We got large bundles of it from his little red 
 barn. We offered to pay for it, but he would 
 not take a cent. It was only hay, he said. 
 We spread it out gratefully where the fir 
 branches had been. We rested on it fragrantly 
 while we watched the moon rise in an un- 
 veiled sky and light the water with a silver 
 pathway for a spirit like Christ. . . . 
 
 By day we traveled slowly down stream 
 with the current, shifting from one side of 
 the stream to the other as the current shifted, 
 crossing long strips of shingle where the water 
 was only a few inches deep. Over this shingle 
 The Dingbat passed pleasantly enough for she 
 was perfectly flat underneath. As an Irish- 
 man said to us, "Sure, she would float in a 
 
The Dingbat of Arcady 3 5 
 
 fall o' dew!*' We could look down without 
 anxiety at myriads of pebbles rolling over 
 each other and grinding themselves smooth 
 in the clear water just below. Enchanted, 
 we could listen to the strange singing of these 
 pebbles in the ripples, quite unlike the shout- 
 ing of rapids or the buzzing noise of the open 
 rip, not a loud warning nor a weird water-cry, 
 but a thin, insistent chant like the remote 
 murmuring of bees. 
 
 Nor were we nervous when The Dingbat 
 shot down rapids suddenly, or bumped into 
 rocks and big timber hidden just below the 
 surface of the stream. The Dingbat proved 
 to be well adapted to the kind of work we 
 had given her to do, a steady, albeit comical, 
 little craft. Where the river was narrow and 
 deep and swift she bobbed and glided along 
 as prettily as ever. But alas for our unconcern ! 
 One day while we were happy watching the 
 beautiful curving banks we came suddenly 
 upon a deep, narrow place in the river where 
 the water gushed through the channel swiftly 
 under low, bending willow branches. On top 
 of the cupboard at the stern frying pans, 
 knives, forks, plates, cups were lying. They 
 were all swept away into the swirling flood! 
 We could not see them nor reach them with 
 
36 The Dingbat of Arcady 
 
 sticks. The current was far too swift for 
 diving! We could only keep our place near 
 the scene of their disappearance by clinging 
 to the branches. Our kitchen equipment was 
 gone, irrevocably lost! We had only a lard 
 pail, two spoons, and a cup left as kitchen 
 utensils! Perhaps that is why we learned to 
 make lucky stew. 
 
[Ill] 
 
[Ill] 
 
 / WISH Lamb were alive to write about 
 lucky stew. He could do it justice. But he 
 may have forgotten even roast pig by this 
 time. At any rate, since I am no spiritual- 
 ist, I cannot expect his assistance. I must 
 describe lucky stew myself, beginning with 
 the recipe. 
 
 HOW TO MAKE LUCKY STEW 
 
 Put anything you like in a very deep pail 
 And pour on anything you please; 
 
 Stir it all up with anything you find 
 Under the anywhere trees. 
 
 If anybody comes, asking for dinner. 
 
 Serve it with anything you wish; 
 But never, never, never, never, never forget 
 
 To put a four-leaved clover in the dish. 
 
 That is a good recipe of the conventional 
 kind, for it leaves out most of the important 
 information. Good recipes never tell the 
 whole story. If they did, cooking would lack 
 romance. As it is, cooking is adventurous 
 work. 
 
40 The 'Dingbat of Arcady 
 
 Consider the demand for a four-leaved 
 clover! Sometimes no four-leaved clover can 
 be found. Jim and I find them only two or 
 three times in a season, even when we camp 
 all summer, but we have lucky stew nearly 
 every night. Therefore I have cleverly learned 
 to substitute three white petals from a newly 
 opened daisy, or one long, friendly pine- 
 needle. These have a magic of their own 
 quite as good as the magic of clovers. When 
 good recipes call for something which cannot 
 be had, the wise cook simply substitutes 
 something which can be had. 
 
 Having found the suitable substitute, the 
 camper is free to look for "anything you 
 please*' and "anything you like." "Anything 
 you like" usually means vegetables for us when 
 we are traveling in farm country, game or 
 fish in the wilds. In Oregon it meant carrots 
 most of the time, large, vivid carrots, for they 
 were plentiful. In the East it sometimes 
 means scraggly rutabagas, bursting cabbages, 
 pithy radishes, jaundiced cucumbers, bump- 
 tious kohl-rabis, ancient beets — the more the 
 kinds the merrier. It may mean sweet corn, 
 succulent tomatoes, delicate peas. We take 
 chances, always, when we go abroad seek- 
 ing adventures. But we try to combine the 
 
The Dingbat of Arcady 41 
 
 raw materials of lucky stew in ways that 
 show imagination, fine sensibility, and deli- 
 cate intuition. That is the secret of the 
 recipe. 
 
 The vegetables, of course, must be cut into 
 pieces that will all be thoroughly cooked at 
 the same moment. Hard and antique vege- 
 tables must be cut small. Young and tender 
 ones should be added after the others have 
 cooked awhile. The pail or pot in which they 
 are to boil should be filled with water ("any- 
 thing you please") to a point just below the 
 top of the vegetables, just so that they do not 
 float. When they have cooked thoroughly 
 a small tin of evaporated milk can be added 
 to the liquid in the pail and thickened. Butter 
 may be used, or olive oil. Then you have a 
 dish for the great of the earth, mingling 
 many aromas, rich, warm, filling. 
 
 Lucky stew is best, of course, if a surprise 
 can be added to it. A surprise, be it known, is 
 something edible found when it is least ex- 
 pected. Once in Southern California when I 
 was making lucky stew on the beach, I found 
 a giant Pismo clam lying calmly near my foot. 
 I am sure that it was not the fear of evil which 
 gave him over to his fate. Even his big six- 
 inch shell was a quite serene denial of error. 
 
42 The Dingbat of Arcady 
 
 Yet I seized him and added him to my pail 
 of onions and potatoes. Perhaps he was con- 
 tent to perish in a good cause. 
 
 At other times, and in other places, I have 
 put in mussels fresh from the rocks washed 
 by surf, delightful surprises. Or, when we 
 have been floating down rivers like the Wil- 
 lamette, I have taken soft little fish, chubs, 
 suckers, and the like, that would be insipid 
 eaten alone, and, after parboiling them, skin- 
 ning and boning them, added them to my 
 stew, thus making a tolerably good chowder. 
 One last, lonely frankfurter, one small scrap 
 of ham, one lopsided strip of bacon cut into 
 bits will give a surprisingly delightful flavor 
 to any stew of mixed vegetables. And once, 
 in Canada, I made lucky stew out of a porcu- 
 pine. He was a bother to skin, but I did not 
 do that. His hind legs were the best and 
 biggest part of him, and tasted very good, 
 like young spring lamb. 
 
 "Anything you wish,'* in the recipe, may 
 mean toast in practice, if we have been travel- 
 ing regions where bread can be bought. What 
 toast can be made over embers of the fire that 
 cooked lucky stew! It is crisp and tender and 
 has a perfume that suggests the possible 
 domesticity of the muses. The color of it is 
 
The Dingbat of Arcady 43 
 
 a rich, evenly spread, friendly brown, like 
 the brown of oak leaves in autumn. Be it 
 said that whosoever has eaten lucky stew and 
 toast in sufficient quantities has dined well. 
 It was in this fashion that Jim and I dined 
 when we made our trip in The Dingbat^ and 
 because we had only a pail and two spoons, 
 we would remove lucky stew from the fire 
 and eat it from the pail, competitively, as 
 soon as it was cool enough. We bought our 
 vegetables from farmers whenever we could; 
 a burlap sack full of all kinds cost us about 
 twenty-five cents. Sometimes we could buy 
 bread from them too, and butter. Often we 
 had only triscuit with our stew, or even 
 nothing at all. 
 
 Lucky stew is, in its own right, a triumph 
 of the imagination. But there is no law against 
 dessert. And for dessert in the open wild 
 berries are best, small, perfect lyrics made by 
 the collaboration of sun and rain and sweet 
 earth. No wild strawberries can be better 
 than those of Maine and New Brunswick. 
 They are borne in abundance on long, fair 
 stems glistening with dew, wearing a flame 
 color unquenched by it. I have slept where I 
 could gather them for my petit dejeuner 
 without rising. I remember an upland fallow 
 
44 The Dingbat of Arcady 
 
 in New Hampshire where the blueberries, 
 smoky, mild, uncloying, are cause enough 
 for grace after meat. I have torn hands and 
 hair without regret in thickets on steep and 
 stony hillsides in order to get raspberries, 
 red and black. On the banks of the Tobique 
 I have picked and eaten the rare, winy, and 
 beautiful sand-cherry or beach-plum. It is 
 lovely to look at, growing on long, graceful 
 sprays that spring out of the sand and lean 
 to it again. The flavor is zestful and romantic. 
 I have eaten the small wintergreen berry as 
 one eats an after-dinner mint. But the hap- 
 piest days of adventure have been associated 
 with blackberries. When we were floating 
 down the Willamette in The Dingbat of 
 Arcady they kept us fed for several days, 
 once, when we could get no other food. 
 
 We had left the town of Salem behind us 
 without' buying much food, for we had found 
 out that it was cheaper to make our purchases at 
 farms near the river. But for one reason or 
 another, after leaving Salem, we found few 
 farmers with food to sell. Also we were held 
 up by bad weather and forced to travel slowly. 
 Therefore, for a stretch of the river before we 
 reached Newberg, we lived on strictly limited 
 
The Dingbat of Arcady 45 
 
 rations. There came a day when we had 
 only tea for breakfast with sugar and no milk, 
 flanked (if I may use that elaborate expression) 
 with one small piece of triscuit each. We 
 broke fast thus lightly at dawn, for we were 
 eager to be off toward Newberg and good food. 
 
 At about two o'clock that afternoon, after 
 fasting all day, we saw a farm near the water's 
 edge. I scrambled up the bank, cutting and 
 scratching arms and legs on stones and thistles. 
 I ran across a small meadow to the house. I 
 was met at the door by a hearty old lady who 
 seemed to be of Scandinavian origin. I asked 
 her if she had any vegetables to sell to two 
 hungry campers. 
 
 "I haf a onion,'' she said, '*but I want him 
 for my dinner." 
 
 *'Have you any fruit?" 
 
 '1 haf a apple." 
 
 She wanted **him" also for her dinner. She 
 explained, as well as she could, that her farm 
 was managed for her by her brothers who 
 owned a neighboring farm farther inland and 
 grew all the fruit and vegetables needed for 
 both households, bringing her a supply of 
 necessaries whenever they drove over to the 
 river. There must have been a hungry glitter 
 in my eyes, for she looked at me steadily a 
 
46 The Dingbat of Arcady 
 
 moment, thinking. Then, with a wrinkly- 
 smile, she said, 
 
 "You eat blackberry?'' 
 
 I was almost ready to eat hay, or grass 
 like Nebuchadnezzar. I assented eagerly. She 
 pointed across the pasture to a patch of heavy 
 vines hanging in a great clump in full sunlight, 
 twinkling with beady black fruit. 
 
 "Eat all you want and take all you want. 
 Too many here," she said. 
 
 I thanked her with an enthusiasm which 
 must have puzzled her. Then I ran down the 
 bank and hallooed to Jim, bidding him bring 
 something up in which to carry berries. In 
 a minute he was beside me, and he brought 
 a big piece of newspaper in which some of our 
 clothing had been wrapped. Together we 
 hurried over to the clump of berry vines. We 
 set the paper down and began to eat. 
 
 For about fifteen minutes we picked and 
 swallowed without conversation. I had never 
 liked blackberries much before, but these were 
 the best I had ever eaten, in prime condition, 
 large, plump with juices from the rains re- 
 cently fallen, warm and sugary as a result 
 of several days of hot sunshine. They melted 
 away in our mouths by tens and dozens. 
 
 When we had eaten very nearly as many 
 
The Dingbat of Arcady 47 
 
 as was possible, quite as many as was wise, 
 we picked a plentiful provision to carry with 
 us. We must have put nearly a peck into that 
 newspaper. Then, with our treasure, we went 
 back to The Dingbat, 
 
 The berries agreed with us well, which was 
 fortunate, for we got little else to eat for 
 several days. Late that afternoon we did 
 come upon a dairy farm, and bought a quart 
 of rich cream. But the farmer would sell us 
 nothing else. For dinner, therefore, we had 
 blackberries swimming in that cream, with 
 plenty of sugar. More elaborate meals might 
 taste worse. 
 
 While we were eating thus, poetically, on a 
 stretch of sand in a wild and wonderful curve 
 of the river, with great firs rising on hills 
 well away from the shore, it began to rain. 
 It was late. We did not want to travel in 
 the rain and get wet just at sundown. Nor 
 were we sure that we could find a better 
 place to camp even if we went on. So we 
 pulled The Dingbat up onto the beach and 
 tied her. Then, since we had no tent, since 
 the friendly firs were far away, we were hard 
 put to it for protection. However, we took 
 the ever useful strip of canvas which had 
 served as a cover for our blankets, strung 
 
48 The Dingbat of Arcady 
 
 it over a rope tied between two saplings about 
 two feet above the earth, and pegged out the 
 corners, thereby improvising a small, low 
 tent. It was almost satisfactory. I say 
 "almost" advisedly. For if our feet were far 
 enough under cover to be dry, our faces had 
 to be out in the night getting wet. If our 
 faces were dry, our feet suffered. This was 
 simply the driest of several wet ways of 
 spending the night. We took half a dozen 
 sticks of dry wood under cover with us, that 
 we might be sure of a fire in the morning. 
 We took the remainder of our cream under 
 cover too, that it might not be diluted and 
 spoiled. Then, although sand is a test of the 
 camper when used as a bed, we slept reason- 
 ably well. 
 
 In the morning we built our fire, made tea, 
 and ate the rest of our cream and some more 
 berries. At noon we lunched on berries 
 again, having found no place where we could 
 make purchases. Toward sundown of another 
 day, wearily and hungrily, Jim pulled The 
 Dingbat into a little cove near a point where 
 the river widens and where we could see two 
 or three small cottages on the bank. He left 
 me in the boat to watch our belongings while 
 he went ashore to forage. 
 
The Dingbat of Arcady 49 
 
 Perhaps the saints are right about the 
 value of fasting. Perhaps the ethereal diet 
 of the week just past had fed my spirit. I 
 do not know. But I know that while I sat in 
 The Dingbat and watched the moon rise above 
 dark firs on the other side of the river, while 
 the sky was still blue with day, a mood of 
 wonder and worship came upon me. The 
 lapping of water against my boat, a long, 
 seductive, fascinating rhythm, lulled to rest 
 all bodily longing, all desire for any food but 
 beauty. It was one of the fine moments of 
 realization that come to all of us, when speech 
 is impossible unless it is the speech of poetry 
 already made and stored in the mind against 
 the time of need. 
 
 It was the fir grove, or the moon, I think, 
 that made my mood vocal for me, for I re- 
 membered "The Song of Conn the FooF' by 
 Fannie Stearns Davis and the words came 
 to my lips inevitably. 
 
 "I will go up the mountain after the moon, 
 She is caught in a dead fir-tree. 
 Like a great pale apple of silver and pearl, 
 Like a great pale apple is she." 
 
 While I was murmuring to myself after the 
 happy manner of poets and lunatics, I looked 
 
50 The Dingbat of Arcady 
 
 away from the moon a minute and across 
 the glossy top of the river. There, mysterious 
 as if guided by an invisible Charon, a huge, 
 flat-bottomed rowboat was coming toward 
 me, propelled by a pair of oars longer than 
 those Jim used in The Dingbat. When it 
 drew nearer I saw that the Charon in charge 
 was a little girl about ten years old. She was 
 attended by several small brothers and sis- 
 ters. She pulled alongside and stared at me 
 solemnly for a minute or two. I stared sol- 
 emnly at her. Then, realizing that her ap- 
 pearance had not spoiled my happy mood, 
 I resolved to share it with her. I found that 
 I could speak to these shy little strangers 
 without losing the sense of wonder that had 
 been large in my mind when they appeared. 
 They had become a part of it. 
 
 I asked them if they liked poetry and they 
 admitted that they did, vaguely, perhaps with 
 misgivings, but politely nevertheless. The 
 idea seemed to be that they were willing to 
 like it, though not perfectly sure that they 
 had ever heard any. Then, because I was 
 afraid that they would not ask me to say any 
 poetry for them, I offered to do it. With 
 grave courtesy they permitted me to begin. 
 
 I repeated "The Song of Conn the Fool.'' 
 
The Dingbat of Arcady 5 1 
 
 Not a sound broke the music of the lines 
 unless it was the lapping of ripples against 
 the boats. Five small faces looked at me in- 
 tently, as I pointed to the white moon above 
 the fir-trees. When I had finished the little 
 girl drew a long breath. Her small brother 
 piped, 
 
 "Say another!" 
 
 They had liked it! There was no stopping 
 me then. I said "Souls" by Fannie Stearns 
 Davis, after explaining carefully that they 
 are a part of the mental anatomy usually 
 discussed in church and Sunday School, but 
 that they have an independent existence 
 outside of these excellent institutions. Then 
 I repeated "The Cloud" by Sara Teasdale 
 and many another lyric. My audience re- 
 mained soberly interested, hardly loquacious 
 in the intervals between poems. 
 
 Time passed and Jim returned with food 
 at last — eggs, bread, butter, vegetables. We 
 crossed the river to camp where there were 
 no houses, cooked our dinner, ate it, and 
 slept deeply. We had promised the children 
 to see them in the morning when we went 
 back to the httle settlement for more food. 
 
 After breakfast back we went, eager to 
 secure supplies to carry with us on our way. 
 
52 The Dingbat of Arcady 
 
 At the end of the path leading to the cove 
 we met the Httle girl who had been in charge 
 of the rowboat the night before. She had seen 
 us coming. She had picked a pail of logan- 
 berries for us. She offered them in appealing 
 silence. Then and there I put my hand into 
 the pail and drew it out full of the rosy fruit, 
 pungent, refreshing and fragrant as only 
 loganberries can be. 
 
 Together we went up the path to meet her 
 small brothers and sisters, and to greet her 
 mother who lived in one of the cottages. It 
 was low and weary-looking, that cottage, 
 almost ready to bend its vertical lines to- 
 gether and slump upon the earth. In the 
 door stood the mother of the children who 
 had been my audience, a tired, kind-seeming 
 woman. She came out to meet us. 
 
 "Are you the lady who recited for the 
 children?" 
 
 I admitted that I was and wondered whether 
 I was to be scolded. 
 
 "They didn't go to sleep till midnight for 
 talking about it," she said. *'I couldn't make 
 'em stop." 
 
 *T am afraid you don't like me very much 
 if I have kept your children awake," said I, 
 apologetically, with vivid memories of my 
 
The Dingbat of Arcady 53 
 
 own mother's feelings when any of her six 
 would not slumber. But this mother re- 
 assured me. 
 
 *'Would you say the poetry for me?" she 
 asked wistfully. 
 
 What a chance! Of course I w^ould. She 
 sat down on the sloping steps of her porch 
 and gathered her brood around her. I stood 
 in broad sunlight in the path below. My 
 hair was done in a tight, ugly knot. My face 
 and hands were stained with the juice of 
 loganberries. I wore a khaki skirt dingy 
 with smoke from many fires and an old shirt 
 of my husband's with the collar loose at the 
 throat and the sleeves chopped off informally 
 at the elbows. A city audience would have 
 stopped and looked at me, but would not have 
 listened with any degree of respect. My 
 audience by the riverside listened with plea- 
 sure. And never have I found greater pleasure 
 in speaking the lines of a poem. I said every- 
 thing that I could remember. 
 
 When my programme came to an end the 
 mother went into the house and brought me 
 a thank-offering, a dozen cucumbers, a loaf 
 of fresh bread, a small pat of butter, carrots 
 and lettuce. She would take no money for 
 them. So, with peace in our hearts, we thanked 
 
54 T^he Dingbat of Arcady 
 
 one another for such gifts as we had been able 
 to give. Then Jim and I got into The Dingbat 
 once more and pushed slowly out into the 
 current. Five little figures stood at the top 
 of the bank to see us off. We waved to them 
 as long as we could. Then the river bent and 
 we passed away from them, probably for- 
 ever. I have earned my bread, and also my 
 loganberries, in many ways; but never have 
 they tasted sweeter than then, when I earned 
 them by sharing poetry. 
 
