ng, till late, the poetry of Norah May French, the beautiful,
red-headed girl who had, like myself, also lived in Eos, where Roderick
Spalton's Artworks were....

She had been, Penton informed me, when he handed me her book, one of the
famous Bohemians of the San Francisco and Carmel art and literary
crowd....

After a brief career of adventurous poverty, she had committed suicide
over a love affair.

Her poetry was full of beauty and spontaneity ... a grey mist dancing
full of rainbows, like those you see at the foot of Niagara....

I must have read myself to sleep, for the lamp was still lit when I woke
up early with the dawn ... it was the singing of the birds that woke me
on my second day at Eden....

Working on farms, in factories, on ships at sea, being up at all hours
to catch freights out of town had instilled in me the habit of early
rising; I would have risen at dawn anyhow without the birds to wake me.

Turning over for my pencil, which I ever keep, together with a writing
pad, at my bedside, to catch the fleeting poetic inspiration, I indited
a sonnet to Baxter (all copies of which I have unfortunately lost or I
would give it here) in which I sang his praises as a great man of the
same rank as Rousseau and Shelley.

In spite of the fact that I was fully aware of all his absurdities and
peccadilloes, the true greatness of the man remained, and still remains,
undimmed in my mind.

* * * * *

High day. I walked along the path, past the little house where Baxter
sequestered himself when he wished to be alone to think or write; it was
close to my tent, around a corner of trees. I tiptoed religiously by it,
went on up to the big house where the three women slept, as if drawn to
their abode by a sort of heliotropism.

The whole house stood in quiet, the embodiment of slumber.

* * * * *

A lank, flat-chested woman came up the path from the opposite direction
... dressed drab in one long, undistinguished gown like a Hicksite or
Quaker, without the hood ... her head was bare ... her fine, brown hair
plaited flat.

"Good morning!"

"Good morning," she replied, a query in her voice.

"I am John Gregory, the poet," I explained. "I arrived yesterday on a
visit to the Baxters."

She said she had heard of me ... she opened the door and went into the
house. I followed.

She was the wife of Anarchist Jones, of whom I had already heard the
ho