It would be idle to deny that these yells did not raise every hair on my scalp. It was an astonishing enkindling of the primitive. When I stood up to speak to these children I felt myself on a mighty friendly river. I was borne along by a rapturous enthusiasm which had been started by the yells. The whole school, boys and girls, white and coloured, were fused in one glowing whole. And Vachel said to me once more, “There is America.” What a contrast to England, where the children are not allowed to get into this rapturous state! If you have faced the critical audience of Rugby or Harrow, or the restrained maidenhood of a school like High Wycombe, you realise the difference. If you are a moving speaker the Head may even ask you “not to get the children excited.” I was explaining this to Vachel. “Well,” said he, “that’s how it is in England. The duelling spirit survives. Every one is still on his guard. The American has thrown his shield away. Most human beings are incapable of understanding anything till they are moved. That’s how we do things in America, and go ahead, by whoops and yells--Whoopee!” * * * * * ROOSEVELT made America into one man. He mesmerised America. But the spell failed, and many were disillusioned. His destruction of his own Progressive party was a terrible blow. We were walking now in the woods in the dark, and heavy rain had come on, and we thought we were on a foot-trail and were not, and we got into a lamentable jungle of devastated pines and wild undergrowth and water. We walked in a circle, we tore our clothes afresh, we climbed pitiably slowly over stark dead jagged trees and branches, and Vachel forgot the subject of Roosevelt and of oratory, and began to make many suggestions as to the right direction. We got so desperate that I said to him: “You think you know the way. Go ahead, I’ll follow.” He wouldn’t do that. “All right: you follow me. And no suggestions for twenty minutes. We’re going to get out of here.” We then plunged into a waste of tightly-packed willow trees, all about ten feet high, with branches thickly interlaced. It was intensely dark, and they soused us with water at every step. It was like breast-stroke swimming through them. We came to a pine-tree island in the midst of them, and then after a long struggle forward, as I thought, we came back to the same pine trees. Then Vachel said, “Let us just lie down here for the night. When morning comes it will be easier.” But the ground under us was in slops of water, and rather than sit and shiver there for hours I was all for getting out, and still believed it possible. This faith or stubbornness was at length rewarded, for we came to the water at the top of Lake McDermot, and it was nothing to us to walk through thigh-deep water for half a mile and ford the river. We were so soaked with the water of the willows that we must have made the lake a little wetter.