 Sometimes when I look back on sane, de- 
 lightful meals eaten by the waterways and 
 on the open road I am amused by Walter de 
 la Mare's little rhyme — 
 
 "It*s a very odd thing— 
 As odd as can be — 
 That whatever Miss T. eats 
 Turns into Miss T." 
 
 That is the strange thing about food, the 
 metamorphosis. Shakespeare was made of 
 flour and green herbs and the flesh of beasts. 
 The greatest living American may be made of 
 buckwheat pancakes for all that we know 
 to the contrary. Ambrosia eaten by swine 
 would become swine. Though we dine on 
 
The Dingbat of Arcady 55 
 
 roses we are not necessarily sweet. The jack- 
 in-the-pulpit for supper would not make 
 preachers of us. And yet — 
 
 We are changed by our food. Tiresome, 
 conventional kinds of food do not freshen 
 us as does the clean, wild, simple food of 
 field and forest. Of course, in every com- 
 munity nowadays are dietetic dogmatists who 
 would eat old automobiles if they suppo^sed 
 that the essential calories would be in them 
 in soluble form. There are cultists who 
 despise food because it is matter. If it were 
 not for the stubborn fact of hunger, they 
 would not eat. Finally, there are mentally 
 dyspeptic individuals who devour Freud with- 
 out being able to digest him, when they should 
 be eating apples. 
 
 I never have enjoyed camping trips with 
 large numbers of people, but when I think 
 of all these poor souls I am filled with a 
 womanly desire to snatch them up and spirit 
 them away into the woods or into farm coun- 
 try, on such a trip as Jim and I have taken 
 together. I would take them where calories, 
 cults, and psychoanalysis are forgotten and 
 where every animal and every person, in all 
 honesty and dignity, is interested in food. 
 After making them all exceedingly hungry. 
 
56 The Dingbat of Arcady 
 
 after fasting and discipline^ I should like to 
 build the world's finest camp fire for them 
 and make lucky stew. 
 
 On such fare we have lived, Jim and I, 
 when we have left the towns behind us and 
 gone out on the roads and rivers adventuring. 
 On such food we have thriven. And nothing 
 could induce us, I think, to go camping with 
 tht-^usual luggage train of tin cans accom- 
 panied by many people who think that camp- 
 ing means beans. It is not in that way that 
 we desire to be fed by the open road. But to 
 live clean and hard, to get the sharp savor of 
 wild food in sufficient quantities when we can, 
 or, where there are homes, to be social and 
 neighborly in the breaking of bread, is to 
 have food and drink most exquisite and satis- 
 fying. By such food we are changed. . . . 
 
 Fed and changed in this manner, we floated 
 on down the widening and deepening stream 
 until we reached a point just a few miles 
 above Oregon City. A great fall spans the 
 river at that point and to pass it and go on 
 down one must go through the locks. We 
 knew this, and when we were near enough 
 to reach the dam by eight hours or so of hard 
 rowing, we made inquiries and were told that 
 if we could get to the locks before five o'clock 
 
The Dingbat of Arcady 57 
 
 we could go through that day. Jim did his 
 best, pulling hard on the oars all that morning 
 and afternoon. We did not stop to buy food, 
 but ate the last of our bread for luncheon 
 and relied on being able to cook some potatoes 
 — all we had in our sack — when dinner time 
 came. All day we hurried down stream. 
 
 After the long hours in the vivid sun we 
 heard the roaring of the falls below us. Riffles 
 sing soprano and rapids chant in alto and 
 tenor, but great falls boom in basso prof undo. 
 The current quickened perceptibly as we 
 bore to the left, hugging the shore as we had 
 been advised to do. Faster and faster we 
 moved. We got into the swift guard-locks 
 stream. Jim stopped pulling and perspiring, 
 his only care now to keep the boat to the left 
 and close to land. Ahead of us we saw the 
 gates of the locks. At the right, between the 
 dam and the locks, was a paper mill, evidently 
 running on a night shift. At the left of the 
 locks was a perpendicular bluff about ten 
 feet high. We went on and soon brought up 
 hard against the gates of the locks. They 
 were closed. What to do next we did not 
 know. We hallooed. 
 
 At first nothing happened. Then a man, 
 coming out of the mill at the right, saw us. 
 
58 The Dingbat of Arcady 
 
 He said that the gates would not be opened 
 until eight o*clock next morning when a large 
 boat would go through. We could not pass 
 until then. At once we realized our plight. 
 BlufF to the left of us, gates in front of us, 
 falls to the right of us volleying and thunder- 
 ing! Behind us was a current up which only 
 motor power could have pulled The 'Dingbat, 
 We could sleep in her, perhaps, in the shadow 
 of the mill, but that would mean going with- 
 out dinner for our potatoes were still as raw 
 as when they were dug. The thought was 
 disconcerting. The kind man who had dis- 
 covered us realized our distress. 
 
 "You'll have to spend the night here if you 
 want to stay by your boat and your goods,'' 
 he said. *'But wait a minute. Til speak to 
 the boss." 
 
 The boss came out and looked us over. 
 
 **You have your wife along," he said to 
 Jim, meditatively. 
 
 Jim admitted what was obvious. 
 
 "Well," said the boss, with a hospitable 
 wave of the hand, as if he were welcoming 
 us to the dear old Waldorf-Astoria, "well, 
 if you can get up to it, you can spend the night 
 in my pile of junk!" 
 
 We followed the gesture with our eyes and 
 
The Dingbat of Arcady 59 
 
 noticed what we had not seen before, several 
 heaps of shavings on top of the bluff at the 
 left and three sections of huge iron pipe. Each 
 section must have been about seven feet 
 long and six feet in diameter. They might 
 have been sewer pipes for a large city. Jim 
 looked at me with a gleam of intelligence in 
 his eyes and I answered with an understand 
 ing gleam. It could be done. 
 
 *'We'll have pipe dreams to-night,'* said Jim. 
 
 Thereupon we thanked the boss and ac- 
 cepted his offer. He grinned and told the 
 kind man who had discovered us to help us 
 up the bluff. This friendly soul turned Jut 
 to be the night watchman for the mill, just 
 come on duty. He crossed a high bridge from 
 the mill to the bluff and told us to pull over 
 to the left. This we did and Jim threw our 
 long rope to him. He pulled us up stream 
 a little way and into a niche where the current 
 was not felt. Then he tied the rope to a tree 
 on the bank above us. Jim managed to get 
 our blankets and other necessaries hoisted 
 up to him by the use of oars and another 
 rope. Then, with some assistance, he scram- 
 bled up himself. Finally, the two men to- 
 gether hauled me up, bumping and scraping 
 like a clumsy bundle. We were landed. 
 
6o The Dingbat of Arcady 
 
 After that all went well. We took armfuls 
 of shavings from the heaps near at hand — 
 refuse from the pulp mill — and we spread 
 them thickly on the bottom of the interior 
 of one of the sections of pipe. On the shavings 
 we spread our blankets, all but one which hung 
 over the back of our strange house. The 
 canvas covered the front opening in a similar 
 fashion. Our shelter was ready for us. 
 
 In front of the front door we sat down and 
 built a fine little fire of shavings and small 
 blocks of wood. We cooked our raw potatoes, 
 a plentiful if somewhat plain dinner. W^hile 
 we were eating the night watchman came 
 over to smoke a social pipe and chat with 
 Jim. He told us, as men often do in the 
 open w^orld, the story of his adventures. 
 They made ours seem rather tame. Once he 
 had rolled down a mountain-side on the back 
 of his horse, breaking so many bones that he 
 could not count them all. He had been unable 
 to work for a year after that. But now he was 
 fairly well mended and glad to have his quiet 
 job. He was a zestful man, quick to get the 
 sweet of life, and therefore good company. 
 He told us that we would be perfectly safe in 
 our queer house, that the men who worked in 
 the mill were a decent lot and would not 
 
The Dingbat of Arcady 6 1 
 
 bother us. He bade us call him, however, if 
 we were in need of any kind of assistance. 
 The shift of workers would change once in 
 the night, he said, and we would hear men 
 coming and going, but all would be well. 
 He shook the dead ashes from his pipe and 
 left us. 
 
 Then we crept into one of the strangest 
 shelters ever inhabited by a teacher and a 
 poet. We rested well. If you should ever be 
 troubled with insomnia, I suggest that you 
 find a large, clean, iron pipe on a bank above 
 a river, put shavings in it, spread your blan- 
 kets out thereon, eat a dinner of plain boiled 
 potatoes, turn in early, and find your cure! 
 
 Early the next morning The Dingbat fol- 
 lowed the large boat through the locks and 
 was left below the dam, floating securely on 
 that portion of the Willamette River which 
 is said to be "bottomless." Every lake and 
 stream we know has an alleged '^bottomless" 
 place. At some spot known to small boys 
 and ancient romancers every pond and river 
 pours its floods through the earth to the Anti- 
 podes or draws them thence! Having lis- 
 tened to such tales alongshore, I used to 
 tremble when we went gliding over these dark 
 abysses. I did not care to sink through this 
 
62 The Dingbat of Arcady 
 
 perforated sphere, only to emerge damp and 
 bedraggled in some foreign land where I 
 should be unable to speak the language! 
 Now I have learned to float upon such fabled 
 deeps without a tremor. There must be fairy 
 tales! 
 
 We crossed the "bottomless" part of our 
 stream and made for the mouth of the little 
 Clackamas River which pours into the Wil- 
 lamette at a sharp angle to it just below the 
 dam. We had planned to go up the Clackamas 
 in search of fish. 
 
 The stream was brisk and beautiful though 
 not very deep at the mouth. We got out of 
 The Dingbat and walked, pushing and pulling 
 her up to the first sharp bend. On the inside 
 of that bend was a grove and on the outside, 
 on which side we stayed, was a bit of flat 
 country with a few scrubby trees and bushes 
 in which to hide our camp. We spent several 
 days there, resting, writing, and reading, but 
 we found no fish, — none except the poor, 
 dead eels that floated about in places where 
 the current was not swift and near the edges 
 of it. Why there should have been so many 
 dead eels I do not know, unless it is that 
 they die a natural death in the summer 
 season. Within walking distance were several 
 
The Dingbat of Arcady 63 
 
 farms and Jim made a daily trip to one or 
 another of them to get fresh drinking water 
 and provisions. 
 
 One day after he had gone on this errand, 
 I rambled aimlessly away from our camp and 
 down the bank of the stream. Perhaps I was 
 meditating a poem. Perhaps I was merely 
 rapt in the delight of being fallow-minded 
 for a while. At any rate, I totally forgot 
 that it was my duty to remain on guard over 
 our belongings. When I came to myself, like 
 the Prodigal Son, I turned back toward camp 
 and saw a sight that filled me with terror. 
 Between me and the clump of bushes where 
 our food and clothing were spread on the 
 ground were five or six large cows. 
 
 In spite of all that I had lived through 
 recently I was a city woman again, through 
 and through. Everything in me cried out 
 suddenly for asphalt and policemen. Here 
 was a primitive mystery. Bovine psychology 
 was something that I did not understand in 
 the least. Cows had no business in the woods 
 anyway. 
 
 I walked toward them anxiously, cautiously. 
 They lowered their horny heads and mooed. 
 Then they paused and gazed at me with a 
 vulgar curiosity all their own. One came 
 
64 The Dingbat of Arcady 
 
 toward me at a slow trot. It was enough. 
 I had a Smith and Wesson at my belt, but 
 I am an incorrigible pacifist. I fled. I forgot 
 that it was my bounden duty as a good sport 
 to protect the Lares and Penates of our 
 sylvan household. I climbed into the tallest 
 of the low willows on the bank. I remembered 
 with pride that I had never been afraid of 
 mice, but I realized with shame that I was 
 afraid of cows. It was another proof that it 
 is the unknown which terrifies. Mice I knew. 
 Even if a mouse ran across my foot I should 
 not be afraid. But if a cow — cows were 
 strangers. I climbed ignominiously. 
 
 For some time I sat on my perch and 
 trembled and caught my breath, not because 
 I continued to be afraid, but because I was 
 heavy and the branch slender. If I shifted 
 my weight even for a moment, I was obliged 
 to clutch the trunk of the tree firmly, for I 
 did not care to precipitate myself abruptly 
 into the ranks of the enemy. I disturbed the 
 gods with heathen petitions that the branch 
 would remain attached to the trunk until my 
 husband returned to rescue me. How ad- 
 mirable are husbands, I thought! What large, 
 strong, valiant, noble creatures! How I wished 
 that mine would return to me! 
 
The Dingbat of Arcady 65 
 
 The time for his return came, but he did 
 not come promptly. Never before had he 
 remained away so long. The cows were walk- 
 ing placidly across our neatly folded blankets 
 and snuffing at our piled-up clothing. I 
 roared at them. In vain. They knew me for 
 the coward that I was. It would be stretching 
 a point to say that they grinned, but I sus- 
 pected them of humor. I broke a branch 
 from my willow tree and threw it at them, 
 doing my worst in the way of a roar at the 
 same moment. One cow looked up at me 
 imperturbably and set her right forefoot 
 down in a package of shredded wheat biscuit. 
 Another set her left hind foot down with a 
 crash upon our one small mirror. 
 
 A woman's faith in man, or in any man, is 
 tested by the nature of her outcry in time of 
 trouble. I began to houhoo and halloo em- 
 phatically in the hope that my own Achilles, 
 my own Arthur, my own Jim of the strong 
 arm and ready wit would be on his homeward 
 way and hear. He was returning and he did 
 come to the rescue. He strode rapidly into 
 camp, carrying a great water jug in one hand 
 and bearing two large, well filled burlap sacks 
 on his shoulder. The cows gave one look at 
 his red, perspiring, but determined counte- 
 
66 The Dingbat of Arcady 
 
 nance and moved off with deliberate haste. 
 Jim set down the sacks, picked up a stick, 
 chased the cows into the open pasture whence 
 they had come, helped his silly lady down 
 out of the tremulous willow tree, scolded her 
 roundly for the havoc wrought, and then sat 
 down to rest. 
 
 When I had done what I could, in a truly 
 penitential state of mind, to set our dis- 
 ordered camp to rights, Jim remembered his 
 burlap sacks and he opened them with pride 
 and pleasure. One was filled with excellent 
 vegetables for lucky stew. The other jingled 
 and rattled. Out of it Jim took an egg-beater, 
 a large carving knife, a big iron frying-pan, 
 a measuring cup, and other long-needed cook- 
 ing utensils, all pretty well worn, but still in 
 usable condition. They had been given him 
 by the wife of the farmer of whom he bought 
 the vegetables. She had just bought a new 
 set. We had not bought any new things to 
 take the place of those brushed off the rear 
 pantry cupboard soon after our trip began. 
 What fun it would be to have these con- 
 venient trifles ! An iron frying-pan ! Now once 
 more, we could have fried eggs for breakfast. 
 As Friday said to Robinson Crusoe, "Oh, 
 happy, oh, glad!" 
 
The Dingbat of Arcady 67 
 
 It was onl)^ the next day that another 
 farmer gave Jim as many red plums as he 
 would pick from a heavily laden tree and 
 Jim brought them home to me in a burlap 
 sack. Not a cent would that farmer take 
 for them. Life had given him more than he 
 could use or sell. He would share with the 
 poor. 
 
 The sense of Hfe*s fruitfulness is one of 
 the joys of sojourning among farmers. It 
 makes receiving seem as blessed as giving, 
 or rather it transmutes both giving and re- 
 ceiving into one thing — sharing. A good 
 farmer can give away a dozen cucumbers with 
 a shy off-handedness that minimizes the im- 
 portance of the gift and yet does not minimize 
 the pleasure of it. He does not expect that 
 the bread which he scatters upon the waters 
 will return to him carefully spread with the 
 exquisite jam of worldly favors. He does not 
 tell us that he hopes his gift will improve 
 us. He gives no advice with it. He gives 
 simply, as nature gives, as the best poets 
 give, or he does not give at all. 
 
 After we left the Clackamas we received 
 no more gifts and had no more quaint expe- 
 riences for a number of days. We had come 
 to the most difficult and least agreeable part 
 
68 The Dingbat of Arcady 
 
 of our trip. We had to pass Portland and her 
 suburbs before we could go on into the 
 Columbia and find wild country again. The 
 river was busy and industrial. Large boats 
 cut through the waters leaving big waves in 
 their wake. No good camper is happy under 
 such conditions. We made all the speed we 
 could to get past. 
 
 We arrived at St. Johns one evening after 
 dark, very weary. We found a long beach, 
 none too clean, near a pier at which a Standard 
 Oil steamer was docked. In the darkness we 
 stopped, went ashore, made a small fire out 
 of rubbish and bits of broken boxes in a 
 place as secluded as possible, and cooked and 
 ate a light supper. Then the question before 
 us was where to sleep. We asked ourselves 
 whether we had better go on down stream 
 that night or wait until daybreak. If we had 
 not been tired we should have preferred to 
 go on. But we had been traveling since early 
 morning and needed rest. 
 
 Slowly and with great skill Jim worked 
 The 'Dingbat in among the big piles that sup- 
 ported the pier. We got well under it. Then 
 we moved out on the port side of the big 
 steamer so that she stood between us and any 
 waves that might roll in from the wake of 
 
The Dingbat of Arcady 69 
 
 passing boats. It was not pleasant to be 
 awakened in the night with The Dingbat 
 rocking madly under us and spray flying over 
 her sides. When we were safely hidden under 
 the pier, but near the steamer, we lay down 
 on the floor of The Dingbat^ pulled our canvas 
 over us, and slept. 
 
 So eager were we to be off and find green 
 country again that we awoke very early next 
 morning before the stars had left the sky. 
 As stealthily as if we were criminals trying 
 to escape a dire fate, Jim worked The Dingbat 
 out between the piles again and into the open 
 stream. At dawn we found a place where we 
 could cook breakfast and after that we went 
 on much refreshed. Since that night I have 
 had a new feeling of friendliness for big, ugly, 
 hard-working boats. I had traveled in them 
 before. But intimacy was reserved for the 
 night when I rested in the protection of a 
 big, strong, dark hulk. 
 
[IV] 
 
[IV] 
 
 It was not long after that that we turned 
 into the Willamette Slough, a poor relation 
 of the Willamette River, a sluggish and dirty 
 stream that crawls by inches into the superb 
 Columbia. The soul of the river was the soul 
 of a strong man, free and able to do brave 
 work in the world. The soul of the slough 
 was a spirit in prison. It was burdened with 
 all that the river cast into it and held back 
 by the power of the Columbia below it and 
 by the very slight bending of the ground under 
 it. Here was no laughter, no triumphing. 
 The surface was dull and under it was mud. 
 The people who lived on the banks differed 
 in sad and subtle ways from the people who 
 lived on the shores of the river above. But 
 I must not forget that it was here that we met 
 a man who helped us to believe in something 
 that we call ''salvation by mirth." 
 
 When I speak of ''salvation by mirth*' I 
 do not mean the solemnly persistent cheer- 
 fulness of Polyanna. I mean the clean, deep, 
 social happiness that begins out of doors, of 
 which John Masefield says, 
 
 "The days that make us happy make us wise." 
 
74 The Dingbat of Arcady 
 
 Salvation by faith and salvation by deeds 
 are as old as the Bhagavad-Gita, but salva- 
 tion by mirth, which has been needed as 
 long, may be new to owlish philosophers. 
 Perhaps only poets understand it. Jim and I 
 have met a few people on our wanderings 
 who seemed to be untouched by salvation by 
 faith and deeds, who might have accepted 
 salvation by mirth. One of them was the 
 fisherman we met on the bank of the slough. 
 
 At five o'clock in the afternoon, or there- 
 abouts, while we were looking for a place to 
 camp, we saw a small, dilapidated house-boat 
 moored beside a stretch of level land on which 
 were trees. At first we did not see the owner, 
 but, when we landed, we found him behind 
 his abode. 
 
