n echo of
my own first impression, though often and often I've tried to blot out
that first unfair estimate of a real man of genius. There's so much in
the _Child's Garden of Verse_ that I love; there's so much in the man's
life that demands admiration, that it seems wrong not to capitulate to
his charm. But when one's own family are one's biographers it's hard to
be kept human. "Yet there's one thing, Dinky-Dunk, that I do respect him
for," I went on. "He had seen the loveliest parts of this world, and,
when he had to, he could light-heartedly give it all up and rough it in
this American West of ours, even as you and I!" Whereupon Dinky-Dunk
argued that we ought to forgive an invalid his stridulous preaching
about bravery and manliness and his over-emphasis of fortitude, since it
was plainly based on an effort to react against a constitutional
weakness for which he himself couldn't be blamed.

And I confessed that I could forgive him more easily than I could
Sanguinary John with his literary Diabolism and that ostentatious
stone-age blugginess with which he loved to give the ladies goose-flesh,
pretending he was a bull in a china-shop when he's really only a white
mouse in an ink-pot! And after Dinky-Dunk had knocked out his pipe and
wound up his watch he looked over at me with his slow Scotch-Canadian
smile. "For a couple of hay-seeds who have been harpooning the _salon_
idea," he solemnly announced, "I call this quite a literary evening!"
But what's the use of having an idea or two in your head if you can't
air 'em now and then?

_Tuesday the Twenty-seventh_

To-day I stumbled on the surprise of my life! It was A Man! I took Paddy
and cantered over to the old Titchborne Ranch and was prowling around
the corral, hoping I might find a few belated mushrooms. But nary a one
was there. So I whistled on my four fingers for Paddy (I've been
teaching him to come at that call) and happened to glance in the
direction of the abandoned shack. Then I saw the door open, and _out
walked a man_.

He was a young man, in puttees and knickers and Norfolk jacket, and he
was smoking a cigarette. He stared at me as though I were the Missing
Link. Then he said "Hello!" rather inadequately, it seemed to me.

I answered back "Hello," and wondered whether to take to my heels or
not. But my courage got its second wind, and I stayed. Then we shook
hands, very formally, and explained who we were. And I discovered that
his name was