I was disappointed with my summer. In terms of poetic output. I had written only three or four poems dealing with life on the Lakes, and these were barely publishable in the _National Magazine._ I realise now that poetic material is not to be collected as a hunter goes gunning for game. It cannot be deliberately sought and found. It must just happen. Yet all the things that I had seen and been through, I knew, would live in my mind till they were ready of themselves to get birth in words. I knew that I had not lost a single dawn nor one night of ample moon. And there drifted back into my remembrance that night when the Italian coal-passer had come to my bunk and wakened me, that I might come forth with him and observe a certain wonderful cloud-effect about the full, just-risen moon, over Huron.... I had cursed at him, thought he was trying to make a monkey of me ... for I had dropped on deck a letter to me from Lephil of the _National_, and so the crew had learned that I was a poet among them. But I was not being spoofed ... actual tears of surprise and chagrin came into the coal-passer's eyes. Then I had been ashamed of myself ... "Of course I'll go on deck ... mighty fine of you to wake me!" I slid into my pants and went up the ladder-- To envisage, rapturous, a great, flaming globe of shadowy silver ... and across it, in a single straight ebony bar, one band of jet-black cloud ... and the water, from us to the apparition of beauty, danced, dappled, with an ecstasy of quivering silver.... I have met many a man in my wanderings, simple and silent, who felt beauty like a poet or an artist, without the poet's or artist's gifts of expression,--with, on the contrary, a queer shame that he was so moved, a suspicion that, somehow, it was not manly to be moved by a sunrise or sunset. * * * * * I found Penton Baxter, his wife Hildreth, and their child, Dan, living in two tents, among a grove of trees, near the main building of the Health Home. These two tents had, of course, board floors, and there was a woman who kept them in condition ... and there was a rack for towels, and hot water was supplied by pipes from a nearby building. I think the tents were even wired for electric light. Baxter welcomed me. But I took a room for a week in town, though he urged me to stay with him. But when I had the means I liked better to be independent. I calculated living a week in Warriors' River for ten or twelve dollars. That would leave me thirty dollars over, from what I had earned while working on the _Overland_. Then, back to the university for my last year of leisurely study and reading, in the face of the desolate poverty that would have defeated many another man, but to which I was used as a customary condition. After that--Paris or London, or both! Kansas was growing too small for me. * * * * *