 Like a wizard of old he stood near a wide, 
 high fire, a weird black figure seen through 
 the crimson of the climbing flames. Two big 
 tins (like Standard Oil tins) stood beside the 
 fire. From a third, in the middle of it, steam 
 came as from the caldron of a Merlin. The 
 wizard was a bearded man of middle age 
 and somewhat the worse for wear. He lacked 
 the sinister impressiveness usually attributed 
 to wizards by those who know them best. As 
 we drew nearer we saw that he was cutting 
 
The Dingbat of Arcady 75 
 
 up bits of orange-peel and tossing them into 
 his caldron. He threw in, also, a handful of 
 what looked like pickling spice — and was. 
 
 "May we camp here near your place over- 
 night?" asked Jim. 
 
 *'Sure/' he said, ^'anything you like." 
 
 We stood watching his alchemy. Curiosity 
 overcame me. 
 
 "What is it in the tin?" 
 
 "Water boilin' fer crayfish. Fm a cray- 
 fisherman." 
 
 He lifted the cover from one of the tins 
 at his side and showed us hundreds of "craw- 
 dads" creeping about in it. 
 
 "To-day's catch," he said, "First you catch 
 'em. Then you clean 'em. Then you boil 
 'em in salted water with peel and spices. 
 Then you cool 'em. Then sell 'em to restau- 
 rants in Portland. Fifty cents a half dozen. 
 Swells eat 'em. Ever try 'em?" 
 
 We admitted that we had not had that 
 pleasure. Then he sat down on an old stool, 
 picked a crayfish out of the tin full of them, 
 found the right flipper in its tail, gave it a 
 twist and a jerk, and dropped the little beast 
 Hmp and wilted into the steaming tin where 
 it reddened just as lobsters do. He worked 
 as fast as a woman hulling berries. 
 
76 The Dingbat of Arcady 
 
 '*Clean 'em and kill 'em same time," he 
 explained. 
 
 We retired as gracefully as possible from 
 the neighborhood of his fire and built one of 
 our own within sight and earshot. I put on 
 a pail of water to boil for we were to dine on 
 a dozen ears of green corn. While they cooked 
 Jim did the work of camp-making. Once 
 he called out to the crayfisherman. They 
 exchanged mild pleasantries. I began to 
 realize that the wizard had an unsatisfied 
 social streak in him. After watching us for a 
 while he picked out a dozen good crayfish 
 from his tin full of boiling ones and brought 
 them over to us. 
 
 "For your dinner/' he said. "Let 'em cool 
 first." 
 
 Then, for fear of being intrusive, perhaps, 
 he withdrew rapidly. 
 
 When our corn was cooked Jim took four 
 big, golden ears of it over to him with our 
 compliments and a bit of butter. He accepted 
 them all with an awkward pleasure that made 
 us feel sure that he was unaccustomed to 
 receiving gifts. He sat down beside his fire 
 to eat corn and crayfish. We sat down be- 
 side ours to eat crayfish and corn. And while 
 we were still eating the dusk deepened and 
 
The Dingbat of Arcady 77 
 
 we gradually lost sight of the wizard in a 
 light river mist. It was as if he had taken 
 the smoke of his fire and the steam from his 
 caldron and woven a gray, magic wall of them 
 around our camp in the trees. 
 
 We were up early the next morning and 
 the crayfisherman was up early too. He was 
 puttering around in a shabby old rowboat, 
 when Jim built our fire for breakfast. While 
 I was cooking he joined Jim and took him 
 over to show him the house-boat. Later I 
 learned how the conversation ran. Jerking 
 his thumb over his shoulder in my direction, 
 the crayfisherman said: 
 
 "I had a piece of calico myself once." 
 
 ''What happened to her?*' asked Jim. 
 
 With more than a touch of melodrama in 
 his manner the crayfisherman threw open the 
 door of his floating palace and pointed to 
 an old jacket, evidently a woman's, hanging 
 on the back of it. 
 
 *'Hern," he said. "She run away with 
 another man." 
 
 In the clear, hard light of the morning 
 our wizard was only a lonely man! We felt 
 vaguely sorry for him when we climbed into 
 The Dingbat and pulled slowly away from the 
 dilapidated house-boat across the murky ooze 
 
78 The Dingbat of Arcady 
 
 of the slough. Were we destined to hear more 
 of him later on ? 
 
 Steadily we rowed down the slough toward 
 St. Helens where it empties into the Co- 
 lumbia. Saturday came and we were eager 
 to get to the post office before it closed for 
 the week-end. We expected important mail. 
 So we struggled with an indifferent current 
 until about four o'clock in the afternoon. 
 Then we stopped and made inquiries. We 
 learned that St. Helens was not far from that 
 point as a cross-country walk, a matter of 
 only two or three miles, but that it was much 
 farther by boat because it was necessary to 
 go around a point of land jutting out into the 
 river. Also, walking was quicker than pulling 
 The Dingbat over the dead waters of the 
 slough. Therefore we took counsel together 
 and decided that I had better walk to St. 
 Helens for the mail. We could meet at the 
 town dock whither I could go after purchasing 
 food for supper. 
 
 I put on my slouch hat, my high, square- 
 toed boots, my belt and the holster that held 
 my Smith and Wesson. I set off at a good 
 pace through wooded country, seeking St. 
 Helens. The earth was springy under the 
 trees and grateful to the feet. I had been 
 
The 'Dingbat of Arcady 79 
 
 sitting still so many hours in The Dingbat 
 that just to be moving was a delight. I strode 
 along rapidly, walking as you can walk only 
 when you have been living in the open for 
 some time with clear skies over the top of 
 your mind. Presently I entered St. Helens 
 from the rear and saw the quaint little town 
 sloping down hill toward the river. I was ruddy 
 with health, exercise, pleasure, and sunburn. 
 I did not stop to consider how I looked. Nor 
 did I change my stride. I hurried on to what 
 seemed to be an important street of the town. 
 
 The first person I saw was a nice-looking 
 woman in an afternoon frock, white and speck- 
 less. She was carrying a letter as if she in- 
 tended to mail it. I caught up with her. 
 
 'Tardon me, madam, but where is the post 
 office?" 
 
 She was about to answer pleasantly, I 
 think, but before she could frame the words 
 she took one look at me. The smile stiffened 
 on her face. 
 
 "That way," she gasped, and ran in the 
 opposite direction as if for her life. No doubt, 
 after looking at my Smith and Wesson, she 
 wondered who this strange Boadicea could 
 be. I stood still long enough to blush for my 
 appearance and behavior. But it was thrilling 
 
8o The Dingbat of Arcady 
 
 too. I, who had been born and bred to the 
 dullness of bridge whist and the mild delights 
 of pink teas, was taking a Western village 
 by storm and putting the feminine population 
 to flight with one glance of my fiery eyes! 
 I knew the exultation of conquest and, for the 
 first time in my life, sympathized with Alex- 
 ander and Caesar. But I straightened my 
 hat, moderated my stride, subdued my ex- 
 pression into something more nearly approach- 
 ing the lady-like, and went to the post office 
 for my letters. My adventures were over for 
 that day. In due season I met Jim at the 
 town dock, we wandered oflF and found a 
 camping site, making plans together to cross 
 the Columbia and pull into the little Lewis 
 River next morning. We had been told that 
 we might find salmon-trout in it. But, as it 
 happened, we went back and forth across 
 the Columbia several times before we finally 
 settled in a camp on the Lewis. And one of 
 our crossings nearly made an end of the cruise 
 of The Dingbat sooner than we anticipated. 
 
 The Columbia is broad and deep near St. 
 Helens, a marvelous and mighty river. Over 
 it the winds blow from the ocean and the waves 
 on it arc hke the waves on the Great Lakes. 
 Sometimes waves and current together make 
 
The Dingbat of Arcady 8 1 
 
 the crossing difficult for little boats like ours. 
 But The Dingbat had behaved so well hitherto 
 that we did not realize the difficulties of 
 passing those ridges and hollows of heavy 
 water. We set out confidently enough. 
 
 We found that it was very slow going. The 
 oars moved clumsily in the wooden oarlocks 
 and w^e learned, almost at once, that The 
 Dingbat^ with no curved line in her anatomy, 
 was not suited to this new environment. Jim 
 got her into the middle of the stream and then 
 discovered that he was getting tired and 
 making poor progress. Just at that moment 
 a boat under motor power came up with us 
 and, seeing that we were having a hard pull, 
 offered us a tow. Gratefully we flung our 
 rope. We thought we had solved the problem 
 of getting across. Their engine started and 
 we felt ourselves moving swiftly after them 
 over the rough river. 
 
 For a few minutes all went well and then, 
 owing to some slight change of direction, the 
 larger boat pulled the bow of The Dingbat 
 straight through a wave. It covered our floor 
 with water and put us in great danger of 
 overturning at any moment. I screamed, 
 which was fortunate, for the man holding 
 our rope looked, saw what had happened 
 
82 The Dingbat of Arcady 
 
 dropped our rope at once, and had the engine 
 stopped that they might stand by and see 
 us through. Jim never lost his head for a 
 moment, but scrambled to the oars and pulled 
 The 'Dingbat about until she was head on 
 with the waves. He yelled to me to bail like 
 mad, but I did not need to be told. As the 
 water sloshed about from side to side, one 
 edge or the other would tip. Balancing 
 against the water with the weight of my body 
 as well as I could, I dipped out the water 
 as fast as possible with a pan fortunately 
 found on the floor. Every panful out made 
 us that much safer, but we were deep in the 
 water and any unusually heavy wave might 
 have overturned us. Slowly and steadily, 
 however, we pulled through the worst of the 
 waves and finally, dripping with the perspira- 
 tion of nervous excitement and with the water 
 that had nearly swallowed us, we reached 
 the shallows near the mouth of the Lewis 
 and stepped out, exhausted, on the shore. 
 The men in the motor boat who had tried to 
 help us and who had remained to see that 
 we were safe cheered for us and waved their 
 hats before they started their engine and went 
 on up the stream. 
 
 It may have been the next day, or the next. 
 
The Dingbat of Arcady 83 
 
 that we left St. Helens and went up the Co- 
 lumbia with some salmon fishermen to a gravel 
 bank where Indians used to fight long ago, 
 and where arrow-heads are still to be found. 
 We had luncheon together and then we all 
 hunted for arrow-heads. The fishermen would 
 not keep the ones they found, for they said 
 that they lived near enough to find others 
 at any time. They gave all they could find 
 to us, even though they believed that the 
 bits of shaped flint were worth good money. 
 While we were looking for arrow-heads they 
 told us a tale of a crayfisherman and his bride. 
 We wondered if it could possibly be the friendly 
 crayfisherman who had been kind to us. But we 
 could not tell for we had never known his name. 
 
 They told us that he had been married, 
 this crayfisherman, to a sweet young girl 
 from up the river, and that he had always 
 treated her well when he was sober. He would 
 drink with other men for the sociability of 
 the thing, however, and then go home roaring 
 and beat his little wife until she was in terror 
 of her life. Finally she fled to an old friend 
 of her father, who took her up the river to 
 her mother in his boat. Poor child, she did 
 not want another man. 
 
 Was this our crayfisherman, who might 
 
84 The Dingbat of Arcady 
 
 have accepted salvation by mirth if Fate had 
 offered it, who was doomed to a lonely life 
 in an old house-boat with crayfish for com- 
 rades and a woman*s jacket hanging on the 
 door? Had he talked with us freely because 
 the need of his soul was for speech, covering 
 the real reason for his loneliness because he 
 was sober at the time and could not bear to 
 look it in the face? Did he hold to his own 
 version of the story because it supported his 
 pride? Did he let the old jacket satisfy his 
 need of sentiment because he must have that 
 much tenderness in his life? We had no way 
 of knowing. There were many crayfishermen. 
 They talked as they felt. 
 
 It was not strange that he talked with us 
 freely. The hunger of the spirit for sympathy, 
 we have learned, is as common and as con- 
 stant as the hunger of the body for food. 
 But whereas people will seek the body*s food 
 in their own home gardens, many of them 
 have given up hope of finding the spirit's 
 food in their own home towns. Lacking an 
 efficient and sustaining religion, the neediest 
 are to be found on any wayside. They are 
 wistful mendicants. Although they carry no 
 begging bowls, you will not need to be told 
 who they are if you wish to give an alms for 
 
The Dingbat of Arcady 85 
 
 your souFs sake. And a Croesus of spiritual 
 riches, I believe, could travel the wide world 
 over and be received in palace and hovel 
 alike without money or price for the giving 
 of this one good gift of sympathy. It would 
 have to be real sympathy, however, austere 
 and strong and full of faith. It could not be 
 a mawkish sentimentality. It could not be 
 a mask worn for a purpose. It would have 
 to be akin to the sympathy of Christ who first 
 told this need of our kind and taught this 
 way of giving. 
 
 People sometimes talk more freely with 
 strangers than with their neighbors. The 
 cherished confession is for those who will carry 
 it far away. Our crayfisherman was excep- 
 tional only in that, being a man, his confession 
 was tragic. Men usually regale us with tales 
 of fights, floods, fires, and other adventures. 
 Women tell us of their sorrows — why the wee 
 baby died of the croup and how it feels to 
 have your man out of a job. Children tell 
 everything. And we who listen find our own 
 hearts quickened, our own lives deepened and 
 strengthened by the sharing of simple, uni- 
 versally known experiences. 
 
 We are changed by beauty, too. Never did 
 
8 6 The Dingbat of Arcady 
 
 I know what beauty could mean to me until 
 I stood one day in a field of blowing thistle- 
 down. I had been beating about in the brush 
 by the riverside, looking for berries, when I 
 came upon a clearing, a circular patch like 
 a fairy's ring. Upon the earth stood many 
 thistle plants, thorny Puritans, stiff in prickly 
 rectitude. Above them in a mild sky floated 
 millions of the lovely souls of them, light and 
 exquisitely white where purple blooms had 
 died, millions of Ariels climbing up shafts of 
 sunlight into Heaven, and then gently sliding 
 down again. They rested on my eyelids, they 
 caught in my hair, they glistened silverly 
 on the gray wool of my sweater. I did not 
 touch one of them myself, and yet I have kept 
 them all. If I could have prayed then, I 
 should have besought Apollo to make me like 
 the seed of the thistle. For, although I had 
 known them all my life, it was as if I had 
 never seen thistles before. 
 
 The reason for this new joy in old beauty 
 was not far to seek. We had acquired some 
 small measure of that hardness of body and 
 clarity of mind that belong to the life we were 
 living. We had cut ourselves loose from the 
 multifarious cares of our ordinary lives and 
 had given ourselves up to learning the ways 
 
The Dingbat of Arcady 87 
 
 of sun and wind and rain. Our senses had 
 been quickened and made keen. Only a few 
 things seemed important — food, rest, beauty, 
 and worship. For the first time in my Hfe 
 since my childhood, I was able to receive 
 the gift of the world's loveliness in the spirit 
 in which it is given, to let beauty be a growth 
 and a discipline. 
 
 It is something merely to perceive beauty. 
 It is enough to balk vulgar irrelevance. Once 
 upon a time I went for a drive with a woman 
 who could not see it as it actually existed 
 before her eyes because her mind was full of 
 stereotyped images of it as she had read of it 
 in books. We were driving around the top 
 of a high hill, looking across a valley to moun- 
 tains that were a perfectly honest rosy pink 
 in the distance. 
 
 "Pink mountains!** I exclaimed. 
 
 "Mountains are purple and hills are blue,*' 
 she said solemnly, as if she were rebuking 
 me for a minor lapse in morals, "and who 
 ever heard of pink mountains, you funnv 
 woman?** 
 
 For her the lights and shadows had fallen 
 in vain. The sunset had wasted time in being 
 original. It might as well have copied yes- 
 terday's. Looking up at the aurora borealis 
 
8 8 The Dingbat of Arcady 
 
 from a chilly New England valley, looking 
 down on the apocalypse of the Grand Canyon, 
 she would have thought only the conventional 
 thing, and she would have said it. True lovers 
 keep silence. For devout worship she would 
 have substituted a counterfeit politeness, the 
 cant, the affectation, the lush nonsense that 
 men all too often bring to the discussion of 
 sacred things. 
 
 Yet it might have been otherwise if she 
 could have lived out of doors for a month or 
 two, sharing William Watson's "overflowing 
 sun." She might have learned to pray for a 
 soul as beautiful as a far hill under rosy light. 
 For the love of beauty, normally, begins out 
 of doors. The race has been born into that 
 growing and blowing beauty, and out of it; 
 whereas the beauty of cities, of man's intellect, 
 of spiritual prowess, changes from generation 
 to generation. These are still new things in 
 our ancient world. 
 
 Living in the open, moreover, makes us 
 gloriously jealous, after a while, of the lovely 
 individualities of all things, makes us eager 
 for communion with them, makes us long 
 to wear upon our souls the images of such 
 things as we have loved. To the people of 
 the town all rivers are alike. The camper 
 
The Dingbat of Arcady 89 
 
 knows that no two rivers are alike. I have 
 seen the utter blueness of the St. Lawrence 
 under a sunny sky. I have seen the Brule 
 rushing headlong through Wisconsin, yellow- 
 brown in the spring. I have seen the placid 
 "Isis" near "Folly Bridge" in Oxford, and 
 the dark, menacing grandeur of the Columbia. 
 But the little Lewis River which we entered 
 when we had crossed the Columbia, has as 
 much character of its own as any greater 
 stream that I know. The cloudy sage-green 
 of its waters I have seen nowhere else. 
 
[V] 
 
[V] 
 
 tv'E. FISHED all day without any luck when 
 we first entered the Lewis. We pulled up 
 stream as far as the fork where the salmon- 
 trout were said to be. But we caught none. 
 At sundown we dropped down to the mouth 
 again, rather disgruntled. We saw a house- 
 boat of the scow type securely chained to 
 piles in the bank and asked the fisherman 
 who lived in it for permission to camp on 
 shore, but near his residence, for the night. 
 He seemed surprised by the request for he 
 did not own the land, but he said that it 
 would probably be all right. He was glad 
 to have neighbors. He and his wife and 
 partner, he said, would be at hand if we should 
 need anything. 
 
 In a grove at a short distance we built 
 our fire and made lucky stew with plain 
 potatoes. In about half an hour they were 
 ready and we began to eat. Then we saw our 
 fisherman friend coming toward us, balancing 
 something in each uplifted hand, like a waiter 
 in a cheap restaurant. When he arrived it 
 was evident that he held a pan of hot bis- 
 
94 T^he 'Dingbat of Arcady 
 
 cuits in one hand and a hot apple pie in the 
 other. 
 
 "The wife thought you'd Hke 'em for sup- 
 per," he said. 
 
 Did we hke them? For weeks we had Hved 
 chiefly on lucky stew and triscuit. Those 
 biscuits and that pie vanished quickly. After 
 eating them we went over to the house-boat 
 to thank Mrs. Fisherman. She and her 
 husband and his fishing partner all welcomed 
 us cordially and bade us sit down on their 
 pier and talk a bit. We did. 
 
 The two men owned and operated a motor 
 fishing-boat on the Columbia, where they 
 caught the big salmon for the market. They 
 asked what luck we had had with salmon- 
 trout up the Lewis. We admitted that we 
 had had no luck at all. 
 
 **What bait did you use?" they asked. 
 
 ''Worms," we replied innocently. 
 
 They laughed heartily. 
 
 "You won't get 'em that way. Gotta use 
 salmon eggs." 
 
 Then we learned the complexities of fish- 
 ing for salmon-trout. They feed on the eggs 
 of the big salmon. First the fisherman takes 
 a mass of these eggs and pickles them in 
 granulated sugar. When they have stood in 
 
The Dingbat of Arcady 95 
 
 sugar until they are firm and will not spoil 
 easily he puts a mass of them in a small sack 
 with some stones. He throws this sack over- 
 board into the middle of the river just above 
 the place where he expects to fish. Then he 
 baits a long line with two or three salmon 
 eggs, puts on a heavy sinker, throws it in on 
 the down-stream side of the sack, rows back 
 to shore with his reel, and waits. 
 
