Another fellow that he knew, quite as happy, was an outdoor artist who sought out and painted the wild beauty of this beautiful world in which we live. This fellow lived up in a log cabin on a Wisconsin reservation, painting the life of the forest. He knew animals, fish, game, birds, canoes, Indians, woodsmen; and he knew how to paint them so that one looked and was transported to his scene in the very spirit of it. In the fall he would shoot game and cure it, collect wild rice and Indian potato, and stay right there, painting the forest in winter when it was more beautiful than ever. One exhibition of his pictures a year was all he needed to provide for his simple wants. Thoreau loved to study; he was happiest when he had the leisure to read the Scriptures of the ancients in their original tongues, to search for great truths and sound philosophies and pass them on to his fellow men. To get the freedom to do this he had lived alone in the forest and raised from the soil what he needed to eat. These men were not complex. They did not want a million things that people think are necessary to happiness. So long as they were free to keep on, they had all that they asked of life. It struck Sid that the master key of all this was for a man to find the work that he loved and then be free to do it. If the work itself was such that it set a high ideal before him, then that man would be happy. Nothing else mattered. Nothing else _should_ matter. It was essential to bar out the distractions, the meaningless nothings that frittered away one’s time, money and energy. The men of the desert came out here to get away from all that, to devote their lives to some large, simple business, like raising cattle or making the desert bloom by systems of irrigation. And they found the grand peace of the desert good for the soul. Good enough to stay here forever--in what looked to a city man a hideous, iron-bound land--and never have a wish to go back where men spoiled everything in their mad scramble to stay alive.