e to settle right down here with me for the
winter," he said. "In fact I shall try to persuade Richard to buy a
place here."

This brought out my own plan for a home in West Salem and he agreed
with me that the old people should never again spend a winter in Dakota.

There was no question in my mind about the hospitality of this home and
so with a very comfortable, a delightful sense of peace, of
satisfaction, of security, I set out on my way to San Francisco,
Portland and Olympia, eager to see California--all of it. Its mountains,
its cities and above all its poets had long called to me. It meant the
_Argonauts_ and _The Songs of the Sierras_ to me, and one of my main
objects of destination was Joaquin Miller's home in Oakland Heights.

No one else, so far as I knew, was transmitting this Coast life into
literature. Edwin Markham was an Oakland school teacher, Frank Norris, a
college student, and Jack London a boy in short trousers. Miller
dominated the coast landscape. The mountains, the streams, the pines
were his. A dozen times as I passed some splendid peak I quoted his
lines. "Sierras! Eternal tents of snow that flash o'er battlements of
mountains."

Nevertheless, in all my journeying, throughout all my other interests, I
kept in mind our design for a reunion at my uncle David's home in San
Jose, and I wrote him to tell him when to expect us. Franklin, who was
playing in San Francisco, arranged to meet me, and father and mother
were to come up from Santa Barbara.

It all fell out quite miraculously as we had planned it. On the 24th of
December we all met at my uncle's door.

This reunion, so American in its unexpectedness, deserves closer
analysis. My brother had come from New York City. Father and mother were
from central Dakota. My own home was still in Boston. David and his
family had reached this little tenement by way of a long trail through
Iowa, Dakota, Montana, Oregon and Northern California. We who had all
started, from the same little Wisconsin Valley were here drawn together,
as if by the magic of a conjuror's wand, in a city strange to us all.
Can any other country on earth surpass the United States in the ruthless
broadcast dispersion of its families? Could any other land furnish a
more incredible momentary re-assembling of scattered units?

The reader of this tale will remember that David was my boyish hero, and
as I had not seen him for fifteen years, I had looked forward, with
disquieting q