CORNELL 
 
 UNIVERSITY 
 
 LIBRARY 
 
Cornell University Library 
 S 521.D62 
 
 The life worth living, a personal experie 
 
 3 1924 012 406 710 
 
Cornell University 
 Library 
 
 The original of tliis book is in 
 tlie Cornell University Library. 
 
 There are no known copyright restrictions in 
 the United States on the use of the text. 
 
 http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924012406710 
 
THE LIFE WORTH LIVING 
 
OTHER BOOKS BY 
 THOMAS DIXON, Jr.: 
 
 THE CLANSMAN 
 
 THE LEOPARD'S SPOTS 
 
 THE ONE WOMAN 
 
ONE GRKAT PASSION OF MY LIFE WAS THE DREAM OF A 
 BEAUTIFUL HOME" 
 
rhe 
 Life Worth Living 
 
 A Personal Experience 
 
 By 
 
 Thomas Dixon, jr. 
 
 Author of " The Leopard's Spots," " The Clansman," Etc. 
 
 Illustrated <with photographs by the Author 
 
 NEW YORK 
 
 DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & COMPANY 
 190S 
 
Copyright, 1905, by 
 
 Thomas Dixon, Jr. 
 
 Published, May, 1905 
 
 All rights reserved, including that of 
 translation into foreign languages^ 
 including the Scandinavian. 
 
TO 
 
 3lot&an anti <^|^oma0 
 
 MY SONS AND COMRADES 
 IN THE LIFE WORTH LIVING 
 
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 
 
 "One great passion of my life was the dream of 
 a beautiful home '' . . . FHrniituu 
 
 FACING PAGE 
 
 "Just a nineteen-foot slit in a block of scorched 
 
 mud with a brownstone veneer" . . 6 
 " A stately Colonial home two hundred years old " 8 
 "The Old Dominion steamer has an artistic little 
 
 pier on the upper end of the lawn " . . lo 
 "In the high hiUs rise cool streams of fresh 
 
 water to turn our mill-wheels" . .12 
 
 "Its great hall" 14 
 
 "The grass of the lawn rolls sheer into the 
 
 dead line of the salt tide" . . . .16 
 
 A friend from the barn . . ... .18 
 
 "The oaks and elms I love best" ... 20 
 "Through the shadows of the trees the waters 
 
 gleam" 22 
 
 The author at work in his cabin .... 24 
 "The drives in summer along the country roads 
 
 are of surprising beauty" ... ^ 26 
 "The lawn is never quite bare" ... 28 
 "The dog is the most faithful, the most lovable, 
 
 the most companionable of all the animals 
 
 that associate with man" .... 30 
 ix 
 
LIST OF ILLUSTRATION S-Co«ft»«?-^ 
 
 FACING PAGE 
 
 Bob on a close point 32 
 
 The log-cabin study on the edge of the lawn 34 
 Sailor and the boys in private theatricals — 
 "The Mystery of Sleep" .... 38 
 
 The inevitable 48 
 
 "We have a beautifully curved sand beach on the 
 
 lawn" 54 
 
 "All have saddles and ride like veteran cavalry- 
 men" 56 
 
 "Another pleasure of my boys is the work of 
 
 the trapper" 58 
 
 "I believe in the gun for a normal boy" . . 60 
 "The first man was a hunter" .... 62 
 "He learns that winds and tides have souls" 66 
 "Away over the endless marsh" ... 78 
 "Place our decoys on the edge of the receding 
 
 surf" 86 
 
 "Sometimes the sky is black with them" . 88 
 
 The Dixie 102 
 
 "I never knew how much beautiful weather there 
 
 was in winter" 108 
 
 "George and I crouched among them" . .124 
 "We are homeward bound now, with her big 
 yacht ensign set aft and her colours at her 
 
 masthead" 128 
 
 "The ermine robe of the North" . . . 130 
 
THE LIFE WORTH LIVING 
 
g 
 
 The Life Worth Livin 
 
 CHAPTER I 
 Dreams and Disillusion 
 
 Whether life is really worth living depends 
 largely on where you try to live it. 
 
 The one great passion of my life was the 
 dream of a beautiful home. This home- 
 dream crept slowly into the soul long before 
 the face of a woman came to smile at all other 
 hopes and fears. It required no pleading to 
 make her feel its beauty. She, too, had seen 
 it in a vision long ago. Then tiny baby 
 feet came trooping into a cottage before 
 the money was in the bank to build this 
 dream. 
 
 Another passion of my boyhood was the 
 
2 The Life Worth Living 
 
 hope of life in a great city. From the dis- 
 tance of the farm this vision was radiant 
 with the splendours of wealth and power. I 
 dreamed of its boulevards, its parks, its 
 palatial homes, and its gleaming lights. The 
 lambent flame of its distant Ufe filled the 
 horizon with the glory of an endless sunrise. 
 
 So in the natural course of events New 
 York swept us into its seething tide. 
 
 We struggled bravely to save both these 
 dreams. First we rented a modest little slit- 
 in-a-wall fourteen feet wide, far uptown, for 
 which we paid one thousand dollars to the 
 landlord annually, and five hundred, more or 
 less, to the elevated road for the right to be 
 jabbed in the ribs while we held to a strap to 
 get there. 
 
 Then we tried a nice "airy apartment" 
 downtown. It had six "rooms." One 
 opened on the street, four looked down into 
 a dark well, and the kitchen opened on an 
 iron grillwork that gave it the appearance 
 
Dreams and Disillusion 3 
 
 of a jail. The children were omnipotent 
 and omnipresent. By the record in the 
 family Bible we had only three. But they 
 managed to get into every room in that fiat 
 at the same minute, and their name was 
 legion. 
 
 We tried boarding with a nice old lady 
 who had an eye that could chill the most 
 turbulent child into silence. Our little girl 
 took pneimionia, and we had two doctors 
 and two trained nurses in that boarding 
 house for six weeks. 
 
 Then the subvirban home. We bought a 
 vacant lot, with a waterfront of sixty feet, 
 at Bensonhurst, and built on it. When fin- 
 ished it cost sixteen thousand dollars, and it 
 took most of the time of one man to keep 
 the tin cans, driftwood, dead cats and dogs 
 off that sixty feet of waterfront. 
 
 The first time I tried to go home on Sun- 
 day, I got jammed in a cheerful crowd that 
 started to Coney Island by way of Benson- 
 
4 The Life Worth Living 
 
 hurst, gave it up after two hours, and didn't 
 go home till morning. The first big snow- 
 storm that came in the winter buried the 
 trolley lines, and I didn't see my wife and 
 children for two days. As the telephone 
 wires were down I could only hope for the 
 best. I sold the place to a bigger fool, after 
 a patient search of four weeks for him. The 
 ease with which I got out of that house, with 
 only the loss of the carpets and window 
 shades, I shall always regard as a mark of 
 the special favour of God. 
 
 I bought a five-acre place on Staten Island 
 on the top of the highest hill. It had a 
 grand view of the sea, Sandy Hook and the 
 shipping. The mosquitoes were so thick, so 
 enormous, and so venomous, that they could 
 attack and kill a horse if left to their mercy. 
 Their fang was so poisonous that when they 
 bit one of our boys his little legs and arms 
 would swell as though a snake had struck 
 him; and at the end of the summer he 
 
Dreams and Disillusion 5 
 
 drooped into a deadly malarial fever from 
 which we barely saved him alive, but with 
 both legs paralyzed for life. With the 
 shadow of this sorrow darkening the world, 
 we sold the place to the first bidder, and tear- 
 fully returned to the city. 
 
 By this time we were convinced that the 
 only way to really live in New York was to 
 buy a decent home near Central Park, what- 
 ever the cost, and settle for life. We found 
 it after a search of two months. It was 
 located on West Ninety-fourth Street, within 
 the block facing the park. 
 
 We had a delightful time spending a thou- 
 sand dollars decorating it to ovir own taste. 
 It was a neat brownstone front, nineteen feet 
 wide, in a solid block of similar houses. It 
 had a high stoop, iron bars on the basement 
 windows through which we looked frond the 
 dining table, and a kitchen behind this 
 dining-room opening into the paved cat-yard 
 19 X 20. The floor above contained a narrow 
 
6 The Life Worth Living 
 
 hall, parlour and library. The next story had 
 two bedrooms and a bathroom, and the top 
 floor had two "large" rooms and two small 
 ones inside. The wood was hard, the man- 
 tels and chandeliers pretty, the fireplaces 
 poetic looking, with iron logs to imitate 
 wood, and it cost us twenty-five thousand 
 dollars. 
 
 The taxes, insurance and repairs still held 
 a fixed charge on the place of about $350 
 annually. A house in New York is the 
 easiest thing a tax-gatherer has to manage. 
 Only one man in ten ever dares to own one. 
 The others keep moving. 
 
 Within six months this dream had faded. 
 
 Ovir home was just a nineteen-foot slit in a 
 block of scorched mud with a brownstone 
 veneer in front. Our children were penned 
 in its narrow prison walls through the long 
 winters, and forbidden to walk on the grass 
 in the cold, dreary spring. The doctor came 
 to see us every week. 
 
JUST A NINETEEN-FOOT SLIT IN A BLOCK OF SCORCHED MUD 
 BROWNSTONE VENEER" 
 
 1 'sSjTj 
 WITH A 
 
Dreams and Disillusion 7 
 
 The disillusioning was complete. We had 
 stayed in New York eleven years, moved 
 twelve times, worn out three sets of house- 
 hold goods, and aided in the revival of the 
 carpet trade, before we found out what 
 ailed us. 
 
 At last we knew that the stamping-ground 
 of the great herd might be a good place 
 for trade, but that God never meant for 
 man to build a home and rear children in it. 
 
 And then the longing for the country life 
 in which we had both been reared came over 
 us with resistless power. The smell of green 
 fields and wild flowers, the breath of the open 
 sea, the music of beautiful waters, the quiet 
 of woodland roads, the kindly eyes of ani- 
 mals we had known, the memory of stin and 
 moon and star long lost in the glare of elec- 
 tric lights, began to call. We sat down in 
 our Httle narrow parlour, with its cast-iron 
 firelogs and porcelain taper chandeliers, and 
 cried over it all. 
 
