ear. They breathe the knowledge in.

[Illustration: THE CALIFORNIA COAST RANGE]

In speaking as I have done about America I do not mean to praise it as a
State or a society. In that respect it is perhaps worse than our own,
more diseased, more under the heel of the money fiend, more recklessly
and brutally acquisitive. But there are parts of it still more or less
free; nature reigns still over vast tracts in the West. As a democracy
it is so far a failure, as democracies must be organised on a
plutocratic basis; but it at any rate allows a man to think himself a
man. Walt Whitman is the big expression of that thought, but his fervent
belief in America was really but deep trust in man himself, in man's
power of revolt, in his ultimate recognition of the beauty of the truth.
The power of America to teach lies in the fact that a great part of her
fertile and barren soil has not yet been taught, not yet cultivated for
the bread which of itself can feed no man wholly.

[Illustration: BY THE CAMP FIRE]

Perhaps among the few who have read 'The Western Avernus' (for it was
not a financial success), fewer still have seen what I think I myself
see in it now. But it has taken me six years to understand it, six years
to know how I came to write it, and what it meant. That is the way in
life: we do not learn at once what we are taught, we do not always
understand all we say even when speaking earnestly. There is often one
aspect of a book that the writer himself can learn from, and that is not
always the technical part of it. All sayings may have an esoteric
meaning. In those hard days by the camp fire, on the trail, on the
prairie with sheep and cattle, I did not understand that they called up
in me the ancient underlying experience of the race, and, like a deep
plough, brought to the surface the lowest soil which should hereafter be
a little fertile. When I starved, I thought not of our far ancestors who
had suffered too; as I watched the sheep or the sharp-horned Texas
steers, I could not reflect upon our pastoral forefathers; as I climbed
with bleeding feet the steep slopes of the Western hills, my thoughts
were set in a narrow circle of dark misery. I could not think of those
who had striven, like me, in distant ages. But the songs of the camp
fire, and the leap of the flame, and the crackling wood, and the lofty
snow-clad hills, and the long dim plains, the wild beast, and the
venomous serpents, and the need of food, broug