 That is what we did and it was not long 
 before we were rewarded for our pains. We 
 pulled in a lovely, leaping, silver fish that 
 flashed in and out of the water as we reeled, 
 flickering like money in the sun. He was 
 clear pink, like salmon, under his silver sur- 
 face, and sweeter than any other trout I ever 
 ate. After that the day that brought us one 
 or two — a good meal — was a red-letter day 
 for us. 
 
 Mr. Fisherman and his wife and partner 
 proved to be friendly, enjoyable human 
 beings and got up a jolly fishing party for us. 
 They came to breakfast with us first, under 
 our tree, where we made pancakes for them 
 and camp coffee. It was a feast. Then we 
 all piled into their fishing-boat and in it 
 crossed the Columbia and went back again 
 into the Willamette Slough. Our friends took 
 
96 The Dingbat of Arcady 
 
 us to a muddy backwater where catfish were 
 plentiful, the kind called bullheads in the 
 East. In about an hour the five of us had 
 caught sixty-five good fish and we thought 
 that would be enough for one day. We ate 
 the luncheon we had carried with us, rested 
 and talked religion while the men smoked 
 pipes, and, in the afternoon, went home in 
 triumph with our catch. Twenty-eight fish 
 were given us as our share and our friends 
 taught Jim how to skin them. The bullhead, 
 to be good, must be skinned. 
 
 We pulled The Dingbat up the stream to 
 a camping place near a farm where we hoped 
 to get milk, water, and vegetables to eat with 
 our fish. I went up to the house and secured 
 these necessaries from the young farmer's 
 wife. When I returned with my purchases 
 the young man who owned the farm was stand- 
 ing on the bank above Jim, looking down at 
 our catch hungrily. 
 
 "Do you hke bullheads?" I asked. 
 
 "You bet!" 
 
 "Have some for your dinner," said Jim, 
 quickly. 
 
 The young farmer demurred politely. He 
 hadn't meant anything like that, he said. 
 But we urged him to take some fish, for so 
 
The Dingbat of Arcady 97 
 
 many people had given us food that we were 
 eager to do a little giving ourselves. Finally 
 he agreed to take a few bullheads up to the 
 house for his wife. A little later she appeared 
 on the bank, bringing us a few ears of green 
 corn, a handful of tender cucumbers, lettuce 
 and vinegar to go with it, and a small pitcher 
 of sweet cream. She suggested, also, that I go 
 with her to the berry patch in the pasture 
 and get fruit for dessert. I did, and we had 
 the first real two-course dinner of our trip. 
 After dinner we went up to their cottage 
 and spent the evening in their tiny living- 
 room, admiring a fine Oregon baby and talk- 
 ing of nothing in particular, which is one of 
 the best things to talk about when one's 
 feelings are social. 
 
 Making friends with a small family — 
 father, mother, and baby, is a simple matter. 
 Making friends with a- large family and the 
 pets of a large family is a more ambitious 
 undertaking. We discovered that a few days 
 later when we went up the Lewis to the fork 
 again for salmon-trout. We spent the day 
 fishing and swimming and then, when we 
 were floating down again to our camping 
 place, we came suddenly upon ten children. 
 
98 The 'Dingbat of Arcady 
 
 three dogs, two cows, and several pigs all in 
 the water together near the shallow edge of 
 the stream. (Just below that point people 
 drank the river water and thought it was 
 quite pure!) The boys were wearing old over- 
 alls cut to knee length and loose, but hitched 
 to them with most discreet *'gallusses/' The 
 girls had on old dresses. The youngest chil- 
 dren wore shreds of underwear. It was 
 sweltering hot and they were all blissfully 
 happy to be sloshing about in the cool water. 
 The cows stood knee-deep. The dogs swam 
 after sticks. The pigs wallowed with the 
 babies. A boy about twelve years of age, 
 called Harry, seemed to be in charge of them 
 all. 
 
 Jim and I had on bathing suits, for we had 
 been swimming earlier in the day. Moved 
 by a queer impulse, Jim cried, 
 **My wife will race you, Harry!'' 
 Ten pairs of human eyes, the eyes of three 
 dogs, two cows, and several pigs all seemed 
 to be looking at me, as if to ask who I was 
 that would dare to compete with the re- 
 doubtable Harry. I wondered myself, for I 
 am a poor swimmer. But since Jim had made 
 the rash challenge there was nothing for it 
 but to tumble overboard and do my best for 
 
The Dingbat of Arcady 99 
 
 the honor of our house. Needless to say, 
 Harry won the race. The children seemed to 
 like us the better for having established him 
 the more firmly in their esteem. 
 
 We had stopped to swim. We remained to 
 chat. We learned that there is still hope for 
 the old English stock in Washington. The 
 ten children were all sisters and brothers, all 
 sturdy and happy. We wanted a picture of 
 them, but had no films left for use in our 
 little camera. However, they were all so 
 pleased with the idea of having their photo- 
 graphs taken that we promised to go back 
 next day as photographers. We did. 
 
 We took pa with his hair slicked and his 
 jaw locked and ma in her best dress. We took 
 the eldest daughter of the house, married 
 already at eighteen, with her small son, about 
 the age of her mother's youngest. We took 
 Harry and Johnny and Tommy with their 
 dogs. We took the youngest boy feeding the 
 latest oflFspring of the pigs with a nursing 
 bottle. We took the little girls, types of con- 
 ventional pulchritude, with roses in their 
 hands. Later we sent the finished pictures 
 to the family, but probably we did not make 
 them look beautiful enough for their own 
 satisfaction, for never a word did we hear. 
 
loo The Dingbat of Arcady 
 
 At the time, however, they all seemed to be 
 well pleased. We had a pow-wow over how 
 fine everybody had looked, over the incipient 
 personalities of the baby pigs and the fas- 
 cinating idiosyncrasies of the dogs and cows. 
 Then we went up to the house for a visit. 
 Pa gave us corn and cucumbers. Ma gave us 
 butter and fresh white bread. 
 
 And so the time passed, day after deeply 
 satisfying day, until we knew in our hearts 
 that it was time to go back again to the cares 
 of this world and the life that we had almost 
 forgotten in the contemplation of white waters, 
 woodsmoke, and the Spirit that broods in 
 wild skies and deep silences. We were strong 
 in body and firm in mind again when we sold 
 the dear old Dingbat of Arcady for twelve 
 jars of canned salmon, and gave her over into 
 the hands of our friend the salmon fisher- 
 man. 
 
 When Jim and I went out on that first 
 trip we had wanted to forget people. Because 
 we were poor we were failures in our small 
 world. We had known conflicts and sorrows. 
 It was as if we had wrestled in vain with 
 the Hercules of the worldly mind. We were 
 children of Antaeus, worsted in our first 
 
The 'Dingbat of Arcady loi 
 
 encounter, going back to Mother Earth for 
 strength. 
 
 And in the woods we found strength. Trees 
 did not condescend when they looked down 
 upon us. Sometimes they let us feel that we 
 were as tall as they. The maple did not 
 trouble us by despising the fir for having 
 another way of hfe, nor did the fir demand 
 a dreary conformity of the maple. Trees, we 
 learned, are too proud for vanity and give 
 no time to wondering what others may think 
 of their leaves. Nor does the tallest tree claim 
 to be richer than a clump of clover. What is 
 true of trees is as true, in appropriate ways, 
 of sun and moon and stars, of earth and air 
 and water, of all animals save only man. 
 
 Yet, after all that is said, the people by 
 the riverside with their tragedies and ro- 
 mances, their avid need of sympathy, their 
 blessed overflowing kindliness, gave us as 
 much as Mother Earth ever gave. They gave 
 us back our faith, our joy in our kind. To all 
 with whom we broke bread and sang songs 
 and told wild tales, to all who befriended us 
 for a day or any hour, our salutations and 
 our thanks! Amen. 
 
 The cruise of The Dingbat of Arcady was. 
 
I02 The Dingbat of Arcady 
 
 as I have already hinted, only the first of 
 many adventurous excursions, the beginning 
 of a new life not yet ended. To live near 
 singing rivers is to remember them. To know 
 the savor and tang of woodsmoke is to desire 
 it always. 
 
 A townsman gets little joy from the scent 
 of woodsmoke, for he does not know how 
 many varieties of smoke there are. But woods- 
 men know that there are many fragrances 
 in the burning of wood. Dead wood is not 
 like green, and pine is not like maple to our 
 noses. Smoke in frosty air smells sweeter 
 than smoke in summer. But whether it be 
 the spicy perfume of chaparral, crackhng sage 
 and mesquite twigs from a Southern mesa, 
 the rich odor of kindled pine, or the milder 
 fragrance of oak logs, it is a symbol of all 
 honorable things to the camper. Watching it 
 rise in strands or puffs of blue and gray is 
 like watching the whole history of the race. 
 In the fading tissue of color I have seen altars 
 and forges and hearths and pyres for the dead. 
 I have seen Prometheus, dearest of Titans, 
 and his children of this later age, still busy 
 stealing for us holier flames than any that can 
 be wedded with wood. 
 
 Yet sometimes, even as a camper, I have 
 
The Dingbat of Arcady 103 
 
 hated smoke because I have loved trees. Into 
 what may small boys climb when there are 
 no trees? Into what may small souls climb? 
 Progress is with trees. Who will say what 
 China might have been if she had not cut 
 down the trees beside the Yangtse as we Amer- 
 icans are now cutting down too many of the 
 trees of America? Beauty is with trees. It 
 was not an ugly superstition that permitted 
 the poets of Greece to make lovely maidens 
 into branching arbors. The camper who 
 builds his fire where it can harm a single tree 
 is a glutton of life and a murderer of loveli- 
 ness. May the long, strong roots of my friends 
 trouble his carcase when it is buried, and may 
 he wait long for a beacon on the banks of 
 the Styx! I think that man has little culture 
 who has no intimate among the trees. 
 
 My own best friend is the eucalyptus that 
 came from Australia to California where I 
 knew it. I have loved liveoaks with their 
 mystic garlands of moss and their stubborn, 
 stocky bodies, a veiled soldiery; I have loved 
 the maples when I have tasted their honey 
 and when I have slept at their feet. I have 
 loved pines for their columnar power, birches 
 for their refinement, and apple-trees because 
 they have received me into their arms. I 
 
I04 The Dingbat of Arcady 
 
 have listened mute with wonder to the grim 
 and ghastly rustHng of palms in a sea breeze 
 at night, and I have watched their dark, 
 pointed fans outspread against a sapphire 
 sky. These, for my imagination, are all 
 beautiful. The eucalyptus is supremely beau- 
 tiful. How good to strip off old moods like 
 old bark; to stand before the world a spirit 
 in white, uncovered truth like that; to lift 
 one's self far away from the crowd and near 
 to the sky, waving the newest buds of self 
 to and fro worshipfully in wide, open spaces; 
 to keep the green leaves of life alive through 
 all the days of the year; to have dignity that 
 is not forbidding and austerity that is not 
 ungracious; to be remembered fragrantly! If 
 I were a eucalyptus tree, I should ask for no 
 companions. I should ask Fate to let me 
 stand alone and lift my hands toward Heaven 
 with untrammeled gestures. Let me have 
 much space to move in when I am near enough 
 to know the many thoughts of the sky! 
 
 It was in California, with many a tall 
 "blue-gum" and "red-gum" near at hand, 
 that we built the successor to The Dingbat 
 of Arcady. There was a strong family resem- 
 blance between the two boats. In fact they 
 
The Dingbat of Arcady 105 
 
 were as much alike as twin sisters. But the 
 new craft was a little larger. Therefore we 
 called her The Royal Dingbat, In her we 
 spent long peaceful hours on the sun-dazzled 
 waters of San Diego Harbor, traveling from 
 the Silver Strand and Glorietta Bay out to 
 the entrance where the Pacific pours in be- 
 tween Point Loma and North Island. 
 
 One afternoon we took our blankets and 
 canvas and cooking utensils and left Coronado, 
 hoping to make the extreme end of North 
 Island, where the open ocean washes one side 
 of a sharp angle and the harbor waters the 
 other side, before night-fall. We expected to 
 camp there and fish early in the morning 
 when we knew that the tide would be turning 
 toward land, bringing the fish in with it. But 
 The Royal Dingbat^ like her sister ship, was 
 not made to move quickly over roughened 
 water. We stopped, also, at intervals, to fish 
 for mackerel, of which there were many in the 
 bay. Therefore it was late and dark when we 
 reached our destination. The moon was not up. 
 
 Jim cleaned the mackerel that we had 
 caught and I cooked them over a fire of drift- 
 wood flaming green and golden at the water's 
 edge. Then we decided to get to rest at once 
 that we might be up early. We took the long 
 
io6 The Dingbat of Arcady 
 
 rope fastened to the stern of The Royal Ding- 
 hat and carried it up the beach to the hne 
 where vegetation begins. There we tied it 
 to a stake firmly pounded into the sand so 
 that our boat would not float away with the 
 rising tide. Then we carried our blankets 
 up above the tide line, also, and spread them 
 out where the beach was lightly covered 
 with growing things. 
 
 Sand is said to be the least comfortable 
 of all beds, but it was too delightful there 
 under the open sky to remember that. In 
 California the days are topazes, the nights 
 sapphires. Lofty and serene the sky bent 
 above us, showing sharp frost-points of the 
 stars, like the diamond- tipped spears of gods 
 fallen on a sapphire floor. The Milky Way 
 was the record of some gorgeous rout and 
 pursuit through Heaven. When a fog comes 
 in, this light of sapphires and diamonds is 
 magically beclouded. The blue becomes 
 opaque, as if milk had been poured into an 
 azure goblet. But on this night I remember 
 that there was no fog. I remember the blue 
 and white miracle above me and the chanting 
 of the ocean with its voice of Titanic mother- 
 hood and fatherhood. As I looked and lis- 
 tened, I lost consciousness. 
 
The Dingbat of Arcady 107 
 
 The next morning we were awakened as 
 Homer must have been awakened very often, 
 even in his blindness, by the rays of the un- 
 troubled sun shining on us and on the "wine- 
 dark'* sea, touching our cheeks delicately with 
 a warmth unknown to night, caressing sensi- 
 tive eyelids, waking the sleeping flowers and 
 waking us. 
 
 Then I saw that my bed had been made in 
 Paradise. Around the edge of the old, brown 
 camping blankets the wild beach primroses 
 blossomed in golden health. And growing 
 among them were pale purple beach verbenas, 
 each fragile flower head borne upon a sticky 
 stem and exhaling an intense and seductive 
 perfume. Beside these blossoms the friendly 
 garden verbena might seem blowsy and crude. 
 Pale purple and clear yellow side by side in 
 the dawn, blessing the bed that I lay on as 
 Matthew, Mark, Luke and John would have 
 blessed it, surrounding me, head and hand 
 and foot, drooping over my face as I looked 
 up to greet the sun ! When the bed was made 
 the night before I had not known. 
 
 Jim got up at once and baited his line. 
 Then, brown and bare-footed and glad in the 
 early morning, he climbed over a ridge of 
 slippery black rocks that jutted out into the 
 
io8 The Dingbat of Arcady 
 
 rising water. He was fishing for the bass that 
 wear sleek gray and for sculpin with heads 
 as admirably grotesque as the gargoyles of 
 Notre Dame. He sat on the cold, wet rocks 
 with his bare feet curled up under him, watch- 
 ing the tide come in, dreaming of the fish it 
 ought to bring. I sat on the beach and watched 
 him, liking the wistful boyishness that could 
 forget the world for fish, the fugitive child 
 that is in him and in all good men. I hoped 
 Father Neptune would send hosts of the finny 
 people to nibble at his bait. 
 
 The prospects seemed to be good. Jim soon 
 caught a good bass, held him up for me to 
 see, strung him, and hung him in the water 
 in a crack between the rocks to keep him cool 
 and fresh. A little later he caught a sculpin 
 and pulled up his string to put the newcomer 
 on it. The bass had disappeared. Jim merely 
 supposed that he had not tied it securely, 
 so he put the sculpin in its place, more care- 
 fully tied, and went on fishing. Presently he 
 caught another bass. He lifted the string 
 to put him with the sculpin. The sculpin was 
 gone! How to explain it he did not know. 
 He attached the second bass firmly to the 
 string and was about to drop it into the water 
 at his feet when, out of that water rose a 
 
The 'Dingbat of Arcady 109 
 
 great yellow head, yawning hungrily and show- 
 ing rows of teeth, and a slimy, writhing, 
 yellow body. It was a great sea eel, father of 
 all the mythical sea serpents, reaching for 
 the bass that Jim still held. It waved its 
 lemon-colored head about threateningly with- 
 in a few inches of Jim's bare feet. Jim tum- 
 bled back from the edge of the rock very fast 
 indeed. We were content with the one bass 
 for breakfast. But I was disappointed in 
 Father Neptune. 
 
 It was on this same beach, on another day, 
 that we first made friends with the gulls 
 that keep the beaches clean. They are so 
 common that it is easy to forget the thrilling 
 passion of their flight, the rapturous poise, 
 the circling power, the whirl and sudden dip, 
 beak first into blue water. It; is easy to forget 
 the wild and watchful eyes they have, the 
 sleekness of their pointed heads, the strange 
 pathos of their call. 
 
 It was while we were eating our luncheon 
 on the beach in the hot sunshine that one or 
 two gulls halted in the sky overhead, tirelessly 
 vigilant. One of them, seeing our food, 
 swooped low, and flew over us, crying. Jim 
 threw a small bit of bread on the beach about 
 
I lo The Dingbat of Arcady 
 
 twenty feet away. The gull saw It, swooped, 
 caught it and ascended again. Jim threw 
 another piece a little nearer. Again the sharp 
 eyes saw, the white body plunged toward the 
 earth. Another piece we threw, still nearer. 
 This time two gulls saw it and flew low to 
 get our gift. We threw several crumbs. 
 Several gulls appeared from nowhere in par- 
 ticular to accept our offering. More and more 
 crumbs we threw, sitting quietly there in the 
 sun. More and more gulls came flying across 
 the blue fields of Heaven to see what was hap- 
 pening. In fine loops and circles they moved 
 around us, swift and sudden and strong, five 
 or six, a dozen, two dozen, then forty by 
 actual count, then perhaps more. Their 
 lusty wings beat the air about our ears. 
 White and gray and cream-color, markings of 
 straw and tan and slate-color, the sharper 
 shades of feet and beaks, the preening and 
 fluttering delighted us. Even as we had been 
 hungry they were hungry. Even as we who 
 were poor had to dare much to get our bread, 
 they had to be daring too. The flap and clatter 
 of their passing was the epic noise of their 
 struggle for existence. The whirring rise of 
 them was their victory. Their outcry was 
 their poetic and social sharing of the feast. 
 
The 'Dingbat of Arcady 1 1 1 
 
 All this we could feel with them. All this we 
 could understand. Evolutionists tell us that 
 there may have been a time when bird life 
 was near to our own. However that may be, 
 life is one life still through all creation, differ- 
 ing only in the degree of the fullness of its 
 manifestation. 
 
 The gulls dared to come very near us, yet 
 with all their gallantry they would not suffer 
 us to touch them, they would not even suffer 
 themselves to touch us, although they flew 
 so near that once a long wing-feather brushed 
 my throat. I knew a child's longing to fold 
 my two hands around one of those small, 
 swift white bodies, to hold it and look straight 
 into those wild, cold, courageous eyes. And 
 on a later day this experience came to me, 
 but then I was sorry and not glad of it after all. 
 
 We had been trolling in the bay with a 
 shiny tin minnow for bait. It flashed cannily 
 in the translucent water. But the tide was 
 going out and the fishing was poor. I caught 
 nothing. So, while Jim pulled The Royal 
 Dingbat slowly out of the harbor toward the 
 open sea, I tied the trolling Hne and leaned 
 back in my seat negligently, occupying my- 
 self with my own profuse meditations. Jim 
 saw a big gull swoop and cried, 'Took out!'' 
 
