Barton had taken over a great barn-like, abandoned factory building that stood on the shore of an artificial lake--which, in his wife's honour, he re-named after her, Lake Emily ... his wife was a fussy Canadian woman who interfered in everyone's affairs beyond endurable measure. I was told she used to steal off the chair the old clothes Barton used to wear by preference--paddling along the winding creek in a canoe to his work each morning, his pants rolled up to the knees--and put in their stead a new, nicely creased suit! * * * * * Barton's face was wizened and worried ... but, when we took our morning shower, after exercise, under the lifted gates of the dam, his body showed like a pyramid of perfect muscles ... though his legs--one of the boys who had known him a long time said his chief sorrow was that he could never develop his legs the way he wished them to be. * * * * * We began the building of the city. We laid out the streets through the pines ... many of us went clad in trunks ... or in nothing ... as we surveyed, and drove stakes. The play of the sun and the wind on the naked skin--there is nothing pleasanter, what though one has to slap away horseflies and mosquitoes ... the vistas through the pines were glorious. I saw in my mind's eyes a world of the physically perfect! As the laying out of the sites and the streets progressed, dwellers came to join with us ... fanatics ... "nuts" of every description ... the sick.... * * * * * A woman, the wife of some bishop or other, came to join us early in the season. She had cancer and came there to be cured of it by the nature treatment. She brought with her an old-fashioned army tent, and rented for its location the most desirable site on the lake shore. She had a disagreement with Barton--and left to consult regular doctors. She turned over all rights to her tent and to the site to me. "And mind you, Mr. Gregory," she admonished, "this tent and the place it stands on is as much yours as if you paid for it ... for it's paid for till Christmas." So, with my Shelley, my Keats, and my growing pile of manuscript, I took possession. And with covering from the wet and weather over my head and with plenty of mosquito netting, I felt established for the summer. Every morning I rose to behold the beauty of the little, mist-wreathed lake. Every morning I plunged, naked, into the water, and swam the quarter of a mile out to the float, and there went through my system of calisthenics. I lived religiously on one meal a day--a mono-diet (mostly) of whole wheat grains, soaked in water till they burst open to the white of the inside kernel....