CHAPTER II 
 In Old Tidewater Virginia. 
 
 We moved to Tidewater Virginia, the 
 home of Captain John Smith, the oldest 
 settlement in. America and yet the most 
 primitive, the most beautiful and least 
 known spot in our continent — a bit of wild 
 nature slumbering beside the pathway of the 
 rushing life of the Atlantic seaboard. 
 
 Here we realized the first dream of life, a 
 stately Colonial home two hundred years 
 old, called Eknington Manor, situa'ed on the 
 shores of the Chesapeake Bay. Its ivory 
 piUars flash their welcome from both sides of 
 the house through the shadows of huge trees 
 that shade its wide lawn. 
 
 ' The farm has five hundred acres, three 
 hundred and fifty under cultivation and one 
 
In Old Tidewater Virginia 9 
 
 hundred and fifty in woods. We keep 
 eleven horses, six cows, a dozen sheep, four 
 bird-dogs, chickens, ducks and turkeys. We 
 have a two-acre garden with greenhouse for 
 winter vegetables, an acre of strawberries, 
 an acre of raspberries and dewberries and 
 two acres in grapes; an old orchard and a 
 yoting one with all the fruits of the temper- 
 ate climate ; and a mile water front with full 
 riparian rights. 
 
 The Old Dominion steamer has an artistic 
 little pier on the upper end of the lawn, 
 which gives us daily mail and traffic with 
 Old Point and Norfolk and the outside 
 world. There are no raHroads in the three 
 counties of Gloucester, Matthews and Mid- 
 dlesex. We Hve in Gloucester, and around 
 us on the beautiful landlocked arm of the 
 Chesapeake called North River we see from 
 our porch fourteen water-front homes. 
 These three counties are iatersected by a 
 network of tide rivers and creeks, like the 
 
lo The Life Worth Living 
 
 veins of a leaf, making it a veritable niral 
 Venice. 
 
 Back two miles in the high hills rise cool 
 streams of fresh water to tiim our mill- 
 wheels and pour their new life into the sea, 
 giving us the finest oysters in the world. We 
 have twenty-five acres of these oyster grounds 
 in front of our home. 
 
 The fields are full of quail. They nest in 
 the garden and orchard and sometimes mix 
 with the chickens; while in unbroken reaches 
 of three thousand acres of forests roam flocks 
 of wild turkeys whose ancestors furnished 
 food and sport for Powhatan, Pocahontas 
 and Captain Smith. 
 
 The waters are full of fish, and our baby 
 boy can catch enough for dinner within a 
 hundred yards of the house any day from 
 the first of May till the first of November. 
 In the winter the wild ducks, geese and brant 
 give the sport of kings. 
 
 We keep a pen full of diamond-back ter 
 
 a6o5 
 
In Old Tidewater Virginia ii 
 
 rapin as we keep a pen of pigs, and fatten them 
 on crabs. Crabs and clams are so plentiful 
 that they are considered a very plebeian diet. 
 We keep a naphtha launch, two small sail- 
 boats, three rowboats and a schooner yacht. 
 
 I had always desired a home that had some 
 association with history and yet one on which 
 I might stamp the imprint of my own mind. 
 Elmington Manor fulfilled both these desires. 
 The house, when we bought the estate, was 
 simply a square brick structure finished with 
 Portland cement and painted brown. It 
 is beautifully situated on a peninsula lawn 
 of fifteen acres. From the land side the 
 avenue drive stretches away from the gate 
 through giant trees two miles to the hills and 
 the country road. On the water side it looks 
 majestically out to sea over a sunny stretch 
 of greensward dotted with holly and flower- 
 ing shrubs. 
 
 Its roots are deep set in Colonial history. 
 Its broad acres were a Crown grant two hun- 
 
12 The Life Worth Living 
 
 dred years ago. A short drive to the south 
 is the village of Yorktown, the scene of the 
 siege and surrender of Lord Comwallis to 
 Washington and our French allies. On this 
 side the York River stands towering old 
 Rosewell, the most palatial country estab- 
 lishment in America when built by the Pages. 
 Near Rosewell is the ancient chimney of the 
 Indian emperor, Powhatan. This chimney 
 was built for Powhatan under the direction 
 of Captain John Smith's colonists. Across 
 the York but a few miles from us are old 
 Williamsburg and Jamestown. 
 
 The house was built by Dr. John Prosser 
 Tabb, fifty-seven years ago, at that time 
 the richest and most influential man in the 
 county. Its walls contain the brick from 
 the old house built in the earliest Colonial 
 days. 
 
 These walls are three feet thick. The 
 house is three and a half stories high and 
 contains thirty-two rooms. The hall is 
 
IN THE HIGH HILLS RISE COOL STREAMS OF FRESH WATER TO TURN 
 
 OUR mill-wheels" 
 
In Old Tidewater Virginia 13 
 
 twenty feet wide, and thirty-five feet deep; 
 and from its rear circular wall the winding 
 mahogany stair sweeps gracefully up three 
 stories into the gallery of the observatory. 
 
 There is not a shoddy piece of work in it 
 from cellar to attic. The mahogany rails 
 and spindles are the finest finished hand- 
 work, the window and door sills are of mas- 
 sive Italian marble, and the hard pine floors 
 so evenly and smoothly laid they will hold 
 water. The floors are laid on oak sleepers 
 set ten inches apart, and are back-plastered 
 and sand-ballasted. 
 
 Hundreds of slaves aided the skilled work- 
 men in. its erection. Its straight, massive, 
 square lines gave me the opportunity to 
 carry out my dream of a Colonial home. It 
 only required the addition on both sides of 
 the Greek fagades with the pillars, and it was 
 done. 
 
 We had men at work on the construction 
 of these columns who never saw a locomo- 
 
14 The Live Worth Living 
 
 tive, — ^rrien of family who own their homes. 
 
 I put in a system of waterworks, with 
 windmill for power, four bathrooms, and a 
 complete system of sewerage into tidewater. 
 An acetylene gas plant gives us finer lights 
 than electricity and for less cost than city gas. 
 We rimimaged through the junk shops of 
 New York and dragged out a complete set 
 of massive brass chandeliers, all over fifty 
 years old in pattern, had them cleaned at the 
 factory, and they look as if they had been 
 built into the house originally. 
 
 Twelve rooms have open grate fires, and 
 sufficient heat for all the spaces was secured 
 by placing two tubular hot-air furnaces in 
 the basement. Our winters are usually so 
 mild that roses blossom in the flower-garden 
 in December. 
 
 I had dreamed this complete from the 
 moment I saw the house. The actual doing 
 of the thing was a revelation and a liberal 
 education. I figured on $3,000 for the job of 
 
In Old Tidewater Virginia ij 
 
 painting, decorating, water, heat, and mod- 
 em conveniences. 
 
 The plumbing alone cost $2,350! And I 
 got good value for the money. The bills 
 aggregated $7,500. 
 
 But when it was done, it was a joy to look 
 at it. The effect was massive and dignified, 
 and yet homelike and inviting. We had 
 something to show for our money, and, what 
 was a great deal better, we had something 
 that would stand the test of time. Its great 
 hall and grand old rooms with their lofty 
 ceilings give meaning and dignity to daily 
 life, and their memories liiik us in fellowship 
 and sjmipathy to a mighty past. 
 
 And we got it all for nineteen feet of 
 scorched mud in New York. 
 
CHAPTER III 
 Beside Beautiful Waters 
 
 It is the situation of a home that makes or 
 mars it. Spend a million dollars on a palace, 
 locate it poorly, and it is lost. You may 
 build with all the art that genius and wealth 
 can command, and if you build in an un- 
 healthful climate or near a fish factory, art 
 and wealth and genius have failed. 
 
 The one thing that makes New York im- 
 possible for a real home is the certainty that 
 sooner or later a hotel, a flat, a store, a 
 church, a factory, a stable or a saloon will be 
 located near you. It is only a question of 
 time when the palaces of millionaires are 
 moved by these forces. 
 
 The thing which charmed me first with the 
 spot in Tidewater Virginia which I selected, 
 
THE GRASS OF THE LAWN ROLLS SHEER INTO THE DEAD LINE OF THE 
 SALT tide" 
 
Beside Beautiful Waters 17 
 
 is the fact of its perfect healthfulness and 
 sectirity from nuisance. 
 
 The lawn is high ground rising abruptly 
 from eight to ten feet from the water line, a 
 stiff clay soil mixed with sand, with no marsh 
 grass or mosquito pools. The grass of the 
 lawn rolls sheer into the dead line of the salt 
 tide. There are mosquitoes and malaria in 
 Tidewater Virginia if you choose their loca- 
 tion. The lawn of Elmington Manor is a 
 beautiful little peninsula behind which 
 stretches the estate of five hundred acres 
 into the hills. 
 
 This little peninsula juts out into the 
 waters of the river at the head of its 
 navigable channel, just where the current 
 makes a sharp bend to the right and two 
 large creeks sweep inland to the left, giving 
 views of the water from every window in 
 the house and from every point at which 
 a rustic seat may be placed on the lawn. 
 The creek flows gracefully through the lawn 
 
1 8 The Life Worth Living 
 
 and forms a landlocked harbor for our 
 boats. 
 
 The water front commands an entran- 
 cing view. Straight before, two miles wide, 
 stretches the North River southward until 
 lost in the open sea of the Chesapeake 
 Bay and Atlantic Ocean. The shores are 
 marked with towering trees clustering around 
 their old homesteads. 
 
 The things which fascinate me above all 
 others are our trees. 
 
 The place was named "Eknington" from 
 its giant elms. On the lawn now are three 
 hundred and ninety trees, comprising thirty- 
 seven varieties. About half of them are the 
 evergreens, holly, pine, cedar and magnolia. . 
 Among them are water oaks four feet in 
 diameter, lifting their immense limbs clothed 
 in shimmering green far above the roof of 
 the house. 
 
 There is no sameness anywhere. The 
 lawn is level only on two sides. On the 
 
A yRIEND FROM THE BARN 
 
Beside Beautiful Waters i$ 
 
 other sides are little hills and valleys and 
 long open reaches of sunlit turf. A hundred 
 cedars tower in line along the northern and 
 western sides as guarding sentinels against 
 the winds of winter. Two big magnolias, 
 robed in everlasting green, stand beside the 
 white pillars on the front porch and blossom 
 aU summer. 
 
