I had a splendid six weeks tramping with my lifetime friend, Stephen
Graham, in the Rockies. We climbed northwest through Glacier Park,
Montana, across the Canadian line into Alberta, Canada. There it is in
two sentences.
It would take more than the _Encyclopædia Britannica_ to tell on how
many points I differ from Stephen, and on how many points I agree with
him. I had not the least idea that so much Lindsay was going into
Graham’s fireside notes--while I was asleep at noon, often recovering in
an hour from ten hours of restless, sleepless freezing by night. I do
not hold myself liable in court for any opinions of mine then recorded
by Graham. My daytime strength was not all given to thought, however,
but often to trying to keep Graham in sight when he was a quarter of a
mile ahead of me climbing mountains absolutely perpendicular. As I
remember our first fireside discussions, they were as to whether there
was actually such a person as Patrick Henry. Graham had an idea he was a
perverse invention of my own fancy. But he looked him up afterwards and
found there was such a man. As I remember our conversations after that
provocation, I kept trying to deliver to him from memory Bryce’s
_American Commonwealth_, unabridged, two volumes, one thousand pages
each. I remember those volumes well. I read every page in lonely country
hotels and on slow local trains while a Sunday field-worker for the
Anti-Saloon League. And now invisible leaves of Bryce often made the
chief ingredient of our tea. So I have indicated in the design.
I did not tell Graham I was quoting the great ambassador, and so many
unsupported, heavy and formidable statements he quite properly hesitated
to write out, without further confirmation, though he drank them down
quite cheerfully. In the great blank spaces in Graham’s narrative where
he skips really splendid scenery, I was quoting Bryce--not always
singing hymns!
The most authentic part of my book, the part Mr. Vernon Hill has left
out, is that the mountains were as steep as I have drawn them. His
mountains, otherwise quite correct, are not sufficiently perpendicular.
Vernon Hill, of course, was not physically with us on the expedition. He
was in London, drawing beautiful and famous Arcadian Calendars. When
later he came to illustrate Graham’s book in London, with Graham bending
over him, no one mentioned the fact that the mountains were all like
church steeples. Graham had not noticed it, and it did not occur to
Vernon Hill by wireless. Otherwise Vernon Hill was in excellent
communication with us, and every picture in Graham’s book expresses
exactly what Graham was talking to me about to make me forget the
tumbles and the briers, and to drown out the Bryce.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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