My mind dwelt on the matter of roots and I looked at my feet. The whole question with which I was at the moment concerned became a matter of feet. I had two feet that could take me out of the life I was then in and that, to do so, would need but take three or four steps to a door. When I had reached the door and had stepped out of my little factory office everything would be quite simplified, I was sure. I had to lift myself out. Others would have to tackle the job of getting me back, once I had stepped over that threshold. Whether at the moment I merely became shrewd and crafty or whether I really became temporarily insane I shall never quite know. What I did was to step very close to the woman and looking directly into her eyes I laughed gayly. Others besides herself would, I knew, hear the words I was now speaking. I looked at my feet. “I have been wading in a long river and my feet are wet,” I said. Again I laughed as I walked lightly toward the door and out of a long and tangled phase of my life, out of the door of buying and selling, out of the door of affairs. “They want me to be a ‘nut,’ will love to think of me as a ‘nut,’ and why not? It may just be that’s what I am,” I thought gayly and at the same time turned and said a final confusing sentence to the woman who now stared at me in speechless amazement. “My feet are cold wet and heavy from long wading in a river. Now I shall go walk on dry land,” I said, and as I passed out at the door a delicious thought came. “Oh, you little tricky words, you are my brothers. It is you, not myself, have lifted me over this threshold. It is you who have dared give me a hand. For the rest of my life I will be a servant to you,” I whispered to myself as I went along a spur of railroad track, over a bridge, out of a town and out of that phase of my life. NOTE IV ON the evening when I returned to the town my mood was quite another one. I was on my way from Chicago to the city of New York. Why had I wanted to stop? The impulse had come suddenly, as I stood at the railroad ticket window in Chicago.