 On the water side the hollies cast their 
 dense shade in summer and lift triumphantly 
 their bouquets of scarlet berry and green 
 leaves through the fiercest storms of winter. 
 
 A mockingbird builds every summer in 
 the flowering holly which we see on the water's 
 edge from the dining-room window, while 
 another nests in the rosebush nearby, and 
 from every shrub and tree the chatter and 
 song of an army of feathered musicians fill 
 the air with melody. 
 
 We have nothing artificial, forced or cul- 
 tivated — only the trees, hardy shrubs, grass 
 and wild flowers. 
 
20 The Life Worth Living 
 
 Out friends from the bam with their babies 
 often roam over the lawn, and their fellow- 
 ship more than pays for any annoyances 
 their presence may cause. They drink grace- 
 fully at our mermaid fountain and seem to 
 think her bronze figure was cast and set there 
 to give them water. And so it was. 
 
 In early spring the buttercups carpet 
 every inch of earth in gorgeous yellow, while 
 the jonquils lift their flame about the foun- 
 tain's rim. 
 
 The buttercups stay a month, and then 
 forget-me-nots, clover and daisies add their 
 white and blue. We have a garden for the 
 cultivated flowers. But I confess I've given 
 my heart to the wild flowers of the lawn. 
 They ask nothing and give everything. 
 
 The oaks and elms I love best of all the 
 trees, especially the water oaks. When tired 
 of study, I stroll beneath their dark shadows, 
 while their satin leaves flash above" in the sun 
 like so many swinging diamonds, lie down 
 
THE OAKS AND ELMS 1 LONE BEST 
 
Beside Beautiful Waters 21 
 
 on the grass, and rest. Ah, such rest, with 
 my beloved near! 
 
 The rush and roar and stupid din of the 
 city I remember only as a fevered dream. I 
 am akin to all life. The earth beneath is soft 
 and tender as the touch of a mother, and 
 these oaks that tower above me are my broth- 
 ers. They have been tried as I have been 
 tried. Their limbs have wrestled with the 
 furies that rode on the wings of storms and 
 have conquered. Their fibre is strong be- 
 cause they have suffered. The last storm 
 twisted off the top of a mulberry and hurled 
 it to the ground. But the oaks laughed for 
 sheer joy in their strength when the wind 
 was fiercest. I love them because they are 
 strong. I hear them at night softly sighing 
 when the wind is gentle. They are telling 
 the others about them to be not afraid, for 
 they have looked far out to sea and no storm 
 is near. 
 
 Through the shadows of the trees the 
 waters gleam. 
 
22 The Life Worth Living 
 
 How any man can build his home away 
 from water so long as there is a water front 
 left is something I cannot understand. The 
 house is located just two hundred feet from 
 the river's edge from one comer of the porch, 
 and from the other comer the lawn stretches 
 away into a reach of three hundred yards of 
 open greensward before it merges into the tide. 
 
 This flashing glory of opal, emerald, and 
 turquoise water, changing its tint with every 
 passing cloud and breath of wind, reflecting 
 every mood of sky and shore, with each white- 
 winged sail that skims its surface — ^all now 
 are of the rhythm of our very life. The storm, 
 with its ten thousand whitecaps dancing and 
 foaming and thundering on the shore, the 
 mirrored pictures of the cakn, the endless 
 panorama of sun and moon and star are ours 
 for the lifting of the eye. 
 
 And we got- it all in exchange for a few 
 feet of scorched mud, and a cement cat-yard 
 19 X 20. 
 
THROUGH THE SHADOWS OF THE TREES THE WATERS GLEAM 
 
CHAPTER IV 
 The Music of the Seasons 
 
 Old Tidewater Virginia is the ideal spot 
 in America for a home all the year round. 
 Northern people have a very erroneous idea 
 of the heat of its summers. I have spent 
 stunmers at Gloucester, Massachusetts, on 
 Long Island, and the Jersey coast ; but there 
 is no place on the Atlantic that compares in 
 comfort to the shores of Old Virginia. The 
 Gulf Stream, which almost touches the 
 beaches here, maintains its temperature of 
 70 the year round. In winter it tempers the 
 cold, and in simimer it lowers the heat. We 
 have the most even temperature to be foimd 
 in the East. 
 
 We have long, beautiful springs. Winter 
 never lingers in the lap of spring 'until it 
 
24 The Life Worth Living 
 
 creates talk.' The earth seems aHve with 
 every species of early wild flowers. 
 
 The vegetable garden is a source of endless 
 pleasure. We plant peas in January, and 
 cabbage and lettuce grow all winter. 
 
 Thpre is something about planting seeds, 
 watching them sprout and grow, that links 
 one with the creative process. 
 
 Production is communion with God, how- 
 ever stoutly the dogmatist may deny it. 
 
 I plant the seed in the soft warm earth and 
 feel the glow of creative joy. I have joined 
 with God in giving Hfe, and when I reap my 
 harvest, I join with him in taking it again. 
 
 There is not a month in the year that otir 
 garden will not grow the hardy vegetables, 
 and from March to November it grows every- 
 thing that flourishes this side the tropics. 
 Celery wiU keep all winter bedded in the 
 ground where it grows. 
 
 The spring calls the sportsman as loudly as 
 the fall. 
 
THE AUTHOR AT WORK IN HIS CABIN 
 
The Music of the Seasons 25 
 
 The fishing is fine, and the shore birds, 
 curlew, snipe and plover, come in myriads in 
 April and May and spend six weeks getting 
 fat as they migrate northward. They have 
 raised their young in the winter, far south, 
 and spring is the proper season to kill them 
 for food. They leave in the latter part of 
 May and stop again as they return south- 
 ward in July and August. They do not nest 
 or stay permanently in our territory. Tide- 
 water Virginia is simply their rich feeding 
 groimd. 
 
 In summer we have delightful breezes from 
 every point of the compass. The long sweep 
 inland of the Chesapeake Bay for 200 miles 
 makes a hot land breeze impossible. The 
 land breezes on the coast of New Jersey are 
 insufferable to me. Here is water, water 
 ever)rwhere, and the land seems always the 
 least significant feature of the picture Nature 
 presents. 
 
 The fruits of the semi-tropical zone all grow 
 
26 The Life Worth Living 
 
 Ittxuriantly. Gloucester county is famous 
 for its fine watermelons and cantaloupes. 
 
 The drives in stimmer along the country 
 roads are of surprising beauty. The wild 
 grapevines festoon its dense woods and hang 
 far out over the roadway. Even at noon the 
 wide double-track highway is sheltered by 
 these cooling shadows. 
 
 The stimmers offer the sportsman the same 
 flight of migratory shore birds as spring, and 
 adds to them some special varieties. 
 
 Autumn clothes field and forest with a new 
 and peculiar glory. Here we have the long 
 Indian Summer in September and October. 
 Italy never saw such skies, and the glorious 
 sunlight and peace that flood the earth in 
 these days cannot be revealed by words. 
 October is the only month when the wind- 
 mill ever fails for two days to turn. Nature 
 seems to hold her breath for sheer joy. 
 Each day is a miracle of beauty — clear skies, 
 warm genial stm, crisp piire air, with every 
 
THE DRIVES IN SUMMER ALONG THE COUNTRY ROADS ARE OF 
 SURPRISING beauty" 
 
The Music of the Seasons 27 
 
 tree that sheds its leaf robed in scarlet and 
 purple flame. 
 
 It is hard to tell when our woods are most 
 beautiful: in spring, with the dogwood blos- 
 soms so thick they look as if a snowstorm 
 had covered their tender green, or in October, 
 when the hoUy, as thick as the dogwood, lifts 
 its great bouquets of glistening evergreen 
 with scarlet berries amid the red and purple 
 splendour of the oak and hickory, beech and 
 maple, poplar and chestnut. 
 
 I confess a special love for our winters. 
 Here the fire of the sun never dies. It warms 
 and thrills even in February. The lawn is 
 never quite bare. When the winds of No- 
 vember have swept clean the great limbs of 
 oak and ekn, the magnolia, cedar and holly 
 smile still into the face of the sun. I love 
 these big naked trees, too. To me their tail 
 nymph-like limbs seem fashioned by some 
 master artist of the nude against the azure 
 background of the sky. 
 
28 The Life Worth Living 
 
 The roads in winter, that stretch through 
 solemn aisles of towering pines, are as beau- 
 tiful to me as the embowered drives of stim- 
 mer. 
 
 I love the ragged winter lines of the creek 
 where the quail shelter in the tall grass at the 
 water's edge ready to cross to the woods if 
 hard pressed. 
 
 The cry of the wUd duck and brant and 
 the honk of the goose thrill the heart of the 
 huntsman and call to the sport of kings. 
 
 There is not a day in the calendar from the 
 first of' January to the thirty-first of Decem- 
 ber that there is not good fishing or hunting, 
 or both, in Tidewater Virginia. 
 
 On long winter nights we sit beside a roar- 
 ing log fire, read and dream, listen to music, 
 or chat with our kindly neighbours. Our 
 neighbours are never in a hurry. They have 
 more time than money, and spend it more 
 freely. They really live, and we have fallen 
 into their friendly ways. 
 
CHAPTER V 
 The Fellowship of Dogs 
 
 Perhaps the most pitiful thing about the 
 stunted life of a man or a boy in the city, is 
 the lack of healthy dog comradeship. 
 
 The cynic who said, "The more I see of 
 men the better I like dogs," was speaking of 
 men who had degenerated for the lack of the 
 friendship and personal sympathy of dogs. 
 
 The dog is the most faithful, the most 
 lovable, the most companionable of all the 
 animals that associate with man, and man 
 is always made nobler by his friendship. 
 
 Let no fool philosopher tell me a dog can't 
 think, reason, love, hate, fear, laugh and cry 
 as I do. I know better. 
 
 When I reached home the other day from a 
 long lecture tour, my oldest setter hadn't 
 
30 The Life Worth Living 
 
 been out of the lawn for two weeks. She 
 scorned to follow the carriage and point birds 
 for women and children, who were incapable 
 of appreciating her genius. But when I 
 came — such capers, such exclamations of ■ 
 love and joy! She cried — literally cried big 
 tears of joy — ^laid her head against mine, and 
 between her sobs told me I had missed the 
 greatest quail season ever known in Virginia. 
 She said the quail were so thick they were 
 coming into the yard, and that nobody had 
 sense enough to go after them. She begged 
 me to go outside the gate with her, in season 
 or out, she didn't care, and she would show 
 me. 
 
