And I cried also, I suppose, because in Uncas and mother there was a kind of directness and simplicity that father and all fellows, who like myself are of the same breed with him, can never quite achieve. NOTE II A FAMILY of five boys and two girls--a mother who is to die, outworn and done for at thirty-- A father, whose blood and whose temperament I am to carry to the end of my days. How futile he was--in his physical life as a man in America in his time--what dreams he must have had! There was a dream he had of something magnificent--a lone rider on a horse, dressed in shining armor and riding in a city before a vast multitude of people--the beating of drums.... “The man--he comes! Hurra!” People who live their lives by facts can never understand such a fellow. “He comes! All hail!” What has he done? Well, never mind--something grand, you may be sure of that. The dream that never can become a fact in life can become a fact in fancy. “There he goes.... ‘Teddy the magnificent’!” One both laughs and cries over the memory of him. The showman was there, in him--it flowered within him--and it is in me too. When Carl Sandburg, the poet, long after said to me--speaking of his lecturing and reading his poetry aloud, to make a living--“I give ’em a good show,” I understood what he meant and I understood the pride in his voice when he said it. And then, later still, when I was writing my own novel, “Poor White”; and when my boyhood friend, John Emerson, gave me a job--doing publicity for movie people, in order that I might have some income to write at my leisure--and for a time I saw a good deal of that strange perverted band, I could understand them also. They were people like my own father, robbed of their inheritance. In an odd way they were my own people too. John Emerson, a boyhood friend from my own village, had given me the movie job, knowing I would be no good at it. He was a successful man, a moneymaker, and was always planning out schemes for giving me money and leisure. I went often to the movie studios and watched the men and the women at work. Children, playing with dreams--dreams of an heroic kind of desperado cowboy, doing good deeds at the business end of a gun--dreams of an ever-virtuous womanhood walking amid vice--American dreams--Anglo-Saxon dreams. How they wanted to be the things they were always playing, and how impossible it all was! My father lived in a land and in a time when what one later begins to understand a little as the artist in man could not by any possibility be understood by his fellows. Dreams then were to be expressed in building railroads and factories, in boring gas wells, stringing telegraph poles. There was room for no other dream and since father could not do any of these things he was an outlaw in his community. The community tolerated him. His own sons tolerated him.