data before I am ready to go.” The dread of being fixed and settled, a captive in a place I could not leave at a moment’s notice, did not operate where Nature was concerned. The idea of living in the forests had no fear of prison in it. Events, moreover, which brought big changes into my life had always come, I noticed, from outside, rather than as a result of definite action on my own part. A chance meeting in a hotel-bar set me reporting, a chance meeting with Mullins landed me on the _Times_, a chance meeting with Angus Hamilton in Piccadilly Circus led to my writing books, a chance meeting with William E. Dodge now suddenly heaved me up another rung of life into the position of private secretary to a millionaire banker. To me it has always seemed that some outside power, but an intelligent power, pulled a string each time, and up I popped into an entirely new set of circumstances. This power pushed a button, and off I shot in a direction at right angles to the one I had been moving in before. This intelligent supervision I attributed in those days to Karma. In the mind, though perhaps with less decision there, it operated too. A book, a casual sentence of some friend, an effect of scenery, of music, and an express-lift mounts rapidly from the cellar of my being to an upper story, giving a new extended view over a far, a new horizon. Much that puzzles in the obscurity of the basement outlook becomes clear and simple. The individual who announces the sudden change is unaware probably how vital a rôle he plays in another’s life. He is but an instrument, after all. When, by chance, I found Mr. Dodge next me in a Broadway cable car, my first instinct was to slip out on to the outside platform before he had seen me, with, simultaneously, a hope that if he had seen me, he would not recognize me. He was a friend of my father’s. We had dined at his house on our first visit to New York, and once or twice since then our paths had crossed for a moment or two. He was a man of great influence, and of tireless philanthropy, a fine, just, high-minded personality. He stared hard at me. Before I could move, he had spoken to me by name. “How was I getting along?” he inquired kindly, and did I “like New York?” What was I “doing at the moment?”