 When I drove out with my wife, Becky 
 was simply beside herself with joy. She 
 danced and capered around the carriage and 
 said with a smile : 
 
 "Now just watch me. I'll show you a 
 dozen between here and the county road!" 
 
 We had barely passed through the gate, 
 
"the dog is the most faithful, the most lovable, the most 
 
 COMPANIONABLE OF ALL THE ANIMALS THAT ASSOCIATE WITH MAn" 
 
The Fellowship of Dogs 31 
 
 when she circled gracefully through the 
 strawberry patch, made a beautiful point, 
 turned her head toward the carriage, grinned, 
 switched her tail and said : " I told you so ! 
 Look at this!" 
 
 When I flushed the birds she sailed swiftly 
 away to the next field a hundred yards far- 
 ther, and before we reached the point in the 
 road she had rounded up more birds. 
 
 When I flushed them, she looked up at me, 
 smiled and said with a sigh : 
 
 "You see they are all in pairs now — it's 
 too late. I nearly died of a broken heart 
 because you didn't come in time. I lost my 
 appetite and all interest in life and wouldn't 
 go out of the yard. You will not stay away 
 so long again, wiU you?" 
 
 I assured her that I had already arranged 
 my lecture-trips season so that I could be with 
 her the month of November and December, 
 and she wagged her tail and smiled. 
 
 One of the smartest things I ever knew 
 
32 The Life Worth Living 
 
 Becky to do was to take hold of my panta- 
 loons, lead me around behind the house, and 
 introduce me to her puppies bom in my 
 absence. 
 
 I saw there was something on her mind. 
 She seemed ashamed and troubled lest some- 
 body would tell me before she had a chance 
 to explain. So she led me in haste to her 
 modest cottage behind the servants quar- 
 ters before she would allow me to enter the 
 house. 
 
 "You see it was Hke this, sir," she said 
 with confusion ; "I know you don't like drop- 
 pers, and it's not considered good form in 
 aristocratic society for a setter to mate with 
 a pointer, but really I couldn't resist Bob. 
 He was so handsome and stylish and we were 
 thrown together so much, it all came about 
 quite naturally. We hunted together and 
 Bob stood so beautifully and found so many 
 birds and was so kind to me — I confess — I 
 lost my heart. And when he a,§ked me to 
 
BOB ON A CLOSE POINT 
 
The Fellowship of Dogs 33 
 
 marry him, I knew I was doing a wicked 
 thing to disobey you, but — ^we eloped." 
 
 "Why, Becky, I'm astonished at you!" 
 
 She himg her head and stammered inco- 
 herently, but looking up with a smile said : 
 
 "Yes, sir, but you haven't seen 'em — 
 come, look at 'em. They're every one of 
 them raving beauties. You see, I was so in 
 love with Bob, they all took after him. Not 
 one of them seems to have a drop of setter 
 blood in him. They all have the short silky 
 hair of their father and the most beautiful 
 spots!" 
 
 It was true. Every one of them was a 
 pointer and the cutest little fellows I ever 
 saw. 
 
 When Becky saw I was pleased she began 
 to sob. 
 
 " There, there, Becky, it's all right now; we 
 wiU make fine hunters out of them, and no- 
 body will ever suspect they are droppers." 
 
 "You see, sir, I've been so lonely since 
 
34 The Life Worth Living 
 
 Sailor's death I had to marry again, and I 
 must say Bob is the handsomest dog I ever 
 knew, and he can't help that he's a pointer." 
 
 "Very well, I'll provide for your children, 
 and see that they are properly educated. If 
 any one tries to insult you in your set, let me 
 know and I'll protect you." 
 
 " It was not that I had forgotten Sailor, sir, 
 but he was dead and I was lonely." 
 
 "Yes, I know; it's an old, old story. You 
 have good precedents." 
 
 Becky knew that I had loved her former 
 mate. Sailor, above aU the dogs I had ever 
 known. They were both bom in North 
 Carolina, the home of fine field dogs. 
 
 Sailor was a beautiful white and black 
 Llewellyn setter, whose white tail flying 
 above the grass looked like a sail skimming 
 the sea, and from this he got his name. He 
 could find more birds than any four dogs that 
 ever went into the field with him, and do it 
 quicker. He was a fine watchdog. When 
 
THE LOG-CABIN STUDY ON THE EDGE OF THE LAWN 
 
The Fellowship of Dogs 35 
 
 I was away from home he slept in his mis- 
 tress' room and I believe he would have torn 
 an intruder to pieces at a single word from 
 her. 
 
 Sailor had strange powers of observation 
 for a dog, and many special likes and dislikes. 
 He could spot a crank or a fool among a gang 
 of workmen and would watch his opportu- 
 nity to snap him. We had at one time thirty- 
 five workingmen here every day. Some of 
 them stayed months. Among them was a 
 poor white man who was a quack doctor, a 
 quack preacher, and a quack workman. 
 Sailor spotted him by some subtle power of 
 reasoning the first day he landed and tried to 
 bite him. That man stayed around our place 
 tinkering at various jobs for two months, and 
 the dog managed to tear his pantaloons three 
 times and got one good crack at his leg, 
 and he was never known to disturb any other 
 workman. 
 
 When he first arrived from North Caro- 
 
36 The Life Worth Living 
 
 lina, he was two years old and not very 
 good looking. I got him in the spring 
 and had to keep him all summer before I 
 could try him. I didn't like his movements 
 and in general thought him a failure. He 
 was passionately fond of a horse — a rather 
 vinusual trait for a bird-dog. So I sent him 
 to the stable and never allowed him to see 
 the inside of the house. 
 
 When the first of November came, I took 
 him out in the field for a trial with little faith 
 in his ability. 
 
 The way he swept that field fairly took my 
 breath! 
 
 The other dogs simply were not in his class. 
 He was the whole show. He would circle a 
 hedgerow Kke a white streak of light, sud- 
 denly dart out into the open, his beautiful 
 head flung high in the air, and have the birds 
 before the other dogs had started. 
 
 I hugged him. When we returned home 
 that night he knew the change in his status 
 
The Fellowship of Dogs 37 
 
 in that household. He walked proudly into 
 the library and lay down on the rug at my 
 feet without waiting for an invitation. He 
 knew the place belonged to him. 
 
 Sailor and Becky had only been married 
 six months, and their first brood of puppies 
 were three months old when he developed an 
 ugly growth on one of his legs. I took him to 
 a hospital in New York near Herald Square 
 and a distinguished English dog surgeon per- 
 formed an operation and removed the growth. 
 He did well with the wound and in ten days 
 was ready to go home. 
 
 How he wept for joy when I came to take 
 him, told me of his suffering under the knife, 
 and how he longed for the sight of my face 
 and the soimd of my voice! I explained to 
 him that I didn't come because I couldn't 
 bear to see him suffer. 
 
 "And, Master," he sobbed, "the awful 
 loneliness these ten days I was getting well, 
 and you only stayed a minute or two ! I had 
 
38 The Life Worth Living 
 
 to endure the vile talk of these ignorant and 
 degenerate city dogs. All they know is the 
 latest brand of vile dog biscuits that I 
 wouldn't give a cur to eat, or about some 
 collar they wore or a new coat for a party, or 
 the last fight they had in Central Park on 
 Stinday. It made me sicker than ever. 
 Not one of them ever saw a rabbit or a quail 
 or a woodcock. I asked one of them — a real 
 setter too — ^if the dogs up here were good on 
 a back stand or did they crowd much. The 
 fool didn't know what I was talking about 
 and yelled back at me : " Listen at the hay- 
 seed! He don't know a street car from a 
 milk wagon ! Wow, Wow ! ' ' And the whole 
 mob of the ill-mannered brutes yelled at me, 
 until I crawled back in a comer, lay down 
 and cried for shame that I was a dog. I'm 
 glad we're going home. I'm sick for the open 
 fields and the cool water of the springs and 
 the branches, and I've dreamed day and 
 night of ; the birds." 
 
SAILOR AND THE BOYS IN PRIVATE THEATRICALS 
 
 "the MYSTERY OF SLEEP" 
 
The Fellowship of Dogs 39 
 
 When the cabman was- assisting Sailor 
 down stairs and into the cab, the doctor 
 gravely whispered: 
 
 "I'm sorry to teU you, sir, but your dog 
 can't Uve long. He has a ttimor developing 
 in the groin which will kiU him within a year 
 or two. He can hunt all right up to the day 
 it strikes a vital organ and then he will go." 
 
 He seemed so happy, with his head out the 
 cab window sniffing contemptuously at the 
 poor little chained and collared dogs he saw 
 on the streets ! Now and then he would lick 
 my hand with a grateful dog kiss for what I 
 had done for him and for the joy of horne 
 that was in his soul. How could I tell him 
 the fatal secret that Death had already laid 
 his hand on his silken hair and claimed him 
 as his own? 
 
 A little while longer we would smell the 
 fields together and our hearts thrill with the 
 joy of the chase, and he would go. I won- 
 dered where ! And my heart was heavy. 
 
40 The Life Worth Living 
 
 We had two more glorious seasons together, 
 and as the end drew nearer he seemed brighter, 
 swifter and more human in his intelHgence, 
 
 The second summer after the doctor's ver- 
 dict, he suddenly dropped, one day, under 
 the shadow of a great elm on the lawn. 
 Death had called him, and he crouched and 
 shivered at my feet afraid of his new Master. 
 I tenderly smoothed his beautiful hair. He 
 looked up into my face at last, his great soft 
 eyes full of a strange terror. Unable to bear 
 it, I started to leave him. He staggered to 
 his feet and tried to follow me, took three 
 steps forward, stumbled and fell. 
 
CHAPTER VI 
 
 Some Sins of Nature 
 
 Where else on earth is the general cussed- 
 ness of things so vividly displayed as on a 
 farm? The farm is the great School of Life, 
 and no man's early education is fairly begun 
 until he has taken a course on it. 
 
