e sky-land,
Sight the hills of Treasure Island,
Prowl and peer and prod and prise,
Till there burst upon my eyes
Just the proper pirate's freight:
Gold doubloons and pieces of eight!

Then--the very best of all--
Suddenly a stranger tall
Would appear, and I'd forget
That we hadn't ever met.
And with cap upthrown I'd greet him
(Turning from the plunder, yellow)
And I'd hurry fast to meet him,
For he'd be the very fellow
Who, I think, invented fun--
Robert Louis Stevenson.

The enthusiasms of this barbaric period never died. They grew up,
instead, and proved serviceable friends. Fishing and hunting are now
the high-lights of vacation time. The crude call of the weird and the
inexplicable has modulated into a siren note from the forgotten
psychic continents which we Western peoples have only just discovered
and begun to explore. As for the buried treasure craze--why, my
life-work practically amounts to a daily search for hidden valuables
in the cellars and attics, the chimney-pieces and desert islands of
the mind, and secret attempts to coin them into currency.

And so I might go on to tell of my enthusiasms for no end of other
things like reading, modeling, folk-lore, cathedrals, writing,
pictures, and the theater. Then there is the long story of that
enthusiasm called Love, of Friendship its twin, and their elder
brother, Religion, and their younger sister, Altruism. And travel and
adventure and so on. But no! It is, I believe, a misdemeanor to obtain
attention under false pretenses. If I have caught the reader's eye by
promising to illustrate in outline a new method of writing
autobiography, I must not abuse his confidence by putting that method
into practice. So, with a regret almost equal to that of Lewis
Carroll's famous Bellman--

I skip twenty years--

and close with my latest enthusiasm.

IV

Confirmed wanderers that we were, my wife and I had rented a house for
the winter in a Massachusetts coast village and had fallen somewhat
under the spell of the place. Nevertheless, we had decided to move on
soon--to try, in fact, another trip through Italy. Our friendly
neighbors urged us to buy land up the "back lane" instead, and build
and settle down. We knew nothing of this region, however, and scarcely
heard them.

But they were so insistent that one day we ventured up the back lane
at dusk and began to explore the woods. It grew dark a