alf-read books, marked newspapers, clippings
and letters, a welter of concerns which he refused to have removed by
the broom of the caretaker, and now and again as he wished to show me
something he rose and hobbled a step or two to fish a book or a letter
out of the pile. He was quite lame but could move without a crutch. He
talked mainly of his good friends in Boston and elsewhere, and alluded
to his enemies without a particle of rancor. The lines on his noble face
were as placid as those on the brow of an ox--not one showed petulance
or discouragement. He was the optimist in every word.

He spoke of one of my stories to which Traubel had called his attention,
and reproved me gently for not "letting in the light."

It was a memorable meeting for me and I went away back to my work in
Boston with a feeling that I had seen one of the very greatest literary
personalities of the century, a notion I have had no cause to change in
the twenty-seven years which have intervened.

CHAPTER XXXI

Main Travelled Roads

My second visit to the West confirmed me in all my sorrowful notions of
life on the plain, and I resumed my writing in a mood of bitter
resentment, with full intention of telling the truth about western farm
life, irrespective of the land-boomer or the politicians. I do not
defend this mood, I merely report it.

In this spirit I finished a story which I called _A Prairie Heroine_ (in
order that no one should mistake my meaning, for it was the study of a
crisis in the life of a despairing farmer's wife), and while even here,
I did not tell the whole truth, I succeeded in suggesting to the
sympathetic observer a tragic and hopeless common case.

It was a tract, that must be admitted, and realizing this, knowing that
it was entirely too grim to find a place in the pages of the _Century_
or _Harper's_ I decided to send it to the _Arena_, a new Boston review
whose spirit, so I had been told, was frankly radical.

A few days later I was amazed to receive from the editor a letter of
acceptance enclosing a check, but a paragraph in the letter astonished
me more than the check which was for one hundred dollars.

"I herewith enclose a check," wrote the editor, "which I hope you will
accept in payment of your story.... I note that you have cut out certain
paragraphs of description with the fear, no doubt, that the editor would
object to them. I hope you will restore the manuscript to its original
form and retur