 I tried to keep out of farming when I 
 bought my country home. An early train- 
 ing behind the plough was my inheritance as 
 a boy. 
 
 I knew it was not aU poetry. 
 
 The estate was in the hands of executors 
 for sale as a whole. In vain I pleaded for the 
 lawn and garden and fifty acres to tinker 
 with. The price fixed for the house and lawn 
 and fifty acres was just as large as for the 
 whole place of five hundred acres. I didn't 
 
42 The Life Worth Living 
 
 understand the sarcasm of this till long after. 
 The temptation could not be resisted. There 
 was a lordly suggestion about "broad acres," 
 and there was a challenge in the soil and sky- 
 that roused my fighting blood. I longed to 
 conquer, subdue and make it fruitful. 
 
 Besides, I had a sneaking idea that I knew 
 more about farming than any farmer of my 
 acquaintance. AU that was necessary was a 
 large opporttmity to demonstrate the breadth 
 of my genius. I got it. 
 
 First, I determined to get rich on fancy 
 truck farming. 
 
 The people of Gloucester, who had no rail- 
 roads, were slow and ultra-conservative. I 
 determined to hustle after the manner of the 
 Yankee and the Westerner, and show them 
 how to do things. 
 
 I put in fifty acres of Rockyford canta- 
 loupes and ten acres in cabbage. I had no 
 idea how many cabbage plants could be set 
 in ten acres of ground before. 
 
Some Sins of Nature 43 
 
 I knew after I paid for the labour. 
 
 I had a gang of men at work a week on it, 
 after patient and careful preparation of the 
 soil with the most expensive commercial 
 fertilizer. In the winter I studied the 
 weather with nervous fear for those thousands 
 of precious cabbage plants. They puUed 
 through well, with the loss of about twenty 
 per cent. In the early spring the worms and 
 bugs and lice in succession attacked them and 
 we lost twenty per cent. more. But by rapid 
 working and high fertilizing we pushed them 
 ahead of these pests. Then they began to go 
 crazy and run up to seed and blossom in- 
 stead of making cabbage heads. Five per 
 cent, more were lost in these seed stalks. 
 
 At last the day came for marketing. It 
 was a day of excitement. They were selling 
 in the New York market for $2.25 a crate, by 
 the papers, and that meant a neat profit on 
 the field. I began to pity my neighbours who 
 were still struggling with common farming. 
 
44 The Life Worth Living 
 
 My triumph was brief. I got 75 cents a 
 crate for my first shipment. They cost a 
 dollar at the most conservative estimate. 
 The next shipment brought 25 cents a crate, 
 and the next one was held for the freight 
 charges and dtmiped by the transportation 
 company. I sent the ploughs into the field 
 and tenderly turned under for fertilizer my 
 crop of cabbage over which I had toiled and 
 yearned and dreamed. I qxoietly determined 
 to let somebody else raise cabbage. 
 
 My cantaloupes grew beautifully. I'm 
 especially fond of a fine cantaloupe and I 
 determined, for the sheer love of the thing, 
 to grow the finest melon New York ever 
 tasted. I did it. The first shipment, how- 
 ever, gave me a chill. Instead of $3 a crate 
 I had expected, I got an average of 85 
 cents a crate. They cost me $1.25. The 
 next shipment brought 50 cents, and the 
 next 25 cents. 
 
 I had nervous prostration and went to 
 
Some Sins of Nature 45 
 
 New York to study the distribution problem 
 in connection with production. 
 
 I found my commission man was also a 
 retail dealer, and that he sold my melons to 
 himself and then sold them to his trade, and 
 that this was the rule, not the exception. I 
 found my melons in the refrigerator of a great 
 hotel, and the steward informed me they 
 were the finest ever seen on the New York 
 market. He didn't know why I was inter- 
 ested and I let him talk. He told me he paid 
 the commission merchant to whom I had 
 shipped them $3.50 a crate. He was paying 
 me 25 cents. 
 
 I had a pleasant interview with this com- 
 mission-retailer who was kindly assisting me 
 to bankruptcy. His explanation was so 
 beautiful, so plausible, so incontrovertible I 
 had to thank him and ask his pardon for dis- 
 turbing him "while he was figuring out his 
 profits. He said the melons were so roughly 
 handled by the steamship company (our Old 
 
46 The Life Worth Living 
 
 Dommion Line is one of the most careful 
 freighters in America) and arrived in such bad 
 order, he had to knock open four or five 
 crates to make one fit for a first-class hotel. I 
 apologized for putting him to so much trouble, 
 sent my agent direct to the hotels and took 
 orders for all I could supply at $3 a crate. 
 
 Once more I smiled at the mental reflec- 
 tion of my eagle eye and massive brain and 
 fell to pitying my neighbours. 
 
 The new arrangement went forward well. 
 I had shipped a thousand dollars' worth of 
 melons and was figtiring out the gross earn- 
 ings and the net profits and planning great 
 outlays for the following year. 
 
 A drought struck us, killed all the old vines 
 in a few days and ripened prematurely every 
 melon in the three fields I had planted for 
 succession. They were not fit to eat. I 
 cancelled the hotel orders, bought some hogs 
 and fed them on thirty acres of cantaloupes, 
 that cost me $2,000 in cold cash. 
 
Some Sins of Nature 47 
 
 I retired from the trucking business, and 
 decided that hay was good enough for me. 
 
 I built a big hay barrack and put in a 
 trolley fork and seeded the farm in peas, 
 clover and grasses. 
 
 In six weeks after the bam was built, a 
 storm blew it down. I cheerfully rebuilt it. 
 
 We jammed it full of pea hay in one end 
 and timothy and clover in the other. Besides, 
 we had every other bam full and some 
 stacked in the field. At last, I saw daylight. 
 The hay under cover was selling at the bam 
 door for enough to pay all expenses and give 
 me $1,000 in a dividend. Again I shook 
 hands with myself and wondered why the 
 farmers of Gloucester county didn't have sense 
 enough to raise hay. When I opened the big 
 new bam to sell the first load out of the pile of 
 ton on ton where my profits lay, I found it 
 had rotted beneath the surface. It cost me 
 fifty dollars to clear that bam of hay. 
 
 Then an epidemic of a strange horse 
 
48 The Life Worth Living 
 
 disease that no veterinary surgeon ever saw 
 or heard of struck us, and carried oS. $500 
 worth of farm horses in two weeks. 
 
 I had never believed the wild stories about 
 the modem negro farm labourer in the South 
 till I tried it. In three years I've hired over 
 one hundred negro farm hands and dis- 
 charged all save three of them, who are first- 
 class men. I tried patiently to teach one 
 I kept six months to do a few simple neces- 
 sary things with modem farm machinery. 
 At the end of six months he broke three 
 mowers in one day on a beautiful level piece 
 of clover. 
 
 I discharged him, and that night lost 
 twenty dollars' worth of harness out of my 
 bam. 
 
 Large groups of my African neighbours 
 keep horses, dogs and children and yet are 
 opposed to a strenuous life of systematic and 
 constant labour. 
 
 I'm now spending cheerfully $500 on 
 
THE INEVITABLE 
 
Some Sins of Nature 49 
 
 fences. I've detennined to raise cattle. Will 
 the fever strike them, I wonder? Who knows? 
 
 The experience of these three years, in 
 which my total farm losses have reached 
 about $7,000, has given me a feeling of ten- 
 derness and sympathy for the farmer I never 
 had before. Who can measure the sum of 
 his anguish through the years as he watches 
 the fleeting clouds in the brazen heat of 
 simimer and sees no sign of rain, knowing 
 that every moment of that heat is burning 
 to ashes the hopes he has cherished for his 
 loved ones? 
 
 With me farming is a dissipation. I am 
 willing to spend my hard-earned money in 
 this game with Fate. -It is gambling. The 
 cruelty and sheer brutality of Nature fasci- 
 nate me — she who has no ear to hear, no 
 heart to pity, no arm to save the weak, 
 knows no conventions of morals or qualms of 
 conscience, breeds and kills by the million 
 
 while her eternal life rolls on forever. 
 4 
 
50 The Life Worth Living 
 
 But when I look on a little check sent in 
 for a year's struggle, not large enough to pay 
 for the labour expended, when I look on a 
 dead field parching in the August sun, gaze 
 on the ruins of a storm-wrecked bam, see 
 men dumping ton on ton of spoiled hay, or 
 gaze on the carcass of a horse as they drag 
 him away for burial, and think of what this 
 means to a man whose bread depends on 
 it, the pity and the pathos of it all over- 
 whelms me. Back of the serene beauty of 
 Nature I see her tragic cruelty. Man must 
 obey her laws or die. Alas, how few of us 
 know her laws! 
 
 Yet there is something supremely fasci- 
 nating in this fight with sun and storm, earth 
 and air, their mysterious moods and myriads 
 of swarming lives. Man has not been bap- 
 tized into the life of our planet until he has 
 felt the challenge and tested the sinews of 
 his soul in this combat. 
 
 There is something still more stirring, too, 
 
Some Sins of Nature 51 
 
 in the great human struggle pending between 
 the American farmer, the most intelligent, 
 aggressive and powerful Producer in the 
 world, and the forces of Distribution. At 
 present the distributer gets it all in the long 
 run. 
 
 It requires more brain and moral fibre, 
 muscle and soul patience, to successfully run 
 a large farm to-day than to conduct any other 
 enterprise of modem civilization. 
 
 And town-bred dudes have been known to 
 sneer at "hayseeds." 
 
CHAPTER VII 
 
 The Shouts of Children 
 
 • I believe it is a crime to rear a child in 
 New York city, or any great city. The 
 man v/ho is imprisoned in this living tomb 
 by business, may plead a fair excuse, yet it 
 is none the less a crime. 
 
 It is a physical and spiritual impossibility 
 to rear a normal hxmian being under the 
 conditions which surround child-life in the 
 modem city. His earth is merely a huge 
 cobblestone with asphalt patches. There is 
 no sun or moon or star. Day and night are 
 one. The seasons disappear. Artificiality 
 is the rule, and Nature becomes a synonyme 
 for sin. 
 
 I shall never forget the sight of five hun- 
 dred city waifs I ran into one hot July night 
 
The Shouts of Children 53 
 
 as I was hurrying through the car shed of 
 the Pennsylvania Railroad to catch the train 
 for my home. 
 
