*

I was disappointed with my summer. In terms of poetic output. I had
written only three or four poems dealing with life on the Lakes, and
these were barely publishable in the _National Magazine._ I realise now
that poetic material is not to be collected as a hunter goes gunning for
game. It cannot be deliberately sought and found. It must just happen.

Yet all the things that I had seen and been through, I knew, would live
in my mind till they were ready of themselves to get birth in words. I
knew that I had not lost a single dawn nor one night of ample moon. And
there drifted back into my remembrance that night when the Italian
coal-passer had come to my bunk and wakened me, that I might come forth
with him and observe a certain wonderful cloud-effect about the full,
just-risen moon, over Huron....

I had cursed at him, thought he was trying to make a monkey of me ...
for I had dropped on deck a letter to me from Lephil of the _National_,
and so the crew had learned that I was a poet among them.

But I was not being spoofed ... actual tears of surprise and chagrin
came into the coal-passer's eyes. Then I had been ashamed of myself ...

"Of course I'll go on deck ... mighty fine of you to wake me!" I slid
into my pants and went up the ladder--

To envisage, rapturous, a great, flaming globe of shadowy silver ... and
across it, in a single straight ebony bar, one band of jet-black cloud
... and the water, from us to the apparition of beauty, danced, dappled,
with an ecstasy of quivering silver....

I have met many a man in my wanderings, simple and silent, who felt
beauty like a poet or an artist, without the poet's or artist's gifts of
expression,--with, on the contrary, a queer shame that he was so moved,
a suspicion that, somehow, it was not manly to be moved by a sunrise or
sunset.

* * * * *

I found Penton Baxter, his wife Hildreth, and their child, Dan, living
in two tents, among a grove of trees, near the main building of the
Health Home. These two tents had, of course, board floors, and there
was a woman who kept them in condition ... and there was a rack for
towels, and hot water was supplied by pipes from a nearby building. I
think the tents were even wired for electric light.

Baxter welcomed me. But I took a room for a week in town, though he
urged me to stay with him. But when I had the means I liked better to be
independent. I calculated living a week in Warriors