_The Indians are dancing as we enter their paradise, Our hearts are dancing too. We love the Indians because they never bent their backs To slavery, To civilisation, To office-desks. What matter if they are dying out, They have at least lived once._ [Illustration: I WENT TO A HOUSE AND I KNOCKED AT THE DOOR BUT THE OLD LADY SAID I HAVE SEEN YOU BEFORE] IV. FIRST NIGHTS OUT WE spent our first night in a burned forest beside a sunken pink and grey rock. There was a green carpet of unblossoming flowers as green and romantic as ideal spring, and beside it in contrast the stark blackness of the charred trees all up and down the hill. Hidden from view but twenty yards away was a foaming rivulet with pools. We bathed and we cooked and we talked and we slept. A great mountain like God Almighty in the midst of His creation was visible to us through the trees. We made our beds soft by pulling the dead red foliage from scorched trees and heaping it under our blankets beside the pink rocks. Lindsay made hot a large stone in the embers of our fire to keep him warm. So we lay down and waited for the night. I looked through black masts and great entanglements to the hills. Lindsay faced a scorched section of the forest all hanging in brown tresses. We listened to the stream below, its music becoming every moment more insistent. We knew that it would lull us all night long. The mountain cloud then began to come down and roll over the tree-tops, giving them ghostly semblance. That passed, and the stars and the moon appeared and stillness ruled. An hour before dawn we were awakened by the sudden patter of a shower of rain and it was followed by the birth of a wind which came roaring along a ravine and started all the air moving everywhere and all the dead forest creaked and whined. It was our signal to arise. * * * * * LINDSAY rose like a young lion roaring, rrrah!... and making the mountains echo with his roar. “Let us go up higher,” says he. I read him this. “Put it, ‘Lindsay arose groaning and grunting like a pig under a gate--and let people choose,’” said the poet. He was in great spirits. “I have never been so free. I start afresh. All is behind me. We’ll tramp to the coast. We’ll tramp to Alaska. We’ll do all the national parks, the same way,” were his impulsive speeches. As we climbed aloft, following the North-west by our wrist-compasses, and careless of time and space, he sang a disreputable song belonging no doubt to that disreputable past of his when he hiked and begged and recited his poems to farmers-- Why don’t you go to work Like other men do? How can we work when there’s no work to do? Hallelujah, on the bum! Hallelujah, bum again! Hallelujah! Give us a hand-out To revive us again!