ematics and
philosophy, slowly but surely, just as he had fought inch by inch and
link by link, across the Arizona desert years before. It was a much
harder fight, for all the force of lifelong habit, than which there is
none other so powerful, was against him from the start. And now came the
human temptation to be off on the old trail, to saddle his horse and get
a pick and a pan and make off across the western range to the golden
land that always lies just under the sunset. How often that turbulent
_Wanderlust_ seized him, I can only conjecture. But I know the spirit of
the wanderer was always strong within him. He could say, with Kipling's
_Tramp Royal_:

"It's like a book, I think, this bloomin' world,
Which you can read and care for just so long,
But presently you feel that you will die
Unless you get the page you're reading done,
An' turn another--likely not so good;
But what you're after is to turn them all."

And I knew that he fought that temptation over and over again; for that
little experience out on the Gallatin bench had only partially turned
his life from the channels of wandering, although it had bereft him of
the old desire to seek for gold. Often he outlined to me a
well-formulated plan; perhaps he had to tell some one, lest the fever
should take too strong a hold upon him, and force his surrender. His
plan was this: He would teach a term here and there, gradually working
his way westward, always toward the remote corners of the earth into
which his roving instinct seemed unerringly to lead him. Alaska, Hawaii,
and the Philippines seemed easy enough to access; surely, he thought,
teachers must be needed in all those regions. And when he should have
turned these pages, he might have mastered his vocation in a degree
sufficient to warrant his attempting an alien soil. Then he would sail
away into the South Seas, with New Zealand and Australia as a base. And
gradually moving westward through English-speaking settlements and
colonies he would finally complete the circuit of the globe.

And the full fruition of that plan might have formed a fitting climax to
my tale, were I telling it for the sake of its romance; but my purpose
demands a different conclusion. My hero is now principal of schools in a
little city of the mountains,--a city so tiny that its name would be
unknown to most of you. And I have heard vague rumors that he is rising
rapidly in his profession and that the community he se