112 The Dingbat of Arcady 
 
 But it was too late. The bird had dipped for 
 the tin minnow and our hook held him fast. 
 
 It was a moment of agony. This fair white 
 creature of the sky had to be pulled across 
 the water that we might loose him, his pride 
 of flight hurt and humbled as his body was 
 wounded. We got the line in as fast as pos- 
 sible and, when he fluttered and struggled 
 and beat his wings against the edge of the 
 boat, I caught him and held him firmly, but 
 as gently as I could, with my two hands about 
 his throbbing body. 
 
 We found that, fortunately, he had not 
 swallowed the hook. It had caught firmly in 
 the side of his neck when the tin minnow 
 sank and bobbed under his unerring stroke. 
 For a moment we did not know what to do. 
 Jim got his knife and tried to get the hook 
 loose, but it could not be done without tear- 
 ing the gull's flesh badly. It was a small 
 hook. We severed it from the minnow and 
 from our line, thinking that so small a wound 
 might heal, even without the removal of the 
 hook, and leave the bird little the worse off. 
 I unclosed my hands and he went free again 
 with a great gladness. 
 
 Our adventures were numerous in San 
 
The Dingbat of Arcady 1 1 3 
 
 Diego Bay. One of them was the oddest ad- 
 venture I ever had with a fish. It will be 
 believed only by those who have faith in my 
 veracity. We were out one day in The Royal 
 Dingbat looking for mackerel and small fry, 
 fishing lazily. We caught little or nothing 
 and grew tired of pulling the boat around. 
 We decided to tie her to one of the big piles 
 that marked the channel. Jim threw our rope 
 around it loosely and then we lolled in the 
 bow and stern, doing nothing, saying little, 
 and absorbing the beauty of the sunset, 
 crimson with delight In the distance beyond 
 the channel's end. 
 
 The mackerel line with which we had been 
 trolling was baited with a fairly large hook 
 and carried a heavy sinker. The sinker had 
 behaved very well while we were moving, 
 but when we stopped it carried bait and line 
 straight to the bottom. However, our minds 
 were not occupied with the thought of fish. 
 We were too lazy to care. One end of the 
 line was slack in my hand. It mattered little 
 to me that the other end had gone to the realm 
 of Davy Jones. Then suddenly I felt it rip 
 through my hand, tearing the skin of my palm 
 as my grip tightened and making a hot line 
 across, like an electric current. 
 
1 14 The Dingbat of Arcady 
 
 ^ "A big fish! I can't hold him!" I yelled. 
 Jim took the reel. The line sang over it madly- 
 down to the last dry inch. Then Jim had to 
 hold on. The fish held on too. The rope of 
 The Royal Dingbat^ loosely coiled around the 
 channel pile, slipped, pulled free, slapped the 
 water. We began to move away from the 
 pile, towed toward the open sea and the sun- 
 set by some unseen power at the end of our 
 slender mackerel line. It was incredible and 
 ridiculous, but it was thrilling and there was 
 no doubt about it. For a few moments our 
 sense of wonder sharpened and deepened. We 
 learned how strong a slender thing can be. 
 A mere thread was drawing us toward that 
 Paradisal glory in the West. Then, suddenly, 
 the water broke ahead of us, a shark with a 
 sallow belly and an ugly head leaped clear 
 of the water for an instant, broke the little 
 mackerel Hne, and disappeared! 
 
 The electricity of such surprises darts 
 through life in the open, making day and 
 night golden, showing us the vivid interplay 
 of hardship and adventure in the life of the 
 spirit. Hardship in the world of wood and 
 stream is the first restraint man ever knew, 
 the most ancient form of discipline, the be- 
 ginning of that knowledge of the law which 
 
The Dingbat of Arcady 1 1 5 
 
 will be made into good morals at last. Ad- 
 venture, in the world of wood and stream is 
 the beginning of that joy in the power of 
 body and mind which brings culture; it is 
 the nobly defiant impulse to live freely and 
 take chances under the law; it is the desire 
 for overwhelming beauty. If life had meant 
 only hardship for the race, it would have 
 been unbearable, and long ago the genera- 
 tions would have perished of heartache. If 
 life had meant only adventure, the beginnings 
 of order never would have come out of chaos. 
 The fortunate ones of the earth maintain an 
 equilibrium between hardship and adventure in 
 the making of days and years, knowing that to 
 lose this balance is to fall away into death 
 and that to keep it brings the fullness of life. 
 
Cvi] 
 
[VI} 
 
 xyoMETiMES the day's adventure may be 
 minute and fragile, a chance meeting with a 
 flower. Flowers, like the abstract idea of 
 beauty, are much abused in custom and con- 
 versation. Our affection for them is lasting 
 and sincere, but rather vulgar. No doubt I 
 seem crude when I handle bloodroot or trillium 
 or creamcups, if there be gods or fairies watch- 
 ing or finer mortals with gentler hands. Our 
 way of touching flowers is a revelation or a 
 betrayal. 
 
 Nor can we know them by possessing them, 
 by having them in our houses. We might 
 as well try to understand normal humanity 
 by seeing it in prisons and hospitals. If we 
 would know flowers, especially wildflowers, we 
 must live near them. The flowers that do 
 most for us are those that we never pick. 
 We never see them fade. 
 
 To walk in golden mustard eight feet tall 
 by a California roadside while the petals and 
 pollen shower bright gold on our heads and 
 shoulders is good. To kneel on the mesa 
 beside the tiny pink gilia that covers the earth 
 
1 20 The Dingbat of Arcady 
 
 with bright patches after the rains, Hfting 
 its plucky blossoms, the size of a nickel, on 
 little thread-like stems about two inches long 
 — that also is good. Better still it is to wander 
 into some remote canyon and find the deep 
 oracular phacelia that has pinkish, hirsute 
 stems and leaves and a solemn face the size 
 of a violet. People who have broken their 
 bread in the sight of such flowers and taken 
 their rest beside them are less likely to pick 
 them. They have exchanged the lust of posses- 
 sion for the desire of beauty. 
 
 So have I passed a mariposa lily, an orchid 
 stranger, simply crying out to Apollo to give 
 them my blessing as a salutation to their 
 loveliness, since I myself^ cannot speak their 
 language. It makes me regretful to think that 
 the poems made in their honor can never be 
 translated for them. Yet, if I were to choose, 
 I should rather have poems understood by 
 people than by flowers. For flowers are beauty, 
 nearly always, in their own persons, but 
 people, who are rarely beautiful, must have 
 beauty given to them. 
 
 It would be difficult to tell of all my ad- 
 ventures with flowers either in California or 
 in those Eastern lands whither we have been 
 carried by the mystic stream on which The 
 
The Dingbat of Arcady 1 2 1 
 
 'Dingbat first bore us. But because of these 
 adventures my mind is full of colored gar- 
 dens. My memory does not need the fields 
 of mythological asphodel, but reaches to 
 quiet earthy places where, in bright tufts of 
 spore-bearing moss, I see shy, thin-stemmed 
 bluets with petals pointing to the four winds 
 and golden hearts like suns in the midst of 
 skies. In the spring, while I am still working 
 at my desk in the city, my spirit wanders 
 at will through the uplands of New York 
 where the cool arbutus creeps from under moist 
 leaves, or through the fallows of New Jersey, 
 while wild azaleas bloom. In summer, no 
 matter where I may be, I can call to mind 
 the heavy odor of the milkweed^s queer, 
 reddish blossoms near level, dusty roadways, 
 or the ecstatic perfume of the wild grape 
 clambering over rocks. The sleepy look of 
 red poppies in Devon is with me, the pungent 
 whiff of the Httle, rusty, button-chrysanthe- 
 mum, blossoming its best in forsaken gardens 
 of our Eastern states. 
 
 It is not merely that I remember these 
 colors and fragrances, but that I remember 
 them as they were in the morning, at noon, 
 at night, redolent of joy in the new sight of 
 the world, strong with the pride of lusty life, 
 
1 22 The Dingbat of Arcady 
 
 or faint and strangely mingled with the scent 
 of the moist, dark earth. 
 
 Sometimes the day's adventure may be 
 chance meeting with a bird. Jim and I had a 
 most happy experience with birds in a pine 
 wood in New Hampshire one summer. We 
 were sitting under a pine in the silence that 
 belongs to good comrades. We had tramped 
 far that day and at sundown we were resting 
 under the trees and dreaming dreams to- 
 gether. When two people can dream dreams 
 together, they do not need to talk. Perhaps 
 because we were silent we heard from behind 
 one of the trees a purely silver song. Jim, 
 who knows birds better than I do, laid a 
 hand on mine and a finger on his mouth to 
 enjoin silence, but the gesture was super- 
 fluous. I had no desire to speak. This song 
 was to me, also, the punctuation of our dream- 
 ing, for as commas and periods set intervals 
 between words, bird-song sets intervals be- 
 tween dreams. 
 
 In a minute or two more we heard a sim- 
 ilar song from another tree, a small flute out 
 of Paradise. The first singer answered. A 
 third called from in front of us. And then the 
 first singer appeared where oblique rays of 
 
The Dingbat of Arcady 1 23 
 
 the sun falling on him showed a speckled 
 breast and rufous tail. It was the hermit- 
 thrush, himself and no other. Singing he 
 walked among the pine needles, his comrades 
 answering him. The other two joined him, 
 presently, and perhaps a fourth was with 
 him, but of that we could not be certain. 
 They moved about before us and made their 
 music without a thought of us, giving us their 
 loveliest and most limpid singing. We hardly 
 dared to breathe for fear of interrupting the 
 recital. For ten or fifteen minutes we sat 
 and listened with white awe upon us, and then 
 their wings rustled and they were gone. The 
 place where the rays of the sun had fallen on 
 them was dark and empty. The song was 
 sung. Our dreams were dreamed too. 
 
 One other small memoir of aii adventure 
 with a bird I must share. When it came to us 
 we were living in the town of Superior, Wis- 
 consin. It was cold there in winter. The snow 
 sometimes lay four or five feet deep for weeks 
 at a time on wild land near the town. The 
 thermometer would fall low and chilly days 
 as bright as diamonds would follow one an- 
 other, clear and still. Sometimes we would 
 borrow snow-shoes from our friends and go 
 out of the town into the country to find the 
 
1 24 The Dingbat of Arcady 
 
 lavender and rose-colored shadows on the 
 unbounded fields of snow. We would take a 
 cofFee-pot and coffee, a pound of bacon, a loaf 
 of bread, and a pan to cook with. 
 
 One day, when we had run or walked on 
 snow-shoes all morning until we were ruddy 
 with health and hot under our heavy clothing, 
 we found a place to rest on a crust of hard 
 snow in a hollow where winds did not bother 
 us. We were surrounded by the protruding 
 tops of bushes that must have seemed quite 
 tall when the ground was bare. They bore 
 tufts of snow upon them like white blossoms, 
 the fair, false flowering of the winter. We 
 broke some of these small twigs and made a 
 fire with them. Jim found a dead branch]]oi 
 a tree that provided enough wood for cooking. 
 I filled the cofFee-pot with snow — as clean as 
 air or water could be there in the wild out- 
 of-doors — and when enough was melted I 
 put in the coffee. We cut huge slices of bread 
 and put slices of bacon, with dripping, be- 
 tween them. Never did food taste more 
 delicious than this crude banquet. Then, 
 warmed by exercise and fire and food, we 
 sat still for a while, resting. The fire burned 
 itself away into the drift which the heat had 
 melted. And then — 
 
The Dingbat of Arcady 125 
 
 "Chickadee-dee-dee !'* 
 
 Small brother chickadee, perched on one 
 of the snowy bushes, wanted dinner. We fed 
 him crumbs of our bread. A small and impu- 
 dent beggar he was, hungry and jolly. His 
 energetic throat said many a quaint grace. 
 
 "Chickadee-dee-chickadee!'' 
 
 Such a dark, fluttering little fellow seemed 
 out of place and out of proportion in that wild, 
 white, motionless winter world. But there he 
 was, busy and very much alive. I can not 
 look at the blanched beauty of snow in such 
 a stretch of country without remembering 
 his queer, dear, merry little song when he 
 first cocked his head and looked at us. 
 
 Sometimes the day's adventure may mean 
 simply facing rough weather. My experience 
 in the open has made me feel sure enough 
 to dogmatize; there is no such thing as "bad" 
 weather. Who are we that we should fasten 
 that malevolent Httle adjective "bad'' upon 
 weather that merely fails to serve our utili- 
 tarian purposes and our self-indulgent ideas 
 of comfort? Indeed, if beauty is to be judged 
 by its rarity, a great storm may be the great- 
 est weather and the most beautiful. By 
 paraphrase the devout and daring person may 
 
I iG The Dingbat of Arcady 
 
 well say, "Though it slay me, yet will I love 
 it!" To like only weather that is blue and 
 white and golden and placid is to be limited 
 in the love of beauty. 
 
 This may be the secret of the scorn, usually 
 veiled, that men who have known Nature in 
 all weathers, suffered her and dominated her, 
 feel for the pale-eyed and pale-skinned crea- 
 ture of comfort. However this may be, this 
 I know, that they who can outface a storm 
 and exult in it have a clew to the meaning 
 of life which can help them to triumph, also, 
 in the vicissitudes of the intellectual and 
 spiritual experience. 
 
 Considered quite apart from the damage 
 it may do, a storm is supremely beautiful. 
 Somebody told me this when I was a little 
 girl and the thought came to me with a thrill 
 of surprise, for it was a new gospel. Most of 
 the people in my small world disliked storms. 
 That one person made life richer for me by 
 telling me the truth. I have two memories 
 of storms that have remained with me long. 
 
 One was a great wind storm on the prairie 
 in the Middle West. It came after a long, 
 still, sultry summer day, in the late after- 
 noon. I felt the stillness deepen and strengthen 
 around me like the self-restraint that hushes 
 
The Dingbat of Arcady 1 27 
 
 anger. Then huge clouds bunched themselves 
 together in the West. I stood and watched. 
 I saw a line of trees, a windbreak, far away, 
 so far that I could not tell their kind. One 
 moment they were perfectly still. The next 
 made them toss their branches madly as if 
 they were wild with grief or pain. In front of 
 them a field of corn yielded to shadows and 
 swayed as if some terrible hand had stroked 
 each corn-stalk, bending it, crushing it to 
 the very earth. The great wind was coming 
 toward me, nearer and nearer. But I did not 
 stir. I told myself that when it came I would 
 lie down. It caught the near fields of grass 
 and rang over them, and sang over them while 
 the air around me was still and sultry. I 
 was fascinated. A group of willows quite near 
 me jerked their tops forward suddenly with 
 the impact of that rushing gust upon them. 
 Then they tumbled and tossed their branches 
 about uproariously in the rushing air that 
 took and tore them. The wind crossed the 
 short stretch of grass between those trees and 
 me and then beat against my face, my throat, 
 my breast, my limbs, with cold and savage 
 fury. My breath was blown back into my 
 nostrils. My hair was ripped loose from 
 around my forehead. My throat and body 
 
1 2 8 The Dingbat of Arcady 
 
 felt sudden cold like the water of a trout 
 brook in April. The invisible legions of the 
 air pushed me back, back, back, step by step. 
 I gave way before the pressure of their chilly, 
 unseen, powerful hands. I fell upon my face 
 and waited. Sticks and leaves from far away 
 were blown down upon me. Even upon the 
 earth, flat and humble, I could not evade that 
 magnificent rage. It went bellowing over my 
 head into the East. And then, as suddenly 
 as it had come, it stopped. Rain fell quietly 
 on a cool world and tears came into my eyes. 
 The other storm that I remember was a 
 thunder-storm at night by a riverside in 
 Canada. Jim and I were lying in our tent, 
 unable, for one reason or another, to get much 
 sleep. Perhaps it was because Nature herself 
 could not rest. The air was disturbed and yet 
 stagnant. Then there came a heavy groaning 
 and sudden shocks of distant sound like the 
 heavy breathing of Vulcan and the falling 
 of hammers on his anvil. We saw far lightning 
 like the flying of sparks. The noise increased. 
 Mars and Thor had been awakened over 
 Scandinavia and Hellas and were hurling loud 
 words at each other. They threw the lances 
 of Heaven about and the lightning became 
 frequent and livid. As each spear of light 
 
The Dingbat of Arcady 1 29 
 
 fell and broke in pieces upon the floor of 
 Heaven we saw the jagged lines of fall and 
 fracture. The earth under us seemed solid, 
 but that floor of Heaven, on which those 
 terrible figures trod, shook under them and, 
 when they came to grips and wrestled, rocked 
 with their power. Perhaps that is why we 
 on earth saw a glory of dark trees suddenly 
 illumined by lightning, with leaves that had 
 been like black masses in the darkness sud- 
 denly etched sharply upon a clear background, 
 then blackened into vagueness again. Such 
 a glory of splashing rain upon the vexed black 
 surface of the river! Such a smell of sweetness 
 in air that had been stale as fever! And then 
 one great bolt flying, one barbaric splendid 
 burst of crashing sound, as if the floor of 
 Heaven had given way under terrible feet, 
 as if one great god had hurled the other 
 through the gap! After that, silence. Later we 
 heard the booming of the forge of Vulcan and 
 saw the sparks flying from it again. At last even 
 that noise faded into silence, and we slept. 
 
 Sometimes our adventures have been ex- 
 cursions into the hearts and minds of our 
 kind. One such adventure came to us when 
 we were camping on the banks of the Tobique, 
 
130 The 'Dingbat of Arcady 
 
 a swift, bright tributary of the St. John, flow- 
 ing through New Brunswick. The fishermen 
 and guides who lived on the banks were kind 
 souls. When they saw that we went in swim- 
 ming every day they warned us against the 
 water, saying that we would get "water 
 poisoning" if we kept on. 
 
 The river was fed by sweet springs and 
 rivulets. Salmon and trout that will not live 
 in foul streams were plentiful in it. Yet these 
 men would not go in swimming for fear of 
 being poisoned. We talked over their advice, 
 and considered it, but the weather was hot 
 and we decided to disregard it. Day after 
 day we took our swim. We were not poisoned. 
 Then came a very hot day. The men all took a 
 chance, went in, and came out with fairer faces. 
 Nobody, so far as we know, was ever poisoned. 
 I hope we broke the wicked fairy's spell. 
 
 One of these fishermen, an old man wise 
 in the lore of the woods, who had brought 
 down many a moose and bear in his time, was 
 as exquisitely tactful, in his own way, as the 
 hero of "A Hundred Collars'* by Robert 
 Frost. Tact is supposed to be a sophisticated 
 virtue — or vice — but this man proved that 
 it might also inhere in the unlettered. 
 
 He knew that Jim had been longing to 
 
The Dingbat of Arcady 131 
 
 take a salmon and that he had had no luck, 
 although the river was full of them. They 
 could not be seen from the banks because of 
 the swirling lights in the ripples. But when 
 we climbed up into trees and looked down we 
 could see long streaks of silver-gray against 
 the light sand-color of the stream's bed. 
 
 Came a morning when the old man took his 
 old boat and his old rod and Jim's fine new 
 reel and pulled out into a quiet part of the 
 river where he sat, rod in hand, for several 
 hours. Then a strike! He began to play his 
 fish. He knew that Jim had been watching 
 from the bank. He feigned difficulty. He 
 beckoned as if he were calling for help. And 
 so, while he played the fish back and forth 
 and round about, Jim, in answer to the signal, 
 put out from shore in our canoe, paddled 
 up above the old man's boat, shipped his 
 paddle, and let the canoe slide softly down. 
 He got into the boat with the old man and 
 pushed the canoe hard away to the right 
 where he knew it would catch on a log boom. 
 Then he pulled the old man's boat toward 
 shore. When they stepped out into water 
 thigh-deep, the salmon was still active, lash- 
 ing and threshing his way through the *'poi- 
 soned" waters of the river. 
 
132 The Dingbat of Arcady 
 
 "Can you gaff him?" said the old man to 
 Jim when he began to reel in. He must have 
 taken hundreds of salmon in his time, but 
 he pretended to be needing help. 
 
