I followed him during all the vacations. He loved the North Country--snow on the mountains, cold night rains, the filled fields and shrunken rivers of summer, the sound and natural things. He said he would find his tropical island when his work was done, but that work meant Russia to him. He was genius. Every one loved him. One vacation time we undertook to walk together over the Torqueval Peaks. He borrowed a guitar at a peasant house there in the mountains, and played for an hour as I have never heard any one play. I had been with him for almost three years and had not known he touched the instrument. In one of those days of our walking-tour in the mountains an instance occurred of Varsieff's immeasurable tenderness of heart. One golden morning as we walked through a little village, past a vined wicker fence--a huge yellow cat sprang forth from the leaves and caught a bird on the wing. A kind of sob came from my friend at the swift little tragedy enacted in the wonderful morning light. I turned--Varsieff's face was back to its childhood--a depiction of childish horror--all finished manhood erased. Many times in our talk his sentences formed a poem, which I would rush away to put down. He learned to do this alone afterward. Once I went to his room in Moscow after I had been away several months, and found scattered among clothing, papers, books and tea-things, a set of recent lyrical gems of his. These I gathered together in the little book, now marching around the world. I smile to remember when I came to learn that Varsieff had other friends as devoted as I. It hurt at first; I could not understand. His big magic then was that he wanted nothing. He used to say that a man is at his worst when he wants anything for himself. The fact is Varsieff in wanting the _letter_ of nothing, really wanted the spirit of all; in wanting nothing for himself in those days, he wanted everything for the world, a new heaven and a new earth, first and especially a new Russia. Then the day came when he wanted a woman. This was altogether unexpected. I thought that Varsieff absolutely had given himself to the revolution--that humanity was his bride. I was with him when he first saw Paula Mantone--that is but part of her name. It was in Moscow. His voice, as he spoke to me, watching her, had a different and deeper inflection than I ever heard before. She was just a girl--poorly dressed, who had paused to speak laughingly to an old flower-woman. "Wait, Lange," he said to me, and crossed to her. It was in the Spring of the year. The morning was very bright. She turned from the tray of flowers and looked up at him. His hands went out to her shoulders. He was searching her face with a queer and tense smile--as one who finds a woman after a few months' separation in one whom he has left a child. Of course, my thought was that he had known her before. She, too, would have slept at his door....