But that insatiable _Wanderlust_, that quick response to the lightest call of the seductive Beyond, that vagabond habit which caused my mother so much pain and worriment--where did _that_ come from? It was a sorry home-coming for my mother at night when the runaway fever had sent me away again. She would come into the house, tired out, and ask the governess for news of the children. The latter would make her daily report, omitting reference to me. "And Josiah," my mother was wont to say, "where is he?" "Gone!" the poor governess would wail, and my mother would have to go about her duties the next day with a heavy heart. Now, why was I so perverse and pig-headed in this matter, when I, myself, the fever having subsided, suffered real remorse after each trip? Even at this late day, after years of pondering over the case, I can only make conjectures. I have hinted that probably I inherited from my mother a love of being on the move, but she could control her desire to travel. For years I was a helpless victim of the whims of the _Wanderlust_. All that I have been able to evolve as a solution of the problem is this: Granted the innate tendency to travel, living much solely with my own thoughts, bashful and timid to a painful degree at times, and possessed of an imagination which literally ran riot with itself every few months or so, I was a victim of my own personality. This is all I have to offer by way of explanation. I have never met a boy or man who had been plagued to the same degree that I was. CHAPTER II YOUTHFUL DAYS AT EVANSTON That Western village in which I grew up and struggled with so many temptations and sins deserves a chapter to itself. Doubtless there are some very good descriptions extant of small Middle West communities of twenty-five and thirty years ago, but I do not happen to have run across any which quite hit off the atmosphere and general make-up which characterized my village on the western shore of Lake Michigan. Yet there were probably many other settlements very similar in structure and atmosphere all through Illinois and southern Wisconsin, peopled by sturdy New England folk and charged with New England sentiment. As I have already said, my village was singularized from other near-by communities of the same size on account of the Methodists having selected it for one of their Western strongholds. The place stood for learning, culture and religion in sectarian form in very pronounced outlines, and even in my childhood it was called the Athens of the West, or at any rate one of them. They are so numerous by courtesy to-day that it is difficult to keep track of them.