 'TU try," said Jim, excitedly, "but I never 
 have." 
 
 "Mebbe you'd better take the hne, then," 
 said the old man, putting the reel into Jim's 
 hands and surrendering his catch. "I'll gaff 
 him." 
 
 He took the gaff-hook and waited while 
 Jim reeled. At last, suddenly, when the salmon 
 shot forward desperately between his very 
 legs, he gaffed it. And in some inexphcable 
 way Jim was made to feel that the catch was 
 really his and could not have been made 
 without his assistance. 
 
 This same old man told us how to catch the 
 trout and where. In tributaries of the To- 
 bique, Jim caught a hundred and thirty-two 
 in one afternoon. We shared them with all 
 of our neighbors so that none were wasted. 
 They were not large, but they were delicious 
 aristocrats. 
 
 Every camper has his own favorite way of 
 cooking trout. We fry ours in olive oil. 
 Bacon fat, generally used, is good, but over- 
 comes the delicate flavor of the trout, so that 
 
The Dingbat of Arcady i ^2 
 
 what the camper tastes is bacon. The sweet- 
 ness of the trout can be savored perfectly 
 when they are fried in oHve oil. First we take 
 each freshly caught fish and clean it and wash 
 it in clear water. Then we lift it up to let 
 the sunlight bless it. Then, with sincere 
 affection we dip it in a mixture of flour, corn- 
 meal, pepper, and salt, and lay it in a pan 
 in which the oil is already hot. We fry to a 
 mild brown and serve with coffee and, if 
 there be any at hand, with cress or sour-grass. 
 Wild chives, also, cut up between slices of 
 bread and butter, are very good with trout. 
 Sometimes, as everybody knows, trout will 
 not bite. Then the hungry camper is wise 
 if he will fish for eels. Our kind old friend 
 taught us that art. He bade us build a fire 
 of driftwood near the water's edge, in the 
 evening. Then we baited our lines with stale 
 meat and fish scraps and threw them in. The 
 eels, attracted to the shore by the light of 
 our fire, took our bait almost at once. We 
 hauled them out, each one a writhing, wrig- 
 gling, twisting, squirming body, marvelously 
 muscular and energetic, tying itself into slip- 
 pery, oozy knots and loops. It was difficult to 
 get the hooks out of them. Many had to be de- 
 capitated. Even then they kept on wriggling. 
 
134 "^^^ Dingbat of Arcady 
 
 After we had caught enough the woodsmen 
 showed Jim how to skin them. The skin is 
 worked loose at the neck in just the right 
 way and then pulled off backward, like a glove. 
 Even while this is going on the dead eel writhes 
 and twists. Then we cut them into pieces 
 three or four inches long and dropped them 
 into a pail of salted water to stand over night. 
 
 When frying time came we learned to use 
 plenty of hot fat over a slow fire, to drop in 
 the sections properly floured and to fry them 
 until we were sure that they had been cooked 
 too long. Then we cooked them even longer. 
 Eels, to be good eating, must have patient, 
 thorough cooking. When they have been well 
 cooked they wriggle no more, but are firm, 
 and sweet, and rich. 
 
 But the joy of joys for the palate is Canadian 
 maple sugar. It has the flavor of a whole 
 forest in it and sings upon the tongue like 
 many birds. To eat it at the end of a scanty 
 meal is to swallow fairyland! 
 
[VII] 
 
[VII} 
 
 ©AYS and months passed and the mystic 
 ripples of our lives carried us home into our 
 own country and into the State of New York. 
 There we learned what it is like to camp out 
 of doors in the early spring when snow still 
 blotches the dark earth of shadowed places 
 with a waning and ghostly white. It was early 
 in April, the Easter vacation, when we made 
 our first spring trip for which all of our friends 
 prophesied disaster. 
 
 We were traveling in funny little Frankie 
 Ford, this time, and were exceedingly proud 
 of him as our first car although life had dealt 
 hardly with him and his personal appearance 
 showed the effects of stress and strain. We 
 could truly say that he was far from his end. 
 His radiator was puckered and wrinkled and 
 he wore his top rakishly, but what a soul — 
 what an engine — he had! We went on and on 
 and he enjoyed it. 
 
 When Jim and I go out on the open road 
 it pleases us not to know exactly where we 
 are going or when we shall get there. A 
 destination is more troublesome than much 
 
138 The Dingbat of Arcady 
 
 luggage. If we have one folded up with our 
 blankets, we find it necessary to forego many 
 a pleasant chat by the wayside. Therefore 
 we usually leave our destination at home with 
 our best clothes. They belong together. But, 
 as it happens, we began this trip by traveling 
 up the east shore of the Hudson toward Troy. 
 
 For several days the weather had been 
 mild and balmy. The willows were yellowing 
 and the brush in the swamps reddening with 
 the spring. The birds were returning for their 
 season of mirth. But as we drove on past 
 awakening fields and dreaming fallows it 
 turned colder and began to rain. We crossed 
 the river and turned south on the west side 
 after purchasing a pound of steak in one of 
 the villages so that we could be sure of some- 
 thing for supper no matter where we might 
 camp. The thermometer dropped and the 
 rain changed to sleet. This was food for 
 thought. Our good tent would bear any 
 amount of water without leaking, but what 
 about ice? We could not afford to let it be 
 cut. 
 
 We drove on, wondering what to do, fol- 
 lowing perfect country roads through a dear, 
 gray, chilly drizzle until we saw a tall, roomy, 
 old-fashioned farm-house ahead of us, with a 
 
The 'Dingbat of Arcady 139 
 
 big barn near at hand. The place looked 
 hospitable and wholesome. Some houses wear 
 the auras of their owners. And by that time 
 we were wet and chilled through. It was 
 beginning to be windy. Jim went to the door 
 of the house and asked permission to sleep 
 in the barn. 
 
 The lady of the house looked us over 
 keenly. Then she invited us to spend the 
 night in her guest-room. It was against our 
 principles to accept that invitation, for we 
 hold that camping is not merely for pleasure, 
 but also for discipline. The camper who 
 takes the soft way too easily will miss the 
 hard joys of the road. Our camping con- 
 sciences troubled us even in the thought of 
 the comfort of a barn, but we satisfied them 
 with the thought that we could not afford 
 to spoil our tent. All this we explained to 
 the kind woman in the doorway. She allowed 
 us to spend the night in her barn. 
 
 But she would not let us use our primus 
 lamp for cooking. She took us into a lean-to 
 where she had been ironing all afternoon and 
 where a good fire still burned. There she 
 bade us get warm and cook our supper. It 
 was luxurious. We fried our pound of steak 
 with some onions and made cocoa. While 
 
140 The Dingbat of Arcady 
 
 we were feasting on this already plentiful 
 fare our hostess brought in a jar of her best 
 preserved cherries and offered them to us 
 for dessert. They were carefully pitted, rich, 
 winy, delicious. She also provided a dozen 
 big apples that had come safely through the 
 winter in her cool cellar. We ate our bountiful 
 repast with glee and, after tidying up the 
 room, went out to the barn. 
 
 It was clean and airy. We took a few 
 forkfuls of hay over into one corner, spread 
 our blankets thereon, and, as we drifted off 
 to sleep, listened to what Hamlin Garland 
 astutely calls the "comfortable sound*' of 
 "bosses chawin' hay.'' Never was I more 
 intimately friendly with horses! 
 
 A few days later I learned how strong the 
 friendship between man and horse can be. 
 We had stopped and asked permission to put 
 up our tent in the brookside meadow of a 
 fine, clean-looking farm. The farmer was a 
 big, wholesome, child-like man who gave per- 
 mission rather than be surly. But he had 
 misgivings. While he was doing his evening 
 chores in the barn-yard, he would walk over 
 to the fence that separated it from the meadow 
 and take an occasional uneasy look at us. 
 
The Dingbat of Arcady 141 
 
 Would we steal his chickens? Would we set the 
 woodlot ablaze? He was probably wondering. 
 I made a haphazard effort to be agreeable. 
 
 "You have a fine horse T' 
 
 The trouble left his face and he grinned 
 broadly. Perhaps we were all right, after all, 
 if I knew a good horse. It was more than a 
 good horse to him. It was his treasure. 
 
 "Guess how old he isT* said he. 
 
 I did not know how old a horse ought to 
 be to be right, so I was politely evasive. 
 
 "Fifteen years. Born on the place, he was. 
 I raised him from a colt. He's a wonder. 
 Come here, Peter." 
 
 Much to my surprise the horse walked 
 across the barn-yard to his master as a dog 
 would have done. 
 
 "Kiss me, Peter.'' 
 
 Peter promptly covered the farmer's face 
 with the wettest of wet kisses. Inwardly, 
 invisibly, and inaudibly, I shuddered. Just 
 how much will mankind endure for affection's 
 sake? 
 
 "He'll follow my wife around, asking for 
 sugar. He'll go to the back door for it. He 
 don't know anything but kindness. Nobody 
 else ever had him. I ain't ever let him work out. 
 He's one of the family, he is. He's human"! 
 
1 42 The 'Dingbat of Arcady 
 
 I could not help wondering how many 
 human beings in the worid are like that horse 
 in that they know nothing but kindness! But 
 as Blake says, 
 
 " The beggar's dog and the widow's cat. 
 Feed them and thou shalt grow fat." 
 
 I did not grudge the intelligent beast his 
 happiness. I could not help praising him. 
 That established us in the regard of the farmer, 
 his wife and his children. Cool milk from the 
 milk-room was offered to us and sweet apples 
 from the bin. 
 
 We drove through New Jersey and turned 
 toward Delaware Water Gap. A day came 
 slightly overcast with clouds. We looked for 
 an early twilight. But it was already upon us 
 when we began to look for a place to spend 
 the night and it was dark before we rolled 
 along to a curve where a narrow, rutty dirt 
 road turned off from the main road into a 
 strip of light woodland and fallow beside a 
 swift and narrow stream. We stopped, cooked 
 our supper, and pitched camp in a hollow 
 near it. 
 
 In the morning, when I opened my eyes, I 
 saw that we had rested in a bed of dog-tooth 
 
The Dingbat of Arcady 1 43 
 
 violets. Looking out across the earth with my 
 eyes on a level with it made them seem like 
 an army of yellow elves coming to storm the 
 citadel of my mind. I capitulated at once. 
 When we arose that morning there was a 
 blessing on us and we knew it. We made 
 coffee, fried bacon, and toasted bread joy- 
 fully. Then, before we went on, we covered 
 the remains of our fire with water, earth, 
 and moss that no black ashes might make an 
 ugly spot in that perfect place. 
 
 We went on toward Delaware Water Gap, 
 driving rapidly and living frugally with our 
 bodies, but for our spirits it was to be a day 
 of miracles. At noon we stopped on a country 
 road that crossed a brown-shadowed stream 
 which looked as if it might be a happy home 
 for trout. We had only tea and bread and 
 butter for luncheon, so, while I prepared it, 
 I told Jim to try a cast or two. At the first 
 cast he pulled out a fine trout which we 
 promptly fried and shared. Again we were 
 blessed. We went on happily. 
 
 Early that afternoon we found the trout- 
 stream for which we were looking and, as a 
 light haze descended on the land near it, 
 between the little hills that guided the flowing 
 of it, we pitched camp in a meadow still clad 
 
144 "^^^ Dingbat of Arcady 
 
 with last year's grass, now being lifted by 
 the spring's new green blades. The trout- 
 brook made promises to us all night long 
 of what it would do for us next day. The 
 mild air gave us slow, deep breathing. Again 
 we were blessed. 
 
 Morning came warm and sparkling. We 
 took our tackle and trudged up-stream, fishing 
 as we went. Above the meadow where we 
 had camped the stream ran through wilder 
 and more troublesome country, over mighty 
 boulders, between rough and jagged banks 
 covered with dense undergrowth and brooded 
 over by stalwart trees. We found a clear, 
 delicious spring and drank deeply. 
 
 After a long walk we were hot and came 
 upon a pool where it would be just possible 
 to swim a few strokes. Below it were two 
 great rocks and a plunging gush of waters 
 between them. We went in swimming. Cold, 
 cold as ice recently melted, but stinging sweet 
 to the spirit that loves hardship, was that 
 clean water. Shuddering for a moment when 
 the water first clashed upon us, then rising 
 to feel the kindly warmth of the sun, we were 
 blessed once more. If death should be like 
 that. . . . 
 
 I sat enthroned between two gaunt rocks 
 
The 'Dingbat of Arcady 145 
 
 with water rushing headlong across my shoul- 
 ders. It seemed as if such cool, clear energy 
 must wash away not only the fevers and 
 foibles of this world, but even faults and 
 flaws. In that chilly dazzle of flying sunlight 
 and leaping water I could not think ill of 
 any one, not even of myself. When I changed 
 my wet clothing for dry I was clean of heart. 
 And on the way back I picked long streamers 
 of ground moss and little vines newly budded 
 out, a few sprigs of arbutus, and one blood- 
 root, the wonder-star of April. We caught 
 few fish that day, but we were content. 
 
 At supper-time it was cool and a light wind 
 blew up. The wind grew bolder and colder. 
 By ten o'clock as much of a gale as the little 
 valley could well hold was blowing over us. 
 For once the tent would not stay in place over 
 the top of our car, or anywhere else. It was 
 made of light material and we were afraid 
 it would be torn to ribbons if we left it up. 
 We took it down and tucked it over us flat 
 on the ground. The wind ripped and tore at 
 it even there and sometimes it sHthered across 
 our faces. The night grew colder and colder. 
 Jim let the water out of Frankie Ford's 
 radiator for fear it might freeze. A film of ice 
 showed on the water in our drinking pail. 
 
1 46 The Dingbat of Arcady 
 
 The ground under us stiffened and then froze 
 hard. Yet under the blankets and the tent, 
 wrapped in our warmest clothing, we were not 
 cold. 
 
 Rising in the morning was another matter. 
 When I went out to make a fire the gale blew 
 this way and that. We were obliged to set 
 our small primus stove inside the car in order 
 to cook on it. I washed hands and face in 
 the stream in which I had been swimming 
 happily the day before, and the cold of wind 
 and water now made my fingers stiff and numb 
 so that I fumbled badly with the frying-pan 
 and the coffee-pot. But when I was once 
 warmed through by a good breakfast I got 
 joy of that gusty morning, such joy in hard- 
 ship as I had never known before. Truly, I 
 had been blessed. 
 
 These things, frost and wind, realities of 
 the physical life to which we had gone back 
 for a time, were they not fit symbols of the 
 stresses of the life that we had left? These 
 things, frost and wind, had been conquered 
 by man, the indomitable, long ages before 
 my birth. By claiming our share in that 
 heritage of conquest might we not conquer, 
 also, in the end, that world of stone and 
 steel realities wherein men and women of 
 
The Dingbat of Arcady 147 
 
 to-day face dangers and difficulties more subtle 
 than any that their forefathers knew? Per- 
 haps it is here that the first lesson begins. 
 
 So it has been for me. So may it be for 
 others. For it is an inexpensive blessedness 
 that I have found to save my soul alive in 
 me when I have taken to the highways and 
 waterways that lead to the shrine of the first 
 faith. At this shrine I have found bravery 
 for my fear, and wisdom for my doubt, and 
 life to do battle with life again. 
 
 Never do I return from these adventures 
 in the open with Jim without longing to go 
 out on another. I shall dream of going again 
 and again until the last time — then, at last, 
 to remain. As my flesh grows frail with the 
 growing strength of my spirit, I should like 
 to rise slowly in the long, blue brilliance of 
 night, and seize the horns of the crescent 
 moon and jump over it, between them, as a 
 child jumps over a rope. Once over it, and 
 in the Milky Way, I should like to fling all 
 my sins and sorrows into the Great Dipper, 
 and hsten until I hear them clink upon the 
 bottom of it. Then I should like to find all 
 the time that I have lost. I should like to 
 float out among the stars, seeking a new 
 beauty. 
 
148 The 'Dingbat of Arcady 
 
 One great joy of the road is not knowing 
 what acquaintances we shall make or how we 
 shall make them. Getting acquainted with 
 people is a dullard's adventure if you know 
 all about them ahead of time. But if you must 
 learn the meaning of a human being from the 
 poise of the head, the flash of the eye, the 
 locking of the jaws, the behavior of the fingers, 
 and from the individual life, communicable 
 and yet inexplicable, which animates all of 
 these, then a meeting is an inviting hazard. 
 With letters of introduction we may meet 
 Mr. and Mrs. John Brown Jones Smith. 
 Without them we may find Socrates in a 
 general store at the cross-roads, Le Penseur 
 on a lonely hill, and Saint Francis and Ther- 
 sites tramping side by side along a dusty 
 road; we may even have the good fortune to 
 hear Confucius talking to his disciples of 
 *'poetry, history, and the up-keep of courtesy.'' 
 
 We enjoy the complex simplicities of pio- 
 neering in the hearts and minds of our kind. 
 People who seem quite commonplace to them- 
 selves and to their neighbors shine for us 
 with a light well known before there were 
 candles, the ancient light of romance. For 
 us they wear the plumes of knights, the caps 
 of goblins, the haloes of saints, the garlands 
 
The Dingbat of Arcady 149 
 
 of delectable sinners, without ever knowing 
 that they are clad in more than serge or 
 gingham. And sometimes the light is reflected 
 upon us, who seem quite commonplace to 
 ourselves save in moments of elation. What 
 could be more delightful to a couple well- 
 advanced toward middle age ? 
 
 Once, when we were driving through New 
 Jersey in Frankie Ford, the ramshackle and 
 rakish, we were allowed to feel the 'radiance 
 of this glamour upon us. It was late summer 
 and the road was dusty. Great wreaths of 
 dust whirled past us through sultry air, 
 dimming our eyes and making our hair 
 gritty. As for Frankie, the gray of the dust 
 was so thick on him that only clairvoyance 
 could have told his true color. Jim subdued 
 him to about ten miles an hour and we rolled 
 slowly through a small town, looking for a 
 place where it would be possible to stop and 
 prepare supper. Ahead of us, as far as we 
 could see, dust was thick over the road and 
 gray as death. By all the laws of hygiene 
 and aesthetics it would be wrong to stop 
 where we were for the purpose of eating. I 
 looked about me anxiously. 
 
 Then I saw, at one side of the road, a rusty- 
 colored, benevolent, old-fashioned house. A 
 
1 50 The Dingbat of Arcady 
 
 stubby hedge enclosed a lawn on which a hose 
 was playing. On a veranda, in a chair tilted 
 back against the wall, sat an old gentleman 
 in rusty black. His feet hung limp without 
 touching the floor. His head was sunk on 
 his breast. I gave little thought to him then, 
 however, for I was looking at the lawn (how 
 good it would be to sit on!) and at the hose 
 (how good it would be to get under the 
 spray!). I stepped out of Frankie. Said I to 
 Jim: 
 
 "rU ask that old gentleman to let us eat 
 supper on his lawn.'* 
 
 Never before had we asked such a privilege. 
 We had cooked our meals in meadows and 
 orchards, but never on a lawn near a home. 
 I went quickly for fear of losing courage. 
 
 *Tardon me, sir, but we have been traveling 
 all day and are tired. The road is dusty. May 
 we eat our supper on your lawn?** 
 
 The chair tilted forward and the old gentle- 
 man sat up. His spirit came back from that 
 mazy region unexplored by youth to which 
 old people go when they are alone. He took 
 a good look at me and kindly amusement 
 flickered in his eyes. He got up. 
 
 *'Why, yes,*' he said; "come along in, come 
 along in.*' 
 
The Dingbat of Arcady 151 
 
 He beckoned to Jim, who whirled Frankie 
 about and brought him to a stop beside the 
 stubby hedge. The old gentleman hurried 
 over to get acquainted with him. He was 
 alert now, and twinkled with activity and 
 talk. 
 
 "Campin', eh? Well, now that's certainly 
 fine. Nothin' better 'n campin'. Got supper 
 all ready, have you?" 
 
 "We have bread and butter,'' said I, "but 
 if you would let us light our small gasoline 
 stove — it won't hurt the grass — we could cook 
 beefsteak and onions. . . ." 
 
