In Russia England France Germany a writer sat writing. Oh, how well he did his job, and how close I feel to him as I read! What a sharp sense he gives of the life about him! With him one enters into that life, feels the hidden passions of peoples, their little household traits, their loves and hates. There are sentences written by all writers of note in all countries that have their roots deep down in the life about them. The sentences are like windows looking into houses. Something is suddenly torn aside, all lies, all trickery about life gone for the moment. It is what one wants, what one seeks constantly in one’s own craftsmanship, and how seldom it comes. The little faky tricks are always so ready to help over the hard places and when one has used them there is the little flush of triumph followed by--bah! followed always by the sick awakening. One need not go too far afield to find sentences and paragraphs that stir deeply. No doubt they were in the Indian language before white men came and the first whites on our shores brought the sense of them. There was that Fredis, sister of that Norseman Eric, who had come to America long before Columbus came and had built him a house in Vinland. The sister was a strong-willed woman who bullied her husband and was avaricious for wealth. Came sailing to Greenland the brothers, Helgi and Finnbogi, with a strong ship, and she induces them to go adventuring with her to Vinland but at the very beginning tricks them. She in her ship is to have thirty men and they are to have thirty but unknown to them she conceals an extra five in her own vessel so that in the far land, where are no white men and white men’s laws are unknown, she shall have the upper hand. They get to Vinland and she will not let them stay in the house, built there by her brother Eric, and they go patiently away and build a hut of their own. Still she schemes. See now with what truth, what fidelity and clearness some old writer tells of what happened. Well, the brothers had the larger and better ship and she wanted that too.