I think, when I wrote home the literal truth: “I can’t stand this reporting life any longer. I’m off to the goldfields, and McCloy has asked me to write articles for the paper,” there lay a vague idea in me that these goldfields would prove somehow to be comic goldfields, and that the expedition would be somewhere farcical. I was so eager, so determined to go, that I camouflaged from myself every unfavourable aspect of the trip. Green, being still my predominant colour, was used freely in this camouflage. It was only afterwards I realized how delightfully I fooled myself. Yet it was true, at the same time, that a deep inner necessity drove irresistibly. The city life was killing something in me, something in the soul: get out or go under, was my feeling. How easy it would have been to go under was a daily thought. Far better men than myself proved it all round me every week. It seemed, indeed, the natural, obvious thing to do for an educated, refined Englishman without character who found himself adrift from home influences in this amazing city--to sink into the general scum of failures and outcasts, to yield to one of the many anæsthetics New York so lavishly provided, to find temporary relief, a brief wild-eyed happiness, oblivion, then, not long afterwards, death. The draw of the woods, the call of the open air, moreover, always potent, had become insistent. Spring added its aching nostalgia that burned like a fever in my veins. Thus various influences, some positive, some negative, combined to make me feel that anything was better than the drudgery of my wretched New York life, and the goldfields merely offered a plausible excuse. If I made blinkers with my own hands, I made them effectively at least. Deep out of sight in the personality there hides, perhaps, some overseer who, watching wisely the turns of fate, makes such blinkers, ensuring their perfect fit as well.... There was a nice feeling, of course, that if one went to a goldfield, one picked up gold. Shaking sand in a shining pan beside a rushing river was a picture in the mind. There were wild men, friends and enemies; there were Indians too; but also there were sunsets, tempests, dawns and stars. It would be liberty and happiness. I should see the moon rise in clear, sweet air above the rim of primæval woods. I should cook bacon over an open fire of wood. There would be no grinning Chinaman to pay for laundry....