wn-mower,
the second in the town, and shaved our front yard. We took down the old
picket fence in front of the house and we planted trees and flowers,
until at last some of the elderly folk disgustedly exclaimed, "What
won't them Garland boys do next!"

Without doubt we "started something" in the sleepy village. Others
following our example went so far as to take down their own fences and
to buy lawn-mowers. That we were planning waterworks and a bath-room
remained a secret--this was too revolutionary to be spoken of for the
present. We were forced to make progress slowly.

_Rose of Dutcher's Coolly_, published during this year, was attacked
quite as savagely as _Main Traveled Roads_ had been, and this criticism
saddened and depressed me. With a foolish notion that the Middle West
should take a moderate degree of pride in me, I resented this
condemnation. "Am I not making in my small way the same sort of
historical record of the west that Whittier and Holmes secured for New
England?" I asked my friends. "Am I not worthy of an occasional friendly
word, a message of encouragement?"

Of course I should have risen superior to these local misjudgments, and
in fact I did keep to my work although only a faint voice here and there
was raised in my defence. Even after _Rose_ had been introduced to
London by William Stead, and Henry James and Israel Zangwill and James
Barrie had all written in praise of her, the editors of the western
papers still maintained a consistently militant attitude. Perhaps I
should have taken comfort from the fact that they considered me worth
assaulting, but that kind of comfort is rather bleak at its best,
especially when the sales of your book are so small as to be
confirmatory of the critic.

Without doubt this persistent antagonism, this almost universal
depreciation of my stories of the plains had something to do with
intensifying the joy with which I returned to the mountain world and
its heroic types, at any rate I spent July and August of that year in
Colorado and New Mexico, making many observations, which turned out to
have incalculable value to me in later days. From a roundup in the
Current Creek country I sauntered down through Salida, Ouray, Telluride,
Durango and the Ute Reservation, a circuit which filled my mind with
noble suggestions for stories and poems, a tour which profoundly
influenced my life as well as my writing.

The little morocco-covered notebook in which I set down s