I yielded to an instinct for deprecative horse-play, one of my worst faults, begot of an inferiority-complex. "No, I've never gone to a military academy, but I've had a hole in the seat of my pants so generally, and I have had to walk erect so much to keep my coat tail well down to hide it, that that is where I acquired my military carriage." The general's eyes twinkled. "Take a chair. I have heard of you, Mr. Gregory ... I have watched your work, too. Roosevelt knows about it ... has spoken of it to me ... has remarked: 'there's a young fellow--your poet-chap in Kansas--that will be worth watching ... why is it, Fred, that every man of any talent whatever in Kansas, instantly gets the eye of the nation?... we're always expecting something big from William Allen White's State'." * * * * * A week or so of work for a Polish-Catholic farmer ... who locked me out of his house, when he and his family went to mass the one Sunday I was with him. He asked me if I wanted a book to read. As the only book he possessed was Thomas a Kempis' _Imitation of Christ_, I took it, and learned Christian humility, reading it, in the orchard. Surely this farmer was a practical Christian. He believed in his fellow man and at the same time gave him no opportunity to abuse his faith in him.... * * * * * It was pleasant, this working for from a few days to a week, then sauntering on ... putting up at cheap little country hotels overnight. I liked it better than tramping.... I pitched hay, I loaded lumber, I dug, I planted, I reaped. In lower Minnesota a Swedish emigrant farmer hired me to help him with his hay crop. He and I and his lanky son, Julius ... just coming out of adolescence ... we worked away from sun-up till moon-rise.... The first day I congratulated myself for working for that particular farmer. The meat at table was abundant and fresh. But before my two weeks were up I had grown weary of the diet. They had killed a cow ... and cow-meat was what I found set before me morning, noon, and night,--every day. I complained about it to Julius ... "when we kill a cow ain't we got to eat it?" he replied. Every afternoon we participated in a pleasant Swedish custom. The two women of the household, the mother and grandmother, with blue cloth rolled about their head for headgear, brought us coffee and cake a-field.... "Aeftermittagscaffee," they called it. It refreshed us; we worked on after that till late supper by lamp, driving back to the house by moonlight. * * * * * At Duluth I found that a strike prevailed on the Lakes. I was held in doubt whether I ought to sail, for I would have to do so as strike-breaker, which was against my radical code ... but, then, I had come over-land all the way from Laurel, to voyage the Great Lakes for the poetry to be found there ... and I must put my muse above such things as strikes.