t, in the lower Fraser River in British
Columbia, I read much. In the town of New Westminster was a little
public library, and I used to go thither after work if I was not too
tired. But the work in a sawmill is very arduous to everyone in it, and
while the winter kept away I had little energy to read. Presently,
however, the season changed, and the bitter east winds came out of the
mountains and fixed the river in ice and froze up our logs in the
"boom," so that the saws were at last silent, and I was free to plunge
among the books and roll and soak among them day and night.

The library was very much mixed. It was indeed created upon a pile of
miscellaneous matter left by British troops when they were stationed on
the British Columbian mainland. There was much rubbish on the shelves,
but among the rubbish I found many good books. For instance, that winter
I read solidly through Gibbon's _Rome_, and refreshed my early memories
of Mahomet, of Alaric, and of Attila. Those who imported fresh elements
into the old were even then my greatest interest. I preferred the
destroyers to the destroyed, being rather on the side of the gods than
on the side of Cato. Lately, as I was returning from South Africa, I
tried to read Gibbon once more, and I failed. He was too classic, too
stately. I fell back on Froude, and was refreshed by the manner, if not
always delighted by the matter.

After emerging from the Imperial flood at the last chapter, I fell
headlong into Vasari's _Lives of the Painters_, in nine volumes. Then I
read Motley's _Netherlands_ and the _Rise of the Dutch Republic_, always
terrible and picturesque since I had read it as a boy of eleven.

At the sawmill there was but one man with whom I could talk on any
matters of intellectual interest. He was a big man from Michigan and ran
the shingle saw. We often discussed what I had lately read, and went
away from discussion to argument concerning philosophy and theology. He
was a most lovable person; as keen as a sharpened sawtooth, and a
polemic but courteous atheist. His greatest sorrow in life was that his
mother, a Middle State woman of ferocious religion, could not be kept in
ignorance of his principles. We argued ethics sophistically as to
whether a convinced agnostic might on occasion hide what he believed.

Sometimes this friend of mine went to the library with me. He had the
_penchant_ for science so common among the finer rising types of the
lower classes. So I