"There's no doubt of your being a Westerner." "I hope not. I believe in the West. I tell you, brother Garland, the West is the coming country. We ought to have a big magazine to develop the West. It's absurd to suppose we're going on always being tributary to the East!" Garland laid down his pad and lifted his big fist in the air like a maul. His enthusiasm rose like a flood. "Now you touch a great theme. You're right, Field. The next ten years will see literary horizons change mightily. The West is dead sure to be in the game from this time on. A man can't be out here a week without feeling the thrill of latent powers. The West is coming to its manhood. The West is the place for enthusiasm. Her history is making." Field took up the note. "I've got faith in it. I love New England for her heritage to you. I like her old stone walls and meadows, but when I get back West--well, I'm home, that's all. My love for the West has got blood in it." Garland laughed in sudden perception of their earnestness. "We're both talking like a couple of boomers. It might be characteristic, however, to apply the methods of the boomers of town lots to the development of art and literature. What say?" "It can be done. It will come in the course of events." "In our enthusiasm we have skated away from the subject. You are forty-three, then--you realize there's a lot of work before you, I hope." "Yes, yes, my serious work is just begun. I'm a man of slow development. I feel that. I know my faults and my weaknesses. I'm getting myself in hand. Now, Garland, I'm with you in your purposes, but I go a different way. You go into things direct. I'm naturally allusive. My work is almost always allusive, if you've noticed." "Do you write rapidly?" "I write my verse easily, but my prose I sweat over. Don't you?" "I toil in revision even when I have what the other fellows call an inspiration." "I tell you, Garland, genius is not in it. It's work and patience, and staying with a thing. Inspiration is all right and pretty and a suggestion, but it's when a man gets a pen in his hand and sweats blood, that inspiration begins to enter in." "Well, what are your plans for the future--your readers want to know that?" His face glowed as he replied, "I'm going to write a sentimental life of Horace. We know mighty little of him, but what I don't know I'll make up. I'll write such a life as he _must_ have lived. The life we all live when boys." The younger man put up his notes, and they walked down and out under the trees with the gibbous moon shining through the gently moving leaves. They passed a couple of young people walking slow--his voice a murmur, hers a whisper. "There they go. Youth! Youth!" said Field. NOTE.--A series of portraits of Mr. Field at different ages will be printed among the "Human Documents" in the September number. THE SHADOW BOATSWAIN. BY BLISS CARMAN.