Vachel’s ankle went very well, the danger was that he might do too much on it. We walked three or four miles up stream and then camped for the night on a wild triangle alongside a mighty barricade of the jetsam of broken water-washed tree trunks, some as long as fifty feet. We lodged in the profound trough of a characteristic Western canyon. Night came quickly, and our camp-fire light obscured the stars. The giant trees with shadowy bases climbed sheer out of sight into the murky sky above. The brown and white foaming river, like hundreds of swimming beavers, rolled onward past us all the while. We boiled from it, washed clothes in it, made soap-foam over it, but the ever-freshening waves purified our margins faster than we could sully them. We paddled about in bare feet on the shore and gathered wood whilst the firelight played on the stones, and we heaped high the bonfire. I stood on a mighty chief of the forest and flung lesser logs from the water-washed wood barricade right to the fire, and they landed one after another with a thud and a roar in the midst of the flames. Then we lay flat on our backs on our blankets and watched our sparks fly up and die in scores, in thirties, in fives, in thirty-fives, in hundred and fives. What a giddy and wild life some of them had! How they whirled! How impetuous were some, how serpentine others! We saw how all of them trailed their light as the first escaped from the fire, and were like serpents of flame. “They do not die,” said the poet. “They only seem to die; they go on, like ideas, into the invisible world. I’d like to write a volume of adventures, the story of the adventures of, say, twelve different sparks.” It was very white wood and very red fire. And it was slow-burning, for the resin had been washed out of all their boles. The fire glowed and glittered and was sociable and was taking time to live and taking time to die. Our eyes grew hot and staring, like children’s eyes sitting in front of the yule-logs listening to Christmas tales after their bed-time hour. Our thoughts fly up brightly and then disappear, but goodness knows where they go to. Our fancies stream upward idly like little flaming serpents. Life is a fire, and we keep on burning and throwing up sparks. We are very pretty, if we could only see ourselves, with our thoughts and fancies jumping out of us and flying from us. The fire will burn out towards dawn, and then the sparks will cease. They’ll only be a happy memory then. But the poet believes the sparks go on. What a silence! The river is roaring past like the river of time itself, but we have forgotten it, we have detached ourselves from it, and beside our little fire there is a silence all our own. We have a silence and a noise at the same time. There is a stillness and aloofness and a sense of no man near.