the Club library
and read or write letters."

He wrote almost as many letters as I did, and so we often faced each
other across a desk in the writing room. Sometimes he spoke of President
Roosevelt who was employing him on the new designs for our coins,
sometimes he alluded to the work awaiting him in his studio. Oh! how
homesick we both were! Perhaps he felt the near approach of the hour
when his cunning hand must drop its tool. I know the thought came to me,
creating a tenderer feeling toward him. I saw him in a sorrowful light.
He drew nearer to me, seeming more like a friend and neighbor.

I have said that I had a good deal of time on my hands, and so it seemed
to me then and yet during this trip I visited many of my friends,
prepared _The Tyranny of the Dark_ for serial publication, attended a
dinner to Henry James, was one of the Guests of Honor at the Camp Fire
Club and acted as teller (with Hopkinson Smith) in the election which
founded the American Academy of Arts and Letters--a fairly full program
as I look back upon it, but I had a great many hours to spend in writing
to Zulime and in dreaming about Mary Isabel. In spite of all my noble
companions, my dinners, speeches and honors I was longing for my little
daughter and her fireplace, and at last I put aside all invitations and
took the westward trail, counting the hours which intervened between my
laggard coach and home.

At times I realized the danger which lay in building so much of my
content on the life of one small creature, but for the most part I
rejoiced in the fact that she was in my world, even though I had a
growing sense of its illusory and generally unsatisfactory character. I
found comfort in the knowledge that billions of other men had preceded
me and billions more would follow me, and that the only real things in
my world were the human relationships. To make my wife and child happy,
to leave the world a little better than I found it, these formed my
creed.

It was cold, crisp, clear winter when I returned to West Salem and the
village again suggested a Christmas card illustration as I walked up the
street. The snow cried out under my shoe soles with shrill familiar
squeal, carrying me back to the radiant mornings in Iowa when I trod the
boardwalks of Osage on my way to the Seminary Chapel, my books under my
arm and the courage of youth in my heart. Now a wife and daughter
awaited me.

A fire was crackling in the new chimney, and in the