on the farther side of the valley. I began then to love the level places
of the earth. I love them still. And, always excepting that one titanic
rift, where the world stands edgewise, with the sublimity of the
Almighty shimmering through its far depths, I love them more than any
other thing that nature has yet offered to me.

But to come back to that picture of yesterday: old Fort Leavenworth on
the bluff; the little and big ravines that billow the landscape about
it; the faint lines of trails winding along the hillsides toward the
southwest; the unclouded skies so everlastingly big and intensely blue;
and, hanging like a spray of glorious blossoms flung high above me, the
swaying folds of the wind-caressed flag, now drooping on its tall staff,
now swelling full and free, straight from its gripping halyards.

Between me and the fort many people were passing to and fro, some of
whom were to walk with me down the long trail of years. Evermore that
April day stands out as the beginning of things for me. Dim are the days
behind it, a jumble of happy childish hours, each keen enough as the
things of childhood go; but from that one day to the present hour the
unforgotten deeds of busy years run clearly in my memory as I lift my
pen to write somewhat of their dramatic record.

And that this may not seem all a backward gaze, let me face about and
look forward from the beginning--a stretch of canvas, lurid sometimes,
sometimes in glorious tinting, sometimes intensely dark, with rifts of
lightning cleaving through its blackness. But nowhere dull, nowhere
without design in every brush-stroke.

I had gone out on the bluff to watch for the big fish that Bill Banney,
a young Kentuckian over at the fort, had told me were to be seen only on