* * * * *

I drop in at a Leavenworth newspaper office, ostensibly to borrow the
use of a typewriter.

But the stick or so put in the paper about my passing through
Leavenworth pleases me.

General Fred Furniss is stationed at Fort Leavenworth. I must visit him.

* * * * *

General Furniss walked in rapidly as if executing a military manoevour,
both hands held forth in welcome. He was "Napoleonic" in size, and, also
like Napoleon, he carried too much belly in front of him. He wore a
closely curling salt-and-pepper beard....

He commented on my "military carriage"--asked me if I had ever gone to a
military academy....

I yielded to an instinct for deprecative horse-play, one of my worst
faults, begot of an inferiority-complex.

"No, I've never gone to a military academy, but I've had a hole in the
seat of my pants so generally, and I have had to walk erect so much to
keep my coat tail well down to hide it, that that is where I acquired my
military carriage."

The general's eyes twinkled.

"Take a chair. I have heard of you, Mr. Gregory ... I have watched your
work, too. Roosevelt knows about it ... has spoken of it to me ... has
remarked: 'there's a young fellow--your poet-chap in Kansas--that will
be worth watching ... why is it, Fred, that every man of any talent
whatever in Kansas, instantly gets the eye of the nation?... we're
always expecting something big from William Allen White's State'."

* * * * *

A week or so of work for a Polish-Catholic farmer ... who locked me out
of his house, when he and his family went to mass the one Sunday I was
with him. He asked me if I wanted a book to read. As the only book he
possessed was Thomas a Kempis' _Imitation of Christ_, I took it, and
learned Christian humility, reading it, in the orchard. Surely this
farmer was a practical Christian. He believed in his fellow man and at
the same time gave him no opportunity to abuse his faith in him....

* * * * *

It was pleasant, this working for from a few days to a week, then
sauntering on ... putting up at cheap little country hotels overnight. I
liked it better than tramping....

I pitched hay, I loaded lumber, I dug, I planted, I reaped.

In lower Minnesota a Swedish emigrant farmer hired me to help him with
his hay crop. He and I and his lanky son, Julius ... just coming out of
adolescence .