What happened? Just a tightening of the cords of the boy’s body. There was an inclination to be at the same time sad and full of joy. A door had been jerked open by the hand of the workman but the boy could not see within the house. He was, I remember, known as something of a “nut” in our town--a silent old chap--and once he went away to work in a city factory but later came back to his own little shop. He was a wagon-maker and the making of wagons by individual workmen lasted out his time. But he had no young workman to whom he taught the love of his trade. That died with him. Not quite, perhaps. The picture of the old workman and just the way his fingers touched the trunk of a tree on a certain Sunday afternoon and of how, as he walked away along a path, he kept stopping to turn back and take another look at his materials, stayed in a boy’s mind through long years of being smart, of trying mightily to be shrewd and capable in a world where materials did not matter, in the company of workmen vulgarized by the fact that the old workman’s love of materials was unknown to them. * * * * * The writer with his sheets in a room. Will he accomplish his purpose? It is sure he will not. And that too is a part of the joy of his fate. Do not pity the workman, you who have succeeded in life. He wants no pity. Before him always there is the unsolved problem, the clean white unwritten sheets, and the workman also knows his moments of surrender, of happiness. There will always be the moments when he is lost in wonder before the possibilities of the materials before him. As for myself I had been, at the time in my life of which I am now writing, a man of business for many years, had been buying and selling, but had all the time been secretly scribbling in my room at night. During the day I for years wrote advertisements--of soaps, of plows, house paints, incubators for the hatching of chickens. Was there something hatching in me? With all my scribbling had I something to say? Were there tales I had picked up I might in the end tell truly and well? I had seen and known men and women, going from their homes to their work, going from their work to their homes, had worked with them in offices and shops. On all sides the untold tales looked out at me like living things. I had bought and sold but had no real interest in buying and selling. All day I wrote advertisements and perhaps the advertisements helped sell So-and-so many dollars’ worth of goods. As I walked homeward through streets, across bridges, I could not remember what I had been writing about. At times too there was a sharp sense of uncleanliness. In my room the white sheets looked up at me. I remembered the workman seen in the forest in the presence of the tree when I was a boy. “I will launch out upon new adventures,” I said to myself. NOTE II