I started walking away along the tracks singing the words of an old ditty my father had been fond of singing in his liquor when I was a boy and that had at that moment popped into my head, and at the same time staggering about as though I were drunk. It was my purpose to make the night watchman think me a drunken workman homeward bound and I succeeded. As I went away from him, staggering along the track, singing and not answering when he demanded to know who I was and what I was doing there, he grew angry, ran quickly up behind and kicked at me. Fortunately he missed and fortunately I remembered that his eyes had gone back on him long since. He now grabbed at me but I eluded his grasp, singing my ditty as I half ran, half staggered away: “’Twas a summer’s day and the sea was rippled By the softest, gentlest breeze, When a ship set sail with her cargo laden For a land beyond the seas. Did she never come back? No, she never came back, And her fate is yet unlearned. Though for years and years sad hearts have been waiting Yet the ship she never returned.” NOTE V I HAD become a writer, a word fellow. That was my craft. Flinging aside the fake devotion that must always be characteristic of all such jobs as the advertising writing I had been doing for several years I had accepted my passion for scribbling as one accepts the fact that the central interest of one’s whole being lies in carving stone, spreading paint upon canvas, digging in the earth for gold, working the soil, working in wood or in iron. The arts are after all but the old crafts intensified, followed with religious fervor and determination by men who love them and deep down within him perhaps every man wants more than anything else to be a good craftsman. Surely nothing in the modern world has been more destructive than the idea that man can live without the joy of hands and mind combined in craftsmanship, that men can live by the accumulation of monies, by trickery. In the crafts only one may exercise all one’s functions. The body comes in, the mind comes in, all the sensual faculties become alive. When one writes one deals with a thousand influences that motivate his own and other lives. There is, first of all, the respect for what has gone before, for the work of the older craftsmen. One who has written as much as I have written--and for every word printed there are hundreds I have scrawled experimentally that will never be printed--has also read much and often with great joy.