Like many others, when his heart was saddest he sang—sang like Carligny, who was dying when he made Paris intoxicated with his wit. No publisher was obtained for his poems; he had not found that spring that opens all portals—a name. Every house was already filled with manuscripts, every journal with hastily-written fragments. A living earned by writing was one that too often gave straw for a bed, and bread and water for food. He was growing tired of the battle. There were no victories—all defeats. Perhaps he lacked proper training of self; perhaps the now weakened physical had dimmed the mental; perhaps circumstances without were as strong as the powers within. Men were no longer brothers to him. He sighed for the freedom of solitude, stepped one evening on a freight train going West, and, careless for the future, went forward to an unknown fate. He crossed foaming Lake Erie; flat, woody Michigan and its lake; passed through Milwaukee with its forests and few inhabitants, where now rises one of the loveliest cities of the West, out into the uncivilized country. The land was rolling, with here and there a prairie shut in by a border of oak or cotton-wood trees. The lakes—long Pewaukee; graceful Pine; clear Kotchee, that makes the highway an arch and circles under it; and Neponset, with green, scalloped bank and a tree in each scallop reflected by the waters—all these were like oases to him. He reached the Indian village, Oconomowoc, and stood at the foot of the peninsula that almost touches the island. On one side was a lake bordered with hawthorn, on whose bank a neat church now stands; on the other, five lakes, some small, one seventeen miles in length, surrounding islands covered with spruce and hemlock and oak. Hills, with their outcropping quarries of limestone, stood out against the blue sky. Back of this landscape, one of the most beautiful of the West, he found a cave worn into the mountain—a gloomy place, but free from dampness, and comfortable for one who had no care for humanity. Occasionally he made friends with an Indian and asked him to his hut, but this was rare. They looked upon him as a pale-face who, having vexed the Great Spirit, was repenting in solitude. He spent his days in wandering and study. He learned the geological history of the place from the hieroglyphics God puts upon the rocks for man to read. He pressed hundreds of flowers, and knew what Jehovah had intended for the gardens of the growing West. He wrote some, and grew happy in his isolated existence; yet there was no flow of animal life within him, no leaping of the heart for joy. The past was a sealed book; the present written with the indifference of a stoic; and the future a blank leaf with no desire to write upon it. Such was Giles Mortimer when a tender child was laid before him—a magnet to draw out a heart.