 A philanthropist had given a mission 
 society the money to send these five htm- 
 dred poor children, who never saw a green 
 field or sat beside beautiful waters, out into 
 the country for two weeks. Poor little old 
 wizen-faced men and women, they didn't 
 know how to laugh or play! If they had 
 been going to a fimeral, they could not have 
 been more serious. The word country had 
 no meaning for them. 
 
 Who can measure the tragedy of these 
 millions of tramping child feet crowding one 
 another into the grave without one glimpse 
 of this wonderful world through which they 
 have passed? 
 
 I do not know of a single man of any force 
 in modem civilization whose character was 
 developed in a great city. President Roose- 
 velt is the only man I can recall of any 
 
54 The Life Worth Living 
 
 world prominence to-day who was bom in a 
 great city, and he became a man because he 
 got out of it, and put himself in touch with 
 Nature. 
 
 My children were prisoners in New York. 
 In Old Virginia they find life and freedom. 
 There the doctor came every week, here 
 once a year is enough. We have no signs to 
 "keep off the grass." The lawn is theirs, 
 and on its open greensward or beneath its 
 spreading elms and oaks every game that 
 can tempt a child's heart they can play from 
 year's end to year's end. 
 
 Here they learn to watch for the first signs 
 of life in spring. 
 
 We have a boy whose eye discovers the 
 first ripening strawberry, cherry, raspberry, 
 melon and vegetable. Long before we think 
 of looking, his keen little eyes have found 
 them, and his swift bare feet come bounding 
 to his mother as he holds the treasure aloft 
 in triumph. 
 
WE HAVE A BEAUTIFULLY CURVED SAND BEACH ON THE LAWN 
 
The Shouts of Children 55 
 
 The whole round of country life is a thrill- 
 ing daily drama for a child. When tired of 
 play he explores the bam in search of hen's 
 nests, and finds them in the most unheard 
 of places, sometimes under the floor, some- 
 times in the hay rack far up near the ceiling. 
 He has a duck house of his own at the bam, 
 shuts his ducks up every night and keeps 
 them there till eight or nine o'clock in the 
 morning to be sure of their eggs. After Mrs. 
 Duck has laid, he hustles them off to the 
 creek to feed on bugs and worms and fid- 
 dlers and fish-eggs. 
 
 It is astonishing how many bird's nests 
 that boy can find on the lawn and in the 
 thick hedgerows around the garden and 
 orchard. At first he would rob them all. 
 But it was easy to teach him how much 
 more fun he could get listening to the songs 
 of mockingbirds, watching them sit and 
 hatch, feed their babies and teach them to 
 fly, than by breaking up their nests. Now 
 
56 The Life Worth Living 
 
 he guards these nests with jealous care. 
 The mockingbird, the wren, and song spar- 
 row, the redbird and bluebird, catbird and 
 thrush, hear his soft footfall without dis- 
 tress. His life has become larger and his 
 heart bigger. 
 
 He watched a tiny sparrow build her nest 
 in the grass this spring close beside the path- 
 way to the Steamer's Pier. He saw the first 
 egg and the last, and then the brooding 
 mother, and then the little birds, with grow- 
 ing interest. He kept the dogs and the pup- 
 pies away and gtiarded her with zealous care. 
 "Just as the bird babies were feathering and 
 nearly ready to fly they made such a big 
 houseful, some beast, a bird of prey, a rat or 
 a crow perhaps, found them. As we went to 
 the Pier at boat time they were all right, 
 and the mother was chirping with pride in 
 the tree above. When we returned, in half 
 an hour, the nest was torn from its perch in 
 the grass and every bird gone. The mother 
 
ALL HAVE SADDLES AND RIDE LIKE VETERAN CAVALRYMEN 
 
The Shouts of Children 57 
 
 was crying as though her heart were broken. 
 And then a boy's eyes grew dim. Who can 
 weigh the value of such incidents in the shap- 
 ing of a human soul? How many brass 
 bands, monkeys and hand organs would it 
 take to compensate for their loss? 
 
 When the children are tired of the land, 
 the sea calls. 
 
 We have a beautifully curved sand beach 
 on the lawn that invites for a bath, and row- 
 boat and sailboat are always nodding their 
 friendly challenge tethered to their pier. 
 Somebody is always fishing in sight, and the 
 crabs in the water's edge are a standing chal- 
 lenge. The horses and mules, colts and 
 puppies, cows and calves are far more inter- 
 esting to our children in their daily life than 
 the wild animals of a circus. Daily life is a 
 continuous performance in which the child 
 is both audience and ringmaster. 
 
 My riding mare's last year's colt I gave to 
 my little girl. When she went to boarding 
 
S8 The Life Worth Living 
 
 school, in every letter home were anxious 
 inquiries about her pet. It is her special 
 joy morning and evening to feed and curry 
 and brush that colt. The first thing she did 
 when she got home was to spring from the 
 carriage and throw her arms around his neck. 
 She is now profoundly considering the prob- 
 lem of whether she will make a riding horse 
 of him, or break him to shafts, or both. All 
 three of the children have saddles and ride 
 horseback like veteran cavalrymen. We 
 think nothing of sending our ten-year-old on 
 the fleetest saddle mare eight or ten miles on 
 an errand. 
 
 They love the handsome thoroughbred 
 cows, too, watch their calves grow from 
 fluffy wobble-legs into big capering year- 
 lings, and soon learned that one breed of 
 cows do not give sweet milk and another 
 breed buttermilk. 
 
 The puppies, perhaps, interest children 
 more than any other animals. I suppose 
 
another pleasure of my boys 
 trapper" 
 
 IS THE WORK OF THE 
 
The Shouts of Children 59 
 
 this is because puppies are so closely kin to 
 children in their thoughts and ways. With 
 them life is all play and fun and mischief. 
 
 Two pups can think up more mischief in a 
 day than two children. One of them will be 
 quietly sleeping in the sun, and the other 
 one, browsing around the yard, will suddenly 
 discover something of immense interest. He 
 runs straight to his sleeping brother, wakes 
 him, tells him about it, and off they go. A 
 pup needs more whipping than any animal I 
 know, if given the open lawn and field in 
 which to grow. He wiU chew everything in 
 reach, including chickens, ducks, turkeys, 
 and especially sheep. 
 
 I've lost two sets of puppies in the past 
 year on account of sheep. A sheep is the 
 most tantalizing thing that ever looms on 
 the horizon of a dog's life. When a sheep 
 sees a dog, he exhibits first a most intense 
 curiosity, lifting his head high in the air and 
 standing stock still. When the dog makes a 
 
6o The Life Worth Living 
 
 movement forward, or sidewise, with or 
 without any idea of further acquaintance 
 with the sheep, the whole flock break and 
 run as though the devil with an army of 
 fiends were after them. The temptation to 
 chase is simply beyond the power of any 
 mere pup to resist, if he has passed the age 
 of chewing gum shoes. I don't blame them. 
 If I were a pup, I'd chase sheep. 
 
 When a pup once gets a taste of this royal 
 sport there is but one remedy, and that is to 
 cut his tail off just behind his ears, or send 
 him to the city. The first remedy is less 
 cruel than the second, and is soon over with. 
 A puppy fairly grown, with the sheep habit 
 well fixed, has been known to kill fifty sheep 
 in a night. He never eats them, but just 
 kills for the fun of the thing. 
 
 I paid my neighbour for four lambs one of 
 my pups killed, and on the fifth occasion the 
 farmer happened on the ground with r, shot 
 gun and persuaded him not to do so any 
 
I BELIEVE IN THE GUN FOR A NORMAL BOY 
 
The Shouts of Children 6i 
 
 more. I moiimed, but couldn't complain. 
 I don't Uke sheep. They trouble dogs. I 
 bought a small flock for my lawn just to 
 train the pups. Becky and Bob's family 
 have grown up from the cradle with these 
 sheep and never molest them. 
 
 Another pleasure of my boys is the work 
 of the trapper. The moles infest the lawn 
 and would plough up whole acres of grass but 
 for the boys and their mole traps. They 
 catch one nearly every day when they get 
 troublesome and soon thin them out. 
 
 Rats kill young chickens and birds, just as 
 a puppy kills sheep, for the fun of it. A rat 
 killed and carried out of a brooder seventy 
 little chickens for me once within forty-five 
 minutes. A rat got into my neighbour's 
 brooder and killed over a hundred chickens 
 in one night and left them in great piles. A 
 steel trap set the next night caught him. 
 
 But of all the traps a boy ever sets, none 
 gives him quite the keen delight of an old- 
 
62 The Life Worth Living 
 
 fashioned rabbit-gum set skilfully in a path 
 along the hedgerow or in some deep shel- 
 tered glade. 
 
 I believe in the gun for a normal boy. I 
 teach my boy to shoot with me when he is 
 so small he has to kneel and a number 
 twelve gun kicks him flat on his back. It's 
 funny to see a yotmgster pick himself up and 
 declare he "didn't feel it at all!" 
 
 Narrow and poor is the child's life who 
 never roamed the fields alone with his dog 
 and a gun on his shoulder. He may make a 
 man without it, but he will not have an equal 
 chance with the boy whose heart has thrilled 
 with the elemental joy that links him to the 
 habits and instincts of four thousand years 
 of htmian history. The first man was a 
 hunter, a trapper and a fisherman. When 
 man ceases to care for these things, or de- 
 cries them, I fear that he is either sick, a 
 fool, or both. 
 
 It is not true that it makes him cruel or 
 
THE FIRST MAN WAS A HUNTER 
 
The Shouts of Children 63 
 
 selfish. Upon the other hand, its effects are 
 just the opposite. He draws close to Nature, 
 learns her laws, and feels the sweep qf her 
 elemental life. He Mils only what is fit to 
 eat and needed for food. Every element of 
 his character is strengthened by the care, 
 skill, patience, judgment and zeal with 
 which he follows game. Such boys rarely 
 commit crime or display mental weakness. 
 They make strong, clean, sane, wholesome 
 men. 
 
CHAPTER VIII 
 First Lessons in Life 
 
 If I had exchanged my New York brown- 
 stone house for a log cabin in the woods on 
 the shores of the Chesapeake it would have 
 been a good trade, if the boys could have 
 had boats. 
 
