dge of the wood
just inside the Camp's entrance.

It made a singularly appropriate addition to the reservation, to my
thinking, at least, and I took inordinate pride in its ownership. Trim
and white and graceful it stood against the forest wall, its crossed
poles sprangling from its top with poetic suggestion of aboriginal life,
and when, with elaborate ceremony, I laid the fuel for its first fire,
calling upon our patron, Wallace Heckman, to touch a match to the
tinder, I experienced a sense of satisfaction.

To my artist friends it was a "picturesque accessory"--to me it was a
talisman of things passing. The smoke of the hickory faggots filling
that conical roof-tree brought back to me a cloud of memories of the
prairies of the Sioux, the lakes of the Chippewa, and the hills of the
Cheyenne. Thin as were its walls, they shut out (for me) the commonplace
present, helping me to reconstruct the world of Blackhawk and the
Sitting Bull, and when I walked past it, especially at night, my mind
took joy in its form, and a pleasant stir within my blood made manifest
of its power.

Browne acknowledged its charm and painted a moonlight sketch of it, and
Seton, who came by one day, helped me dedicate its firehole. In the
light of its embers, he and I renewed our youth while smoking the
beautiful Pipe of Meditation, which a young Cheyenne chief had given me
in token of his friendship.

It happened that I was scheduled to give a series of lectures at the
University of Chicago on _The Outdoor Literature of America_, and with a
delightful feeling of propriety in the fact I set to work to write these
addresses in my canvas lodge, surrounded by all its primitive
furnishings. It made an admirable study, but at night as I lay on my
willow couch, I found the moonlight so intense and the converging lines
of the lodge poles so suggestive of other folk and other times that
slumber was fitful. The wistful ghosts of Blackhawk and his kind seemed
all about me. Not till the moon set or the shadows of the forest
covered me, was I able to compose myself to sleep.

For several weeks I wrote at ease upon my theme and then, into the
carefree atmosphere of my Lodge of Dreams came the melancholy news that
William McClintock, my giant uncle, had been stricken by the same
mysterious malady which had broken my mother's heart, and that he was
lying motionless on his bed in the narrow space of his chamber. The
"stroke" (so my aunt wrote) had come upon