e ensuing day or the call of
some sudden hour. It is a liberal education to the law-abiding
Englishman to see a good specimen of a Texan cowboy walk down a Western
street; for he looks like a law unto himself, calm and greatly assured
of the validity of his own enactments. We live in a crowd here, and it
takes a rebel to be himself; and in the struggle for freedom he is
likely to go under.

[Illustration: COWBOY ROBERTS]

While I was gaining the experience that went solid and crystallised into
'The Western Avernus,' I was discovering much that had never been
discovered before, not in a geographical sense--for I have been in few
places where men have not been--but in myself. Each new task teaches us
something new, and something more than the mere way to do it. To drive
horses or milk a cow or make bread, or kill a sheep, sets us level with
facts and face to face with some reality. We are called on to be real,
and not the shadow of others. This is the worth that is in all real
workers, whatever they do, under whatever conditions. Every truth so
learnt strips away ancient falsehood from us; it is real education, not
the taught instruction which makes us alike, and thus shams, merely
arming us with weapons to fight our fellows in the crowded, unwholesome
life of falsely civilised cities.

[Illustration: THE VERY PRAIRIE DOGS TAUGHT ME]

And in America there is the sharp contrast between the city life and the
life of the mountain and the plain. It is seen more clearly than in
England, which is all more or less city. There are no clear stellar
interspaces in our life here. But out yonder, a long day's train ride
across the high barren cactus plateaus of Arizona teaches us as much as
a clear and open depth in the sky. For, of a sudden, we run into the
very midst of a big town, and shams are made gods for our worship. It is
difficult to be oneself when all others refuse to be themselves.

This was for me the lesson of the West and the life there. When I wrote
this book I did not know it; I wrote almost unconsciously, without
taking thought, without weighing words, without conscious knowledge.
But I see now what I learnt in a hard and bitter school.

For I acknowledge that the experience was at times bitterly painful. It
is not pleasant to toil sixteen hours a day; it is not good to starve
overmuch; it is not well to feel bitter for long months. And yet it is
well and good and pleasant in the end to learn realities and liv