 "Steak and onions! Just the thing! Nothin' 
 better 'n steak and onions. If I hadn't had 
 my own supper, I'd just ask you folks to let 
 me in on it." 
 
 He was as excited as if he were giving a 
 party. 
 
 "Mama," he called to one of the windows 
 at the back of the house, "Mama, let these 
 folks in and give 'em a chance to wash at 
 the pump on the stoop." 
 
 We came out with clean faces and clear 
 eyes. We sat down on the cool lawn. We 
 lighted our stove and I filled a pan with steak 
 and onions. The old gentleman walked around 
 us, smoking a pipe, talking volubly between 
 
152 The Dingbat of Arcady 
 
 puflFs, and apparently delighted with his 
 queer, uninvited guests. He told us how he 
 used to go camping when he was a young 
 man. But he had come home, now, home 
 to what David Morton calls "the rooted 
 certainties." 
 
 'If my wife had liked it, we might have 
 kept it up,'' he would say. That is what many 
 men tell us when they talk with us of our 
 adventures. And the house-bound women say 
 wistfully, "If it wasn't for the children . . ." 
 
 While we were still eating, one of our host's 
 old cronies stopped beside the stubby hedge. 
 
 "Havin' a picnic, Joe?" 
 
 With something of the air of a Barnum, it 
 must be admitted, the old gentleman hurried 
 over to explain. He made a good story. 
 
 "These folks have traveled all over the 
 world like this," he said, "and they're great 
 campers." 
 
 When the time came to pack our things 
 and put them in Frankie he did not want us 
 to go. 
 
 "I have a grove the other side of the house," 
 he said, "pine-trees. Nothin' better 'n pine- 
 trees. I wouldn't ever let anybody cut 'em 
 down. You could camp there as well as not. 
 Just come and take a look at 'em." 
 
The Dingbat of Arcady 1 53 
 
 Our vacation was over and we were needed 
 at home. Otherwise we might have stayed. 
 But although we could not do that we went 
 and admired his ''grove/' half a dozen brave 
 old trees, strong symbols of the joy of his 
 youth, reminding him of crisp dawns and clear 
 evenings near the earth. I wondered how 
 many of his neighbors knew what those pines 
 meant to him. Perhaps not a one. He had 
 let us know because we could understand. 
 He all but begged us to stay overnight. When 
 we had climbed into Frankie again, we left 
 him standing beside the stubby hedge, waving 
 his hat. Said he to Jim: 
 
 *'Come again if you're passing by this way 
 and stay as long as you like. / like to meet a 
 character like you!'' 
 
 And so we pass mankind in review on the 
 open road and are reviewed ourselves. Each 
 newcomer is a sentry who cries out to us to 
 halt that he may learn our untold braveries, 
 our hidden renunciations, our latent gracious- 
 ness from a personal radiance evident to him, 
 unsuspected by ourselves. That he can find 
 these things in us is a cause for great good 
 cheer. That we can find them, also, in him, 
 is a reason for the glad laughter that rises 
 out of faith. 
 
[VIII] 
 
[VIII] 
 
 ff^UEN we told people in Oregon and Cali- 
 fornia that we were going back to New York 
 and that we expected to camp out in the East, 
 they said: 
 
 "You won't find the farmers there like the 
 ones here." 
 
 But we did. And when we told New York- 
 ers that we were going to tour and camp in 
 England, they said: 
 
 *'You won't find the farmers there like the 
 ones here." 
 
 But they were wrong. My opinion is that 
 if we sought camping sites in the blue fields 
 of heaven, the farmers there would welcome 
 us as they have everywhere on earth. Per- 
 haps they would offer us ethereal butter and 
 honey from "the angels' pale tables" of which 
 Vachel Lindsay tells. However that may be, 
 I can vouch for the fact that the English 
 farmer is as friendly as his kinsman in our 
 own country, and that is saying a good deal. 
 
 It was in early summer that we began 
 to explore the English countryside in a motor- 
 cycle combination called Rover Chug-chug. 
 
1 5 8 The Dingbat of Arcady 
 
 Rover was a veteran. He went into the war 
 in 1 9 14 and did more to win it than any 
 profiteer ever did. As a result he was old, 
 and often very tired. But not all of the moral 
 force had gone out of his engine. He was 
 plucky and would die hard. If he sometimes 
 behaved with all the flirtatious uncertainty 
 of a Don Juan, that only made him the more 
 attractive. We bought him in London for 
 more good American money than we could 
 get for Frankie Ford at home. All motor 
 vehicles brought enormous prices in England 
 after the war. We removed the upholstered 
 seat from the sidecar, which looked like a 
 bathtub for a giant's canary bird, and we 
 folded our good brown tent and put it where 
 the upholstered seat had been in the place 
 which I was to occupy. We made our blan- 
 kets into a neat, compact brown bundle and 
 strapped them on behind. Between the sidecar 
 and the cycle we swung a big aluminum pail 
 which held our small primus stove and a 
 few cooking utensils. Behind Jim's seat on 
 the cycle was a package of clean clothing. 
 This load and our two substantially healthy 
 selves we asked poor Rover Chug-chug to 
 pull. In spite of the fact that he had only 
 one cyhnder to his name, he usually did it. 
 
The Dingbat of Arcady 159 
 
 With this equipment and in this manner 
 we set out, going down into the southwestern 
 counties. Of course we saw the great cathe- 
 drals and reverenced their grandeur and their 
 grace. Of course we saw Bath and Exeter 
 and Salisbury and Winchester. But of these 
 great piles of sternly worshipping stone let 
 other and wiser tourists tell. We spent most 
 of our time with the simple folk whose fore- 
 fathers had built these mighty churches to 
 be a memorial of their kind while their civil- 
 ization endures. The first farmer with whom 
 we made friends was a man of Somerset, who 
 allowed us to pitch our tent in his field for 
 two days and nights while Jim overhauled 
 the weary engine of Rover Chug-chug, 
 
 This farmer had a voice as smooth and 
 rich as heavy cream. He had hair like sun- 
 light on waves of ripe grain. He and his wife 
 belonged to the Salvation Army and saw little 
 of the comforming villagers who lived near. 
 They were as pious as Father Aeneas. And 
 they were very kind to us through the two 
 long rainy days that we spent with them. 
 After we had made camp and while I was 
 getting supper the first evening, they came 
 over to see us. 
 
 The farmer was a man of few words, which 
 
1 60 The Dingbat of Arcady 
 
 was too bad, for his voice should have made 
 him a bard. A good lyric would have been 
 ravishing in his mouth. But all he said was, 
 *'Oh-ay.'* He made it mean several things. 
 By a subtle variation of sound he could ask 
 a question with it or give an answer or make 
 an exclamation. He could explain his uni- 
 verse with it. He hardly needed gesture. 
 
 His wife, who called me "Dearie" at once, 
 was a devoted mother of half a dozen children. 
 They all lived in a tiny cottage like four low 
 walls hugging a big chimney. It was set in a 
 tiny yard walled away from the meadow. 
 Inside the wall hollyhocks and roses crowded 
 close upon peas and cabbages. Outside, where 
 we camped, was the free pasture of the big, 
 clean, silky cow and of her small, absurd, 
 spotted calf. A pool in the meadow sheltered 
 salamanders — **hevets" the children called 
 them. At least, that is as near as I can come 
 to spelling out their pronunciation. They 
 thought that these salamanders were poison- 
 ous and were amazed to see Jim, who knows 
 something of biology, take them up in his 
 hands. 
 
 When they learned that we loved wild 
 things they took us for a walk in their emerald 
 meadow and showed us the sweetest and 
 
The Dingbat of Arcady t6 I 
 
 happiest thing they knew, their treasure of 
 treasures for the time. On a grassy slope the 
 farmer knelt down and thrust his arm into 
 a hole which we should never have noticed. 
 With a look of shy pleasure he pulled out 
 a wild baby rabbit, then another and another, 
 till each child was holding one little furry, 
 frightened, cuddling creature. We passed 
 them around, gently stroking their brown, 
 downy ears. Then the Somerset man care- 
 fully tucked them back into their nest in the 
 earth. They would not be there long, he 
 said. Poachers would get them. 
 
 His wife gathered a handful of homely 
 meadow flowers for us and a bunch of delicate 
 knot-grass which, she said, would be pretty 
 in the house all winter. And on our way back 
 to the tent, she stepped into the tiny cottage 
 and brought us out a roll of ghstening butter 
 on a broad green leaf. When we sat down to 
 supper on the turf that evening and saw that 
 butter beside our stout English loaf, we felt 
 that the only proper grace was the desire to 
 deserve it. We slept one more night in that 
 meadow in Somerset and in the morning said 
 farewell. The good mother cried out to us: 
 
 "Let us know if you come by again and 
 hl'U put you h'up." 
 
1 62 The Dingbat of Arcady 
 
 Her husband, standing at the gate and 
 smiHng, said, 
 
 "Oh-ay." 
 
 It was good to know that we had been 
 welcome guests. We were glad, too, that we 
 had freed the family from the fear of sala- 
 manders. Every fear lost is a faith found, 
 one step upward on the rungs of the golden 
 ladder that climbs into joy and peace. Per- 
 haps there was a spirit in that pool with the 
 '*hevets'* crying out, even before our arrival, 
 in words like those given to the river god by 
 Beaumont and Fletcher: 
 
 " Do not fear to put thy feet 
 Naked in the river sweet; 
 Think not leech, or newt, or toad 
 Will bite thy foot when thou has trod: 
 
 "Nor let the water, rising high. 
 As thou wadest, make thee cry 
 And sob; but ever live with me 
 And not a wave shall trouble thee." 
 
 Leaving Somerest behind us after two rainy 
 days, we set out to see Devon of the red 
 earth and the lovable sea, Devon of the nar- 
 row immaculate lanes and old churches, Devon 
 of the brown thatches and yellow plaster, 
 Devon of the wild red poppies and the creamy 
 
The Dingbat of Arcady i ()2 
 
 sheep. And we saw her in all her dear, domes- 
 tic beauty, ate her rich cream and her ruddy 
 strawberries, and, in the course of time, 
 arrived at the foot of Porlock Hill where, in 
 so far as I was concerned, the driving trip 
 ended and a walking trip began. 
 
 Unlike Rover Chug-chug^ Porlock Hill had 
 a reputation. It was said to be one of the 
 steepest hills in England. We had been ad- 
 vised to take a long, roundabout road because 
 the short and direct way up would be im- 
 possible for Rover, Even the longer and easier 
 grade, we were told, would be difficult. It 
 would be necessary to lighten the load for 
 Rover. He could carry the luggage or he could 
 carry me. Alas, the luggage could not walk! 
 
 "I'll have to go up Porlock Hill alone," 
 said Jim. I'll wait for you at the top where 
 the road begins to go down again." 
 
 He started the engine and away he went 
 with Rover, I plodded along uphill on a per- 
 fect road which rose steadily, winding around 
 the shapely hill, past hundreds of line old 
 trees. As I walked Christina Rossetti's lyric 
 of the hill and the road came into my 
 mind. 
 
 "Does the road wind uphill all the way? 
 Yes, to the very end." 
 
1 64 The Dingbat of Arcady 
 
 The proud old symbols pleased me more than 
 ever before. I liked the idea of ascending 
 to some far summit of the spirit. It seemed 
 a wiser and a truer symbolism than that in 
 Burns' lovable *7ohn Anderson, My Jo, John/' 
 
 On I went. Alone I reached a height that 
 looks down on the sea that England loves. 
 So steep was that hill that the sea, far below, 
 seemed high at the horizon, as if it were 
 tipping itself toward the land. It was calm. 
 The color of it wavered between jade and 
 slate, a gray-green mystery. I moved away 
 from the ledge where I had been standing 
 and nearer to my friends the trees. I think 
 I learned why the ancient Israelites were 
 forbidden to worship in groves and high 
 places. Perhaps they make the spirit proud — 
 or dizzy. 
 
 Then I wondered why a glimpse of the 
 ocean from a hill meant something new to 
 me in England. I had often looked down on 
 the superb Pacific from the mountains that 
 form the crescent-shaped coast line of Santa 
 Barbara. The majesty of those mountains 
 would have humbled Porlock Hill. I had 
 looked down from them with joy, but not 
 with this strange, new stirring of the heart. 
 Why was it? 
 
The Dingbat of Arcady 165 
 
 I think that while I was Hving out of doors 
 in England I may have been unconsciously 
 homesick, sometimes, for the wild beauty of 
 my homeland. In England man has reigned 
 over nature for generations and reigned 
 nobly. The land has been used and loved 
 and subdued to a quiet loveliness. But 
 America, wherever there is no ''Main Street" 
 (our conquest over nature?), goes hand in 
 hand with grandeur from zone to zone and 
 parallel to parallel. We have scenery whose 
 elemental beauty is amazing enough to be 
 perilous if we were not somewhat insensitive 
 and deeply interested in soap, tobacco, and 
 pickles. Just as an Englishman might be 
 stirred by the sight of English flowers in an 
 American garden, so, I think, I was stirred 
 by the elemental beauty seen from Porlock 
 Hill. It meant home. 
 
 After a little more walking and thinking 
 I reached the top of the hill and found Jim 
 and Rover in good spirits and willing to go 
 on. We drove on to Lynmouth where we saw 
 the things all tourists see and took a good 
 look at the river flowing out into the calm 
 ocean of jade and slate. After that we were 
 obliged to separate again. 
 
 Lynmouth is built at the foot of a high 
 
1 66 The Dingbat of Arcady 
 
 and perpendicular cliff. On top of the cliff 
 is the town of Lynton. Jim and I could have 
 gone up into Lynton together in a lift which 
 operates between the two towns, but the lift 
 could not have taken Rover Chug-chug, It 
 is always despicable to desert a good friend, 
 and on this occasion it would have been un- 
 thrifty also. Jim set out on a meandering 
 road through the hills with Rover, I rose into 
 Lynton on the lift and awaited them there. 
 
 In due season Jim and Rover and I all met 
 again. One of us had a long drink of gasoline 
 and the other two had luncheon in a queer 
 little boarding house in a side street because 
 we were not courageous enough to cook or 
 eat our own on the streets of a town, nor 
 presentable enough to go to a good inn. After 
 luncheon all three of us went on our way, 
 chugging out of Lynton on the road to II- 
 fracombe. For a short time Rover behaved 
 admirably. Then we came to another stretch 
 of uphill going. He wheezed and stopped. 
 
 "You'll have to walk,'' said Jim to me. 
 *'ril drive on toward Parracombe until I come 
 to a place where the road is level or slopes down. 
 Then we'll go on to Ilfracombe together." 
 
 Jim and Rover left me and disappeared 
 around the bend. Afoot and light-hearted. 
 
The Dingbat of Arcady 1 67 
 
 but a little weary, I trudged along in the 
 general direction of Ilfracombe with Parra- 
 combe as my first goal. 
 
 "Shall I find comfort, travel-sore and weak? 
 Of labor you shall find the sum." 
 
 The words of Christina Rossetti went with 
 me. I walked and walked. Although I had 
 memorized that lyric in my youth for sheer 
 love of it, I found out that day what it means 
 to learn a poem ''by heart." The thought 
 and music of it haunted me. No matter how 
 fast I walked I could not walk away from its 
 analogies and suggestions. 
 
 "Shall I meet other wayfarers at night?" 
 
 I wondered what I should do if night came 
 and found me alone on that strange road as I 
 must ultimately be alone at night on the road 
 of Christina Rossetti. Numerous cars and 
 wagons passed me there in the afternoon, 
 but I did not meet my fellow wayfarers. 
 Nobody was presumptuous enough to scrape 
 an acquaintance and give me a lift. The 
 English are exceedingly well bred. 
 
 The road, Hke most roads in England, was 
 beautiful. It rose from a deeply cleft, wooded 
 valley into the skyey regions of what Cali- 
 
1 68 The Dingbat of Arcady 
 
 fornians would call a mesa. I had not gone 
 far before I heard a rumbling noise rolling 
 through the valley. A brooding greyness 
 covered the edge of the upland. A thunder- 
 storm was coming. Nevertheless, I was not 
 alarmed, for I felt sure to the very marrow 
 of my American bones that it would not be 
 the peer of thunderstorms that I had lived 
 through and rejoiced in at home. English 
 weather grumbled along from day to day 
 (when it was not smiling genially), but it 
 rarely did anything rough. 
 
 The rain began to fall slowly and heavily 
 in big drops like the discouraged tears of 
 gentlemanly angels. I had no raincoat. I 
 was wearing a short woolen skirt, a cotton 
 jumper, and a heavy, gray, sleeveless sweater. 
 My arms got wet. My shoes felt the slippery 
 mud of the road take on a new slipperiness. 
 I walked and walked and still that road be- 
 haved like the road of Christina Rossetti and 
 went uphill all the way. No Jim could I see. 
 I wondered whether a leprechaun had stolen 
 him. There was nothing in the world to do 
 but keep on walking. 
 
 The slow shower became a vigorous rain. 
 Mobs of plebeian angels must have been 
 weeping the plentiful tears of some heavenly 
 
The Dingbat of Arcady 169 
 
 sorrow. My sleeves stuck to me. My feet 
 slipped and slithered in the mud. My cheap 
 round felt hat was like a filled sponge on top 
 of my head. On I went. 
 
 After a while I heard the slow pad-pad of 
 a horse behind me. I looked back and saw a 
 farmer's high cart pulled by a sensible old 
 nag and coming along at a decent jog-trot. 
 The farmer and his wife were sitting on a 
 broad, high seat up in front under a mighty 
 umbrella. There was room under it and be- 
 side them for a third person. I looked up 
 appealingly as they passed. They looked like 
 kind people. Surely they would invite me to 
 take the empty place. But evidently it was 
 not the thing to do and nobody English ever 
 does anything that is not "the thing." They 
 passed me by. 
 
 Then I was desperate. We arc bidden to 
 ask that we may receive. We are also told 
 that the biggest price we can pay for any- 
 thing is to ask for it. Both are wise counsels. 
 I realized that I must ask for a lift. I ran 
 uphill after that cart. I overtook the old 
 horse on a steep part of the up-grade. Then 
 I oflfered to pay the farmer to take me as 
 far as he was going in the direction of Parra- 
 combe. 
 
1 70 The Dingbat of Arcady 
 
 As it happened, he was bound for that 
 village. He and his wife kindly helped me up 
 into the empty place beside them. As soon 
 as I recovered the breath lost in running 
 after their horse, I explained my eccentric 
 behavior. I put all of the blame on RoveVy 
 who had refused to carry me. I told them 
 that there had been no stage to take at that 
 time and that it was necessary for us to 
 get to Ilfracombe as soon as possible and 
 that Jim would be waiting somewhere on 
 the road. 
 
 We jogged and we jogged. I was more 
 comfortable on the high seat under the mighty 
 umbrella than I had been on the muddy road. 
 We went on silently for a time. Then an 
 idea entered into the mind of that farmer 
 and fell from his lips in innocent speech. 
 
 "Your husband wouldn't be running away 
 from youj would he?" 
 
 With humor and devotion I rallied to the 
 defense of my good man. 
 
 "It seems a bit queer/* said the farmer. 
 "Does he often leave you hke this?*' 
 
 "Only when Rover can't carry me and 
 we have to get ahead," said I. "The bun- 
 dles can't walk and I can. At home in 
 my own country my husband and I camp 
 
The Dingbat of Arcady 171 
 
 together often and I always try to be a 
 good sport/' 
 
 He probably thought that I had chosen 
 a strange way of being a good sport, but 
 like the other English, he was polite about 
 it. Probably the thought that I was Amer- 
 ican and therefore peculiar just by nature 
 and without being able to help it was a com- 
 fort to him. I suppose that if he is ever 
 asked to describe Americans, something of 
 the wife-deserter will enter into his description 
 of the American man and something of the 
 queer lady pedestrian into his description of 
 the American woman. 
 
 Having imposed myself upon them, I did 
 my best to be agreeable. I told them how 
 much I liked Devon, how beautiful England 
 seemed, and what New York was like. But 
 never could I divert their minds enough to 
 prevent them from wondering where my lost 
 husband might be. The English mind seems 
 to be immobile. 
 
