I am a traveller. In my mind I have gone the world over, and those
wanderings have been unhampered by the limitations of mere time, for I
know my India of the First Century as well as that of the Twentieth,
and the China of Confucius is as real to me as that of Kwang Su.
Without stirring from my little porch down here in the valley I have
pierced the African jungles and surveyed the Arctic ice-floes. Often
the mountains call me to come again, to climb them, to see the real
world beyond, to live in it, to be of it, but I am a prisoner. They
called to me as a boy, when wandering over the hills, I looked away to
them, and over them, into the mysterious blue, picturing my India and
my China, my England and my Russia in a geographical jumble that began
just beyond the horizon.

Then I was a prisoner in the dungeons of Youth and my mother was my
jailer. The day came when I was free, and forth I went full of hope,
twenty-three years old by the family Bible, with a strong, agile body
and a homely face. I went as a soldier. For months I saw what is
called the world; I had glimpses of cities; I slept beneath the palms;
I crossed a sea and touched the tropics. Marching beneath a blazing
sun, huddling from the storm in the scant shelter of the tent, my
spirits were always keyed to the highest by the thought that I was
seeing life and that these adventures were but a fore-taste of those to
come. But one day when we marched beneath the blazing sun, we met a
storm and found no shelter. We charged through a hail of steel. They
took me to the sea on a stretcher, and by and by they shipped me home.
Then it was that I was a hero--when I came again to Black Log--what was
left of me.

My people were very kind. They sent Henry Holmes's double phaeton to