“When I was still a small boy, mother moved to California. She settled in a little wild valley amid the hills in the central part of the state, on a sheep range that she had bought. I was chief herder. All day long I followed the herd over ridge and hollow, and along the hillsides into the blue distance. I absorbed woodcraft and weather-wit, and a love of nature which has been one of the predominating influences of my life. “After a few years, we turned our place into a cattle range and farm, with myself as chief farmer. I was just entering my ‘teens’ then. I fenced and plowed the land straggling up the little valley, and learned every detail of a farmer’s work and life. The hoe, the shovel, the scythe, the cradle, the reaper, the threshing machine, the grafting knife,—these are all old friends of mine. When I began to near young manhood, I became a thresher, going from farm to farm, helping to thresh out the grain after the harvest home, and often sleeping at night in hay-mows. BYRON’S POEMS INSPIRED HIM. “Meanwhile, I devoured all the poetry I could find. I read Byron’s poems more than any other’s, because a complete set of his works was at hand, and as a result of his influence I wrote, when about sixteen, a very ambitious poem called, ‘A Dream of Chaos.’ This was only one of my youthful indiscretions in the poetical line. No, I don’t believe the general public will ever be asked to read them. It has been kind to me, and deserves fair treatment.” “But, Mr. Markham, did you not find that your hard farm labor tended to crush out the poetry, and finer feelings generally?” ANSWERING HIS CRITICS. “Oh, you are now getting on ticklish ground, for it is here that the critics of ‘The Man with the Hoe’ congregate and jubilate. Let me say briefly, though, in answer to you and to them, that I believe in labor, that I believe in its humanizing and redeeming power. Indeed, from a religious point of view, I believe that a man’s craft furnishes the chief basis of his redemption. While one is making a house, he is making himself. While he chisels the block of marble he is invisibly shaping his own soul. And it does not matter much what a man does,—whether he builds a poem or hoes in a garden. The chief thing is the way we do our work. It must be done thoroughly, and in the spirit of loving service. Work of this order is a perpetual prayer. The doer is elevated by such work. “But, while all this is true, it is also true that excesses are evils,—that overwork and underpaid work tend to break down instead of build up. Work is good for the child, but I can put such heavy burdens upon him as to deform his body and stunt his mind.