sets pale.

Alas! the road to Anywhere is pitfalled with disaster;
There's hunger, want, and weariness, yet O we loved it so!
As on we tramped exultantly, and no man was our master,
And no man guessed what dreams were ours, as swinging heel and toe,
We tramped the road to Anywhere, the magic road to Anywhere,
The tragic road to Anywhere such dear, dim years ago.

--"Songs of a Sourdough."

CHAPTER I

As far back as I can remember I have faithfully followed the banner of
Romance. It has given colour to my life, made me a dreamer of dreams, a
player of parts. As a boy, roaming alone the wild heather hills, I have
heard the glad shouts of the football players on the green, yet never
ettled to join them. Mine was the richer, rarer joy. Still can I see
myself in those days, a little shy-mannered lad in kilts, bareheaded to
the hill breezes, with health-bright cheeks, and a soul happed up in
dreams.

And, indeed, I lived in an enchanted land, a land of griffins and
kelpies, of princesses and gleaming knights. From each black tarn I
looked to see a scaly reptile rise, from every fearsome cave a corby
emerge. There were green spaces among the heather where the fairies
danced, and every scaur and linn had its own familiar spirit. I peopled
the good green wood with the wild creatures of my thought, nymph and
faun, naiad and dryad, and would have been in nowise surprised to meet
in the leafy coolness the great god Pan himself.

It was at night, however, that my dreams were most compelling. I strove
against the tyranny of sleep. Lying in my small bed, I revelled in
delectable imaginings. Night after night I fought battles, devised
pageants, partitioned empires. I gloried in details. My rugged
war-lords were very real to me, and my adventures sounded many periods
of history. I was a solitary caveman with an axe of stone; I was a Roman
soldier of fortune; I was a Highland outlaw of the Rebellion. Always I
fought for a lost cause, and always my sympathies were with the rebel. I
feasted with Robin Hood on the King's venison; I fared forth with Dick
Turpin on the gibbet-haunted heath; I followed Morgan, the Buccaneer,
into strange and exotic lands of trial and treasure. It was a wonderful
gift of visioning that was mine in those days. It was the bird-like
flight of the pure child-mind to whom the unreal is yet the real.

Then, suddenly, I arrived at a second phase of my mental growth in which
fancy usurped t