 A boy who learns early to handle a boat 
 has achieved more in education than he who 
 graduates at the head of his class in the city 
 high school. 
 
 A boat teaches him the first lessons of 
 hfe — Law and Obedience — in vital ways. 
 You can talk about Law to a boy hours and 
 hours. It goes in at one ear and out at the 
 other. The fact is, few of us ever learn things 
 in the abstract. We rarely learn anything 
 imtil Nature raps us over the knuckles and 
 calls our attention to it- 
 
First Lessons in Life 65 
 
 A boat says to him : 
 
 "Keep in harmony with the Law and I 
 am your swift and wilHng servant. But if 
 you take your hand off that sheet in a gale, 
 or forget to ease my sail to that cat's-paw in 
 the wind, I'll dump you overboard." 
 
 A boat never talks for the pleasure of hear- 
 ing her own voice. She means it, and it is 
 not necessary to repeat it. One ducking is 
 enough. 
 
 The love which a boat inspires in a boy is 
 not quite like any other. It is more com- 
 plex and broadens his mental and spiritual 
 horizon in proportion to its complexity. 
 He may love- a horse, or a mule, or a dog 
 simply for his own sake. 
 
 A boat inspires all this and more. He 
 soon learns that a boat has a soul bom of 
 the union of Labour with Nature. Though a 
 boat is made of wood and nails and rope and 
 cotton, the putting together of those pieces 
 by human hand and brain gives it the im- 
 
66 The Life Worth Living 
 
 press of character which reveals itself the 
 moment she is afloat. Boats are good or 
 bad, tricky or true, just as animals and folks. 
 
 Sailing on the river one day with my ten- 
 year-old in his boat, we passed another boy 
 in a narrow cranky-looking craft with a big 
 ugly sail. He was a poor youngster, a cook 
 for some carpenters near by. But the 
 salutes between them were given with all 
 the deference of two ocean captains in mid- 
 Atlantic. I asked my skipper what was the 
 name of his friend's craft. 
 
 "Hell," he answered. 
 
 "What?" 
 
 "Yes, sir, 'Hell'— she's so tricky." 
 
 A boy learns to love or hate a boat for its 
 individuality just as he does man or animal. 
 This love for the boat rouses in him rever- 
 ence for Nature in her larger Ufe. 
 
 He learns that winds and tides have souls. 
 
 He. must study their temper and moods. 
 The face of the water is ever changing from 
 
'^1S^ 
 
 "he learns that winds and tides have souls 
 
First Lessons in Life 67 
 
 laughter to tears, from joy to anger, and with 
 each breath speaks a new message. He 
 must listen. The boat compels him. 
 
 The tides speak with authority and eternal 
 mystery. With never a break they ebb and 
 flow twice each day. He must know their 
 hours and plan his life in harmony with 
 them. The fish and crabs obey their laws. 
 He must know whether it will be ebb or 
 flood when he starts home from a day's out- 
 ing, or he will miss his supper. He must 
 figure the height of the tide to cross a bar 
 and get back to his channel, and must know 
 the hour of high water and low water, the 
 day he hauls out his craft to scrape her bot- 
 tom and paint her with copper. The tide is 
 his ship's railway and the beach his drydock. 
 He must study the humours of the tide and 
 interpret them. When the tides run unusu- 
 ally low he knows the wind is blowing strong 
 off shore outside and a storm is brewing 
 from the land. When the tide comes rush- 
 
68 The Life Worth Living 
 
 ing in and piles up its flood to normal reach 
 two hours ahead of time and keeps on rising 
 higher and higher, he knows an easterly 
 storm is sweeping in from sea and makes 
 things snug for its coming. Their ever- 
 lasting mystery tantalize him with a thou- 
 sand vague questions about the Power back 
 of their measureless tons. Early he learns 
 the lesson of Reverence in the presence of 
 Mystery. 
 
 A boat is a specific for conceit. 
 
 When a boy reaches the massive age of 
 thirteen and begins to instruct his father and 
 mother on the conduct of life and the mean- 
 ing of things, give him a boat and turn him 
 loose in tidewater. He may get wet, but he 
 will be saved early from many afflictions. 
 
 I told my boy one day not to venture too 
 far in the wind and tide of the hour from the 
 yacht in his little sailboat. He waved his 
 arm to me in lordly gesture and informed me 
 he could sail her anywhere in sight and get 
 
First Lessons in Life 69 
 
 back all right. I said nothing and let him 
 go. An hour later, I came out of the cabin 
 and went ashore in the naphtha tender for 
 supplies. The wind was blowing a spanking 
 breeze and the tide was running with the 
 wind like a mill-race. I saw my omnipotent 
 young navigator off to the leeward a mile, 
 anchored, and a distress signal flying. I ran 
 the launch within a quarter of a mile of him, 
 but paid no attention to his frantic gestures 
 for help. I passed on to the shore and an 
 hour later returned. Again I passed him 
 waving his arms and bellowing for a tow. 
 When I got back to the yacht, I took the 
 megaphone and asked him why he didn't 
 come in to dinner. The wind was against 
 him and no words from him, of course, could 
 be heard, but the rapidity of his pantomime 
 explanation of the impossibility of lifting his 
 anchor in the terrible tide or making head- 
 way against it, would have been luminous to 
 a wooden Indian. I allowed him to think 
 
70 The Life Worth Living 
 
 another .hotir and then sent the launch to 
 tow him in.. He was quiet and htunble for 
 twenty-four hours. 
 
 Last summer that same boy brought his 
 mother home through a wild, stormy night, 
 over miles of coaming seas in a naphtha 
 laimch. He sat quietly in the stem, ran the 
 engine, and steered the boat without a com- 
 pass over twelve miles of black, crooked, 
 foaming channel without once running 
 ashore. He was only fourteen and his 
 mother is a good sailor, but more than once 
 the winds heard him say with quiet author- 
 ity: 
 
 "Come, come, Mamma, don't be silly; 
 there's not the slightest danger." 
 
 Next morning his mother looked at him 
 long and tenderly with softened eyes. She 
 had not met him before. 
 
 There is nothing like a boat to develop a 
 boy's executive ability, and his self-reUance 
 within the limits of reason. Watch him 
 
First Lessons in Life 71 
 
 skilfully beat his craft to the windward, and 
 you know he is learning one of the first 
 secrets in the deep-seas of life. Then see 
 him round the bend in the channel, ease off 
 her sheet, and lean back with a smile as he 
 flies before the wind taking his girl home, 
 and you know he has felt the thrill of the 
 harmony of Nature and her laws. He has 
 come into a heritage no calamity can imperil 
 and no panic ever destroy. 
 
CHAPTER IX 
 
 Along Shining Shores 
 
 I hold that Old Tidewater Virginia is 
 the most fascinating spot on our planet. I 
 can prove it by the shorebirds, anyhow. 
 
 When the migrating snipe have raised 
 their young in the far South, they come 
 north to spend the summer. Far up in the 
 sky, flying V-shaped, as the wild goose, the 
 curlew leads the way in April. With his keen 
 eye surveying from the heavens the glories 
 of the world, he sweeps over the wild beauty 
 of the tropics, calling now and then his silver 
 trumpet-note of command to his fiock. 
 
 But when he looks down from the clouds 
 and sees the thousand rivers, creeks, chan- 
 nels and solemn marshes of Old Ti(iewater 
 Virginia, his voice rings with joy, his wings 
 
Along Shining Shores 73 
 
 droop with ecstasy, and the whole flock break 
 their long silence with such a shout as the 
 Greeks of old raised when, homeward bound, 
 they first beheld the sea. 
 
 Gracefully they circle downward, chat- 
 tering, calling, screaming their delight. 
 They stop and spend six weeks. They know 
 a good thing when they see it, and they see 
 the world from pole to pole. 
 
 The curlew is to the shore what the ruffed 
 grouse is to the woods, has about the same 
 weight of body, and carries the same dark 
 brown-and-black-spotted plumage, until sun- 
 burnt on his return in August. His bill is 
 about four inches long, unless he is a sickle- 
 bill, when it measures from five to nine 
 inches. The jack-curlew is now the only 
 variety seen in Virginia, though an occa- 
 sional marlin or sickle-bill make the excep- 
 tion to the rule. 
 
 The jack-curlew is the wildest, shrewdest 
 and most tantalizing bird with a snipe's bill 
 
74 The Life Worth Living 
 
 that ever worried and fascinated a htinter. 
 His eye is as keen as a wild duck's, and his 
 ways past finding out. I have hunted them 
 for ten years in Virginia, and many an eve- 
 ning have I gone home with but two or three 
 birds for supper, while the sky above me 
 rang with their shouts of derision. 
 
 I have watched them for days and weeks 
 going in thousands to a certain spot on a 
 marsh at a certain tide. I mark the spot 
 and wait ten days for the tides to get back 
 to the appointed hour. Then, all in readi- 
 ness, I sneak away an hour ahead of my 
 rival, whom I half suspect of knowing my 
 secret. 
 
 Everything depends on the tides. By the 
 calendar, the tide should make high water 
 at sundown. If it does, and doesn't make 
 too high or too low, and the birds don't find 
 out I'm on the marsh by hearing the gun, or 
 from the report of a scout — ^why, then, I'll 
 get some of them. The hunting ground 
 
Along Shining Shores ' 75 
 
 is nine miles wide and eighty miles long, 
 and a curlew thinks nothing of a ten-mile 
 flight. 
 
 Two hours before sundown, I reach the 
 ground. I've marked the spot on a marsh a 
 mile wide and seven nules long, surrotinded 
 by a stretch of mud-bars and channels at 
 low tide, which melt into a beautiful silvery 
 bay at high tide. 
 
 i go in my naphtha launch, following the 
 winding channels, from twelve to fifteen 
 miles, to get two miles as the crow flies. 
 But I must get to the marsh, put out my de- 
 coys on the exact spot on that seven-mile 
 stretch to which the birds are coming, and 
 hide before the first bird appears, and this 
 must be done before the tide rises. The 
 curlew are now scattered over the vast 
 reaches of this eighty-mile bay, eating bugs, 
 worms and sand-fiddlers on the mud-bars 
 and on the creek banks. 
 