 **You're sure he was going to Parracombe?'' 
 they would ask. 
 
 And I would assent, although I was be- 
 ginning to wonder whether I should ever find 
 him again. Much to my relief I did spy him 
 at last, just before the hill sloped down 
 
172 The Dingbat of Arcady 
 
 to Parracombe. Under a big tree at the 
 opening of a lane the old brown tent was 
 spread loosely over Jim and Rover. They 
 seemed to be keeping a weather eye out 
 for me. I squealed with delight and was 
 about to dismount, but Jim astonished my 
 kind acquaintances by shouting to me to re- 
 main where I was. 
 
 "IVe had trouble with the brakes," he 
 said, "and Fve just fixed them. They say 
 that the grade into Parracombe is dangerous, 
 ril go through the town with Rover and meet 
 you on the other side.'* 
 
 The farmer and his wife seemed glad 
 to ascertain that I had a real husband, 
 albeit a queer one, and they agreed to 
 take me through the town. I asked what 
 I owed them. They said that it was against 
 the law for them to accept anything for 
 driving people. It could not be done with- 
 out a license. I thought earnestly for a 
 moment and then asked if they had children. 
 They had. 
 
 "Would it be against the law for me to 
 give them a present?'* 
 
 That would be quite legal. 
 
 **Well, then, I must ask your help about 
 it/' said I. *1 do not know vour children 
 
The Dingbat of Arcady 173 
 
 and can not guess what they would hke. 
 Please buy them something in Parracombe 
 and give it to them from me/' 
 
 All alone again at the first fork of the road 
 beyond Parracombe I waited for Jim. There 
 would be no more hills. I looked down on 
 the quaint, friendly little town which I had 
 left behind and thought of all that must be 
 left behind before reaching the inn at the top 
 of the hill of Christina Rossetti, — towns, 
 homes, gardens, friends, and Jim. I listened 
 to the dry whispering of a scythe in a field 
 near by where a sturdy Englishman was 
 cutting grass. It was an eternal music. It 
 would go on when I had entered the inn that 
 nobody can miss. I was glad of that. . . . 
 The storm had gone and the sky was opal- 
 escent with the fires of sunset. The coming 
 of night was in the coolness of the air, but 
 the day was not yet over. When Jim and 
 Rover found me I was dreaming of a day 
 and a hill and a road beyond time and space. 
 But I had farther to go here. 
 
 " Will the day's journey take the whole long day? 
 From morn to night, my friend." 
 
 We spent many a beautiful night camping 
 on the English commons, treated always with 
 
1 74 The Dingbat of Arcady 
 
 courtesy and kindness by all classes of people 
 with whom we came in contact. Nor did we 
 find anywhere a dirty, unsightly, or unpleasant 
 bit of country. Every inch of rural England 
 that we saw had been loved so well that it 
 had been kept undefiled. May travelers say 
 as much for our country in the future. They 
 could not say it now. 
 
 One of the happiest of our camping places 
 was on Sevenoaks Common on the Pilgrims' 
 Way to Canterbury. It was there that I 
 made friends with an old beech tree. It was 
 in this manner. 
 
 In England summer days were opalescent, 
 softly clouded and shot through with light 
 fire. Life burned and glowed. The holly- 
 bushes had put out their new leaves, deli- 
 cately thorny, shiny, almost translucent, and 
 quite unlike the thick, opaque leaves we know 
 at Christmas time. The wild berry vines were 
 blossoming. The ivy had sent out an apostolic 
 succession of new and sensitive shoots along 
 the climbing ways and over the ground. The 
 bracken was uncurling. The trees were in 
 new leaf. Many of them were not perpen- 
 dicular, but ran at sudden angles one with 
 another and bent in several ways. In the 
 midst was the great beech. In front of it, at 
 
The Dingbat of Arcady 175 
 
 a short distance, so that we might look at 
 it, we put up our tent, while the soft sunlight 
 of an English afternoon fell away to ghostly 
 yellow among all the mingled greens and 
 made a silent symphony of the colors of rest. 
 We ate our supper and sat idly watching 
 day change to night. 
 
 The night was a fairy corridor cut in moss- 
 agate, misty and magical, through which we 
 moved haunted by whims and strange wisps 
 of thought born with our bodies and souls 
 of the experience of our race. I watched the 
 shadows deepen around the old beech, think- 
 ing how the young Shakespeare might have 
 slept out in this same country, under such 
 trees, or how Chaucer might have walked on 
 this very common many a time, picking the 
 daisies that he loved. The tree became a 
 stalwart Shakespeare, a portly Chaucer, a 
 symbol of the mellow greatness of the English 
 mind at its best. If the leaves of it had changed 
 suddenly to the crimped white ruff worn by 
 him of Avon, and if he had spoken to me of 
 the "darling buds of May,' I should not 
 have been greatly surprised. If the branches 
 of the beech had suffered metamorphosis and 
 become the smock that Chaucer wears in his 
 portrait in the National Gallery, I should 
 
1 76 The Dingbat of Arcady 
 
 have taken it, I think, as a matter of course. 
 I should have waited to hear him say, 
 
 "O yonge fresshe folkes, he or she 
 In which that love upgroweth with your age, 
 Repeyreth hoom from worldly vanitee. 
 And of your herte up-casteth the visage 
 To thilke god that after his image 
 Yow made, and thinketh all nis but a fayre 
 This world, that passeth sone as floures fayre." 
 
 A Httle later we decided to make a trip to 
 Edinburgh and left London for the North in 
 Rover Chug-chug, We spent the first night 
 of this trip on " 'Am Common" (Ham pre- 
 ferred) near Richmond, by advice of a kind 
 Bobbie, only to discover next day that it 
 had been against the law for us to put up 
 our tent there, or to run our little motor- 
 cycle combination into a space between clumps 
 of bushes. Nobody knew that we had done 
 it, however, and we were not molested. Nor 
 should I have known that it was against the 
 law if I had not seen a sign next day denying 
 the privilege of camping to all gypsies and to 
 other peculiar people like teachers and poets. 
 
 The bushes around us were furze — what 
 the friendly poHceman had called "fuzz- 
 bushes." They were merry with golden 
 bloom. And never, even in California hills, 
 
The Dingbat of Arcady 1 77 
 
 have I heard such a full chorus of bird song as 
 woke on Ham Common that morning. Cuck- 
 oos called out loudly, as they rarely do with 
 us, that summer was "icumen in." The larks 
 and other English birds that we did not know 
 tossed carols into the air as fast as a fountain 
 tosses spray. It was a jubilant festival. 
 
 Leaving Ham Common behind we went 
 straight North toward Doncaster, driving fast 
 over the long and level roads. It was late in 
 the next afternoon when we saw a modern 
 bungalow of our own American kind at the 
 edge of a quiet meadow and near a small 
 grassy grove. Jim left me with Rover and 
 went and asked permission to put up our tent 
 in that grove for the night. It was most 
 courteously granted. More than that, while 
 we were pitching camp the owner of the 
 bungalow came over to see us, bringing four 
 fresh eggs which he offered us for breakfast 
 and for which he would not be paid. He 
 lingered a moment, chatting diffidently, but 
 with interest, and then he said, 
 
 "Pardon me — I hope you won't think me 
 indelicate — but you have been driving all 
 day — wouldn't you like a bath?" 
 
 It was too good to be true! The English 
 are often accused of stand-offishness. Here 
 
178 The 'Dingbat of Arcady 
 
 was an Englishman offering the kindest 
 hospitahty of his home, his "castle," to two 
 strangers, foreigners at that, who had come 
 to camp upon his property straight from the 
 open road, with no introduction but the 
 smiles upon their faces ! 
 
 We went on northward through Yorkshire 
 and prepared to cross the moor and enter 
 Scotland by way of Carlisle. The rain fell 
 on us day after day and all the way, but we 
 were reconciled to that when we saw the 
 most wonderful sky that we had ever seen 
 from the high moorland between Bowes and 
 Brough. On the day when we made this 
 trip it was still raining, or, let us say euphem- 
 istically that there was a Scotch mist. We 
 had eaten luncheon at Greta Bridge, at The 
 Morritt Arms. It was good, but cold, and 
 came to an end with some Wensleydale cheese 
 as deliciously flavorous as one of Edwin 
 Arlington Robinson's lyrics. From Greta 
 Bridge we drove on in the rain to Bowes 
 where the road began to wind slowly uphill 
 for six miles, and then down again for another 
 six miles to Brough. 
 
 As we moved upward with all the slow 
 speed our heavily laden Rover Chug-chug 
 would make we looked at that sky. It was 
 
The 'Dingbat of Arcady 179 
 
 full of brooding life. Valhalla might have 
 been just behind it. Around us was the moor, 
 rolling and dipping in long, undulating lines 
 away to the right, covered with scrub and 
 weeds of kinds new to us. Across the road and 
 on the edge of the moor the sheep, omni- 
 present in England, were grazing, their creamy 
 wool heavy with moisture. Strange, crested 
 moor birds stood near the road, hunched up 
 meditatively on one leg. As we passed they 
 rose deliberately into the air, crying plain- 
 tively. In the valley to the left grim stone 
 walls, not unlike those in New England, but 
 with a smoother masonry, cut the green land 
 into sections. Here and there great wisps of 
 mist had fallen upon them and blotted them 
 out. Cool air everywhere, moist air every- 
 where, disturbed air blowing this way and 
 that all around us! Over all this the sky! 
 
 The sky was purple as heather and gray as 
 age and streaked with amber and rose like 
 an apple and troubled with wildness like the 
 light in the eyes of a cat. It changed from 
 moment to moment, hue sliding into hue, 
 tone falling upon tone, form melting into 
 form. Great columns of white cloud fell down 
 and broke upon the floor of the earth, or 
 were hidden by rising walls of amethyst. 
 
1 80 The Dingbat of Arcady 
 
 built by invisible fingers. Dusky castles with 
 blue battlements reared themselves before our 
 eyes and stood a moment in evanescent gran- 
 deur, then disappearing in long, vertical lines 
 of swiftly falling silver, upon which the sun, 
 from some secret place, tried in vain to look 
 out. Movement upon movement, glory upon 
 glory! 
 
 I have said that we were wet and cold and 
 tired. That may have been one reason why 
 we kept silence at first as we drove up the 
 winding road. But he is no lover of beauty 
 who can not forget his body momentarily 
 when his soul is feasting. We had also another 
 reason for silence — we were enjoying what 
 was too thrilling for speech. We drove on to 
 the top of the grade. Then, when the road 
 tipped down again, a miracle happened. 
 
 We had forgotten cold and weariness and 
 the unending rain that beat upon our un- 
 sheltered faces and ran down our necks. We 
 had forgotten words. We had forgotten 
 thought. Without words or thought or any 
 tune that I can remember we began to sing. 
 And as we went swiftly and smoothly down 
 into the valley toward Brough we were sing- 
 ing exultantly, with none to hear but the 
 creamy sheep and the vari-colored moor birds 
 
The Dingbat of Arcady 1 8 1 
 
 and that wild sky and the unknown gods who 
 traveled those hills invisibly. 
 
 This, I think, was taking a step forward 
 in the knowledge of the absolute and eternal 
 beauty which we can never know fully in one 
 finite life, though it is that for which our best 
 selves hunger and thirst. To the believer it is 
 one phase of God's existence, this beauty, and 
 one way of his manifestation. It is at once a 
 celestial dream and a deep certainty. It is that 
 which we may approach and touch though we 
 may not encompass it. 
 
 What is given us is the privilege of looking 
 on small gems split from that perfect jewel of 
 unnumbered facets, of cherishing these small 
 particles of beauty in our lives and of telling 
 others about them. This blessed holding and 
 sharing is one fulfillment of destiny. It is what 
 great poets, great artists, great seers have 
 always done. It is what Httle poets, little art- 
 ists, little helpers of mankind should hope 
 to do. It is a high and honorable task. 
 
 The chilly rain went with us all the way 
 into Scotland. We kept fairly dry at night 
 in our tent. But in the daytime we rolled 
 over wet roads with the heavens open above 
 us. Our most intimate garments were thor- 
 
1 8 2 The 'Dingbat of Arcady 
 
 oughly wet most of the time. We were in 
 this condition one afternoon soon after cross- 
 ing the border when we came upon a small 
 cottage near the road. A grove near it looked 
 like a good place for a camp. Jim got off 
 Rover and asked the people who lived in the 
 cottage whether we might have permission 
 to put up a tent there over night. The little 
 woman who came to the door could not give 
 the permission herself, but sent Jim on to a 
 larger house to ask, with assurances that our 
 request would probably be granted. 
 
 For one reason or another I was left stand- 
 ing in the middle of the muddy road, dripping 
 at every crease and angle of my apparel, 
 waiting for Jim to return. I had not been 
 near a fire for three days and nights. While 
 I was thinking about this sordid fact a young 
 girl came to the door and called to me. 
 
 "Mother wants you to come in and get 
 warm by our fire." 
 
 I went in gratefully and set my stiff feet 
 on the fender. My clothes began to steam. 
 White vapor arose from my coat. I told the 
 pretty, dark-eyed woman that we had come 
 from far away New York. She thought it 
 was in Canada, near Vancouver. Her knowl- 
 edge of the United States of America was 
 
The Dingbat of Arcady 1 83 
 
 limited^ but her knowledge of human needs 
 and longings was full and rich. Quietly and 
 charmingly she set the table for tea, talking 
 with me pleasantly all the time. I thought 
 that, since it was tea time, it might be polite 
 for me to suggest departure, but as I was 
 framing a proper speech, my hostess said: 
 
 "Does your husband take an egg to his 
 tea?'' 
 
 They had been getting tea especially for us! 
 They had had their own earlier. Cold and 
 wet as I was the very thought of tea came 
 like a shock of swift delight. The thought 
 of such kindliness, too, made it difficult to say 
 '*Thank you" gracefully enough. They were 
 purely and beautifully hospitable and had 
 no intention of being paid. And such a tea! 
 
 I had had tea in London drawing-rooms 
 with Lady This and Lady That, and I had 
 enjoyed meeting clever and charming people. 
 It had been very good tea, too, with the 
 daintiest of thin bread and butter. But my 
 Scotch friends, who belonged to one of the 
 oldest and most romantic of the clans, had 
 several kinds of bread and butter, scones, 
 several kinds of cake, and a wonderful rhu- 
 barb tart. We might drink as many; cups of 
 tea as we wanted, and we did. Then also 
 
1 84 The Dingbat of Arcady 
 
 there was the friendliest talk in the world, 
 talk of monuments and sights to be seen in the 
 neighborhood. 
 
 By the time tea was over the rain had 
 stopped — or the mist had cleared. We took 
 leave feeling warm and jolly and pitched our 
 tent in the grove. In the evening our Scotch 
 friends came to see us in camp. They admired 
 our tent, our bedding, our primus lamp for 
 cooking, and funny little Rover Chug-chug, 
 Then they sat down under the trees for a 
 talk. 
 
 The man of the house, who had not been 
 present at tea-time, had come with his wife 
 to see us. They had brought the two youngest 
 children, a boy about ten years of age and 
 a girl somewhat younger; lovely, healthy 
 children, shy as young deer. It occurred to 
 me that the man of the family might have a 
 good voice in his big, broad chest. I asked 
 if he could sing and he admitted that he could 
 a bit. Jim thereupon agreed to sing an Amer- 
 ican song for every Scotch song our host 
 would give us. They took it turn about most 
 of the evening. Jim sang "Dixie," "Old 
 Kentucky Home'' and "The Star-Spangled 
 Banner" which they had never heard. The 
 braw Scot sang plaintive, sentimental bal- 
 
The Dingbat of Arcady 185 
 
 lads, many of them quite new to us and 
 quite delightful. One was about a coy lassie 
 who said to her eager lover, 
 
 "I canna, winna, mauna buckle to!" 
 
 I told our Scotch friends that the vulgar 
 American equivalent for "buckle to" was 
 "hitch up/' which amused them mightily. 
 
 When he noticed that we understood the 
 words of his songs, our friends asked us how 
 it happened that we could understand their 
 songs since we did not speak just as they did 
 and came from far away. I told him that 
 educated Americans all read Bobbie Burns. 
 He was amazed and delighted. 
 
 When he had sung everything he could 
 think of himself he turned to his son and heir 
 and bade him sing for us. At first young 
 Robbie said, "I winna.'* Then he said, "I 
 canna." But after much coaxing from his 
 pretty mother and a firm command from his 
 sire, Robbie sang, at first shyly, then delight- 
 fully, with all the unimpassioned clarity and 
 grace of a boy's soprano. 
 
 When the Httle family went home down 
 the quiet road, and we withdrew into the 
 old brown tent I felt that there was still 
 much blessedness to be told of mankind to 
 
1 8 6 The Dingbat of Arcady 
 
 mankind. Such kindness has often been 
 shown to us on the open road. I hope we 
 have not abused it. I hope other campers 
 will not. 
 
 As a mere poet certain things would be 
 permitted to me that are considered unbe- 
 coming in the wife of a teacher. For instance, 
 I seldom curse. But if I were to make up a 
 curse for campers who return evil for such 
 good things given to them, it would sound 
 something like this. May fire fail them in 
 need and may springs be tainted in the lands 
 where they travel, and may poison ivy cling 
 to their ankles, and may burrs catch in their 
 hair, and may thorns tear their cheeks, and 
 may snakes sleep in their beds, and may the 
 woodtick bury itself in their flesh, and may 
 the mosquito and the black-fly buzz near 
 them even unto the end of eternity! 
 
 Or, if I were in a better mood, if iniquity 
 were far from me, I might make, instead, a 
 blessing for all good campers who give joy 
 for joy on the highways and waterways. It 
 would be like this. May sweet fountains 
 quench their thirst and may scented fires 
 warm them; may clovers kiss their feet and 
 daisies crown their heads; may the rustle of 
 the brown thrasher wake them, and may they 
 
The Dingbat of Arcady 1 87 
 
 hear hummingbirds at noon in the hedges, 
 and may the dragon-fly flash bright before 
 them by day and the firefly at night when 
 they follow the old trails of the open world! 
 
 These are my memories, the fruit of a new 
 life not yet ended. But I have thought of 
 the end. The thought of it came to me once, 
 not tormentingly, not even sorrowfully, after 
 our return from England, when we were 
 camping in a cosy hollow at the top of a hill 
 in New York. It' was an autumn night and, 
 as we lay still in the old brown tent the smoke 
 from our dying fire scented the air. Death 
 became grandly inevitable in my mind, as 
 in actuality, and it was not altogether un- 
 lovely. 
 
 To give back to the earth the body broken 
 by life's hardness, to let it be dissolved again 
 to feed the roots of upstanding trees and 
 through the roots the fruits of them — that 
 did not seem terrible in the night. I ought 
 to be glad, I thought, to be renewed in such 
 beauty. To let the flesh become a rainbow 
 would be good. Perhaps many years later, 
 I told myself, young people glad of that into 
 which I had been translated, would come to 
 this very place to enjoy, with senses more 
 
1 8 8 The Dingbat of Arcady 
 
 acute than mine and with a finer under- 
 standing, all that I had known and loved. 
 
 To scatter abroad over the world the separa- 
 ble parts of my spirit, sparks freed from 
 that indivisible flame that is myself, like 
 red leaves in a wind — perhaps that would 
 not be altogether tragic either. My dreams 
 and deeds, capable of mutation and com- 
 bination through some splendid chemistry 
 unknown to me, might yet be immortal and 
 indestructible in the world that I have known 
 and loved. Facing the firm realities of rest 
 upon the rugged earth had enabled me to 
 face the final reality of which we know little 
 save that it is real for us all. 
 
 These are my memories. They have faces 
 as glad as morning, as profound as night. 
 Out of my life they look back at me with cheer 
 and warning and prophecy and comprehension 
 and belief. And over and over again, silently 
 but surely, they cry out to one another, 
 
 ''Gloriar 
 
 ^'Gloria in excelsis deor 
 

 
 
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