Also, of course, it was really out of the question to transport a wife and five little girls across an untracked continent, full of Indians. He was to go alone, make a brief stay, get the lay of the land, and come back, his pockets full of gold, to take the family out in a ship around the Horn. It was all settled in his mind as if the gold were heavy in his pockets. The separation would be short ... he was sure of it, as he was always sure of whatever would ensure his being free of the slightest constraint.... He moved his family into the nearest settlement, cashed in on everything saleable, added a small sum that had just come to him as his share of his father’s small property, and got together enough to support his family for a year. It took little enough, as they had always lived. And he would be back before the year was out, rolling in gold. With empty pockets and a high heart he took his gun and his ax, kissed his family good-by and went away planning to live off the country as he traveled, as he always had. One letter came back from California, the only one he ever wrote, since he had never before been separated from the one human being he had loved. He had had a gloriously adventurous time in getting out there, Indians, drought, snow, heat, grizzly bears--all the regulation accompaniments of the transcontinental trip in 1849. He struck it rich at once, and as one of the first on the ground had a wonderful claim of his own. They would all be rich in no time. In no time he was dead. For an interminable period his wife heard nothing, and then, very vaguely, that he had died of “mountain fever.” He had been dead and buried for months before she learned that she was a widow at thirty-two with five helpless little girls and not a penny in the world. OCTOBER, 1918 MORNING I was crossing the Place de la Concorde, and stopped for an instant, fascinated by the sinister expression of an immense cannon, painted in serpentine streaks and stripes, the muzzle of its tube distorted by an explosion so that a twisted flap of steel hung down like a broken jaw-bone. A hail made me turn around. The elegant old man who was an American correspondent for a New York newspaper, came up with an expression of approval. “Magnificent display, isn’t it?” he said, waving his hand towards the ranks of captured cannon and mitrailleuses, standing thick on the public square. “Why didn’t you bring your children?” The gulf between his generation and mine yawned deep. I told myself the part of wisdom was to close my lips on what I felt. But the cannon leered at me too insolently, with its torn muzzle. I answered, “I’m glad enough when the police seem to be getting the better of a band of ruffians who’ve been terrorizing the town. But I don’t take the children to see the bloody clubs with which....” “Oh, come!” said my old friend, genially. “Feminine emotionality! These don’t look much like bloody clubs. They look more like part of a steel-foundry.”