 I leave the launch at the head of the chan- 
 
76 The Life Worth Living 
 
 nel and drag the hunting dink with guns and 
 decoys over the mud-bar to the marsh. 
 
 I take an hour to locate the right spot. 
 I'm dead sure of the place they went the last 
 run of tides, but, if the conditions of weather 
 differ, they may change their notion with 
 the change of wind and stop a mile below or 
 go a mile farther on, and to miss their track 
 five hundred yards is to miss them five hun- 
 dred miles. They will not listen to a call in 
 their great flock flights on this run of tides. 
 
 At length I select the place in which to cast 
 the fate of the day. I set the decoys in the 
 short grass of a bald high place on the marsh, 
 exactly where I believe they will assemble in 
 grand conclave to sit out the high water. A 
 hole is dug with a spade just deep enough to 
 lie flat on one's back and hide below the sur- 
 face of the ground, and tall green grass is cut 
 and stuck carefully around the hole until it 
 looks like a htmdred other clumps of grass. 
 
 The calico birds begin to come in long be- 
 
Along Shining Shores 77 
 
 fore a curlew is seen or heard. I take a 
 crack at them to get my hand in for Mr. Jack 
 Curlew. The calico plover is a fine practice 
 shot, for he is swift as lightning unless he 
 sees fit to decoy perfectly. 
 
 At last the mud-flats are all covered and 
 the hour has come for the flight to begin. I 
 am on the lookout for a scout. The curlew 
 send out a scout to survey the ground to 
 which the great flocks are comiag. If things 
 look suspicious, he goes back and reports, 
 and they change their flight ten or twenty 
 miles in another direction. 
 
 No scout appears. I wait an hour and 
 begin to grow uneasy. The tide is slow, a 
 westerly wind has spoiled the flow, and not a 
 curlew comes within five miles of me. 
 
 I try the next afternoon, and the wind 
 jumps arotuid to the east, the tide covers all 
 creation and runs me out of my hole before I 
 get a shot, even at a calico. 
 
 Again, not a curlew came to the marsh. 
 
78 The Life Worth Living 
 
 They all went to the sand-dunes on Myrtle 
 Island, fifteen miles below. I watched them 
 for an hour. The heavens were streaked 
 with them as far as the eye could reach — 
 north, south, east and west. I ground my 
 teeth and vowed vengeance. I have but one 
 more day of this nm of tides. If they don't 
 come to the marsh the next night, they will 
 not come till the tide gets around again in 
 two weeks. 
 
 Again I've baled out my hole and rebuilt 
 my grass blind, and, snugly resting on the 
 rubber blanket, I gaze up at the southern 
 sky, or away over the endless marsh and 
 bay, and wait. My guide has gone a mile 
 with the launch and hidden in the tall grass 
 of the creek. 
 
 How still the world! 
 
 To the east, I see the dim white line of the 
 ocean beaches, but the wind is from the 
 south and I cannot hear the surf. North, 
 south and west of me sweeps the dark green 
 
^0^ s^^ 
 
 AWAY OVER THE ENDLESS MARSH 
 
Along Shining Shores 79 
 
 marsh, until it kisses the sky-line and fades 
 into eternity. I begin to dream of great 
 things. Nothing small disturbs my vision — 
 not a house or man or woman is in sight. 
 
 I begin to feel pity for the feathered life 
 I've come to take, when my eye rests on a 
 mother fiddler in the mud beside me, peeping 
 out of her hole to make sure no curlew is near 
 before venturing out for food for her chil- 
 dren. I clutch my gun and determine to 
 take sides with the fiddlers. 
 
 "A curlew's a mean bird, anyhow," I mut- 
 tered. "Confound 'em! let 'em come here 
 and I'll burn 'em up! Besides, I've prom- 
 ised my wife enough birds for the table this 
 week." 
 
 Suddenly the shrill call of a cvirlew scout 
 rang over the marsh, and old Mrs. Fiddler 
 cut a somersault to get into her cyclone 
 cellar. 
 
 I slipped the safety-lock of my gun and 
 tried to get under my hole in the ground. 
 
8o The Life Worth Living 
 
 I must either kill that scout or let him go 
 back without seeing me. I tremble with ex- 
 citement, afraid to answer his call lest I re- 
 veal my position. I know he has seen my 
 decoys and determine to keep silent and still 
 as death. 
 
 He came high, circled around me twice, 
 and then came straight up behind, about 
 a hundred yards in the air. Just over the 
 decoys he poised, cocked his long-billed head 
 to one side and peered down at me. 
 
 I knew he was coming no closer and it was 
 a long chance shot, but I determined to 
 make it before he could jump. Lying flat 
 on my back, I snatched up my number ten 
 and let him have a snap-shot. 
 
 He quivered a moment, and down he 
 came, softly, without a struggle, and fell 
 with his wings spread out three feet on the 
 grass, so close to where I lay that I could 
 reach him without rising. 
 
 I picked him up and found a tiny scarlet 
 
Along Shining Shores 8i 
 
 spot on his big fat brown breast. A single 
 shot had taken effect. 
 
 He fell just at Mrs. Fiddler's door, and left 
 a drop of blood in her front yard. When I 
 Hfted him, the fiddler emerged, with three 
 trembling little fiddlers clinging to her skirts, 
 smiled and thanked me. And then, seeing a 
 baby snail toddling slowly along the road in 
 front of her house, she ran out, grabbed him 
 by the throat, broke his neck, tore him into 
 bits with her big cruel claw, and handed the 
 pieces to her hungry children. 
 
 "It's the way of life," I thought, grimly. 
 " Life feeds on life ; the man on fish and ani- 
 mal; the bird on the fiddler; the fiddler on 
 the snail ; the snail on the worm ; the worm 
 on the cabbage, and the cabbage on the vege- 
 tarian!" 
 
 And, when we get down to the last cell- 
 life, no eye can tell the difference between 
 the germ that will grow into a vegetarian and 
 the one that will grow into a cabbage. 
 
 6 
 
82 The Life Worth Living 
 
 And yet the vegetarians put on holy airs, 
 and say mean things about hunters and 
 meat-eaters. I've often wondered what the 
 cabbages, beets, ttimips, peas and beans 
 whisper to one another about these people 
 in the still moonlit nights of the spring, 
 when they are struggling to reproduce then- 
 kind. 
 
 I reloaded my gtm and lay for another 
 curlew. In about half an hour they began 
 to come. I fotmd I had missed the spot they 
 had selected for their meeting by about three 
 htmdred yards. They were going just be- 
 yond my blind, three hundred yards farther 
 up the marsh across a creek. But they wer& 
 leading so close to my decoys that by vigor- 
 ous whistling I enticed in a dozen large flocks 
 and scores of small groups. When the stm 
 sank I had bagged seventeen. I went home 
 with a song of victory. I felt I could look 
 my wife and children in the face once more. 
 Only once in ten years did I break this rec- 
 
Along Shining Shores 83 
 
 ord. Then I had the remarkable luck of 
 having the wind and tide just right and I got 
 to the right place. Then I carried home 
 twenty-six. Fully fifty thousand curlew 
 came on the marsh that afternoon. 
 
 We get a few curlew when shooting gray- 
 back, willet and plover on the marshes from 
 blinds. But this can be done only in the 
 early part of the season. One shot from a 
 blind is all that is necessary to educate every 
 curlew who sees the performance. No 
 amount of whistle-calling will get him to 
 come in range of a blind again. 
 
 At ebb-tide we shoot the grayback, black- 
 breast, yellow-legs and curlew on the mud- 
 bars, where they come to feed on fiddlers and 
 bugs as the tide ebbs off. I have killed a 
 dozen curlew sometimes from an ebb-tide 
 bhnd. 
 
 One never-to-be-forgotten day the gray- 
 back came like chickens, and I made a bag 
 of eighty-two on the first of the summer 
 
§4 The Life Worth Living 
 
 season. The grayback snipe decoys beauti- 
 fully and is the toothsome quail of the shore 
 and marsh. 
 
 But by far the most interesting sport of 
 the shore is when the red-breasted snipe 
 come suddenly trooping in from the mists of 
 the southern seas about the middle of May. 
 They feed almost exclusively on the mussels 
 of the ocean beaches at ebb-tide. They 
 usually appear about May 15, though their 
 advent varies by a week or so, according to 
 conditions of the spring weather. 
 
 I have walked along the surf in the spring 
 on one day without seeing a single red-breast, 
 and have gone back the next morning and 
 foimd flocks of ten thousand chattering and 
 feeding. " They came in the night out of dark- 
 ness and mystery, and they will go in two 
 weeks, as they came, into silence and mys- 
 tery. 
 
 Where they go the Virginia hunter does 
 not know. Unlike the curlew and grayback. 
 
Along Shining Shores 85 
 
 they do not stop on their return flight from 
 the North Pole in August. The curlew and 
 grayback come in April and leave the last of 
 May. They spend five weeks in the far 
 North and rettim to Virginia about July 15, 
 and remain till the latter part of August, or 
 middle of September. 
 
 Not so the red-breast. He comes in a 
 night in May, gets fat in two weeks and 
 leaves suddenly. He is not seen again until 
 next spring. 
 
 May 1 7 we reached the Life Saving Station 
 of Smith's Island, by the invitation of its 
 genial captain, George Hitchens. It was 
 blowing a furious gale and raining in blind- 
 ing sheets, with the wind hanging steadily 
 on to the northeast. 
 
 The birds had not come, the crew told us, 
 but Captain George said they would come in 
 on the wings of the storm that night. At 
 daylight we caught the old plug of a horse 
 from the stable and hitched him to the cart. 
 
86 The Life Worth Living 
 
 The Smith's Island Light, just over our 
 heads, the greatest light of the Atlantic 
 coast, was stiU flashing its gleaming message, 
 "45," over the storm-clouded sea. 
 
 Within an hour we had reached the bend 
 of the beach, five miles above the station. 
 The tide had just begun to ebb as the stm 
 biurst from the ocean through the cloud- 
 banks of the passing storm. 
 
 The Captain was right. The birds had 
 come on its black wings. The beach was 
 literally covered with them. We were in 
 rare luck. We were the first on the beach, 
 the first day of their season, and the wind 
 was blowing a steady gale