Father stands beside the fence telling the doctor’s joke to the neighbor, who has heard it many times before but who, out of sympathy, now laughs heartily. As though drawn toward each other by some invisible cord they both sidle along the fence until they are standing close together. It is a moment of masculine obscurity. Men must stand shoulder to shoulder. The women have the centre of the stage--as father would have said later, when he became an actor and loved to sling the actor’s jargon, they were “hogging the footlights.” Not quite succeeding however. This is the moment for me to come upon the stage. The two men stand closely together, father fingering nervously the heavy gold watch chain--he is soon to lose it with all his other property in one of his frequent business failures--and from the house comes a faint cry. To the two men standing there it sounds not unlike the cry of a puppy inadvertently stepped on by a careless master, and father jumps suddenly aside so that his neighbor laughs again. And that is myself--just being actually born into the world. * * * * * Which is one thing, but sometimes one’s fancy wants something else. As I lay, deep buried in the hay in the barn on another fall day, and as the resentment--born in me through having been made the son of two decaying, gentle families--grew deeper and deeper, and also as the grateful warmth of the departed summer--captured and held by the hay--stole over my body, cold from the day of tramping in the wood in a cold rain in pursuit of the squirrels--as the warmth took hold of my body, the scene of my actual birth hour, just depicted, faded. I fled from the field of fact and into the field of fancy. Upon the sand on a desolated coast far down on the Gulf of Mexico an athletic looking man of perhaps thirty lies looking out over the sea. What cruel eyes he has, like the eyes of some cunning beast of prey. He is perhaps thirty years of age, but one can see well enough, just by looking at him casually, that he has retained all the youthful strength and elasticity of his splendid body. He has a small black mustache and black hair and his skin is burned to a deep brown. Even as he lies, relaxed and listless, on the yellow sand a glow of life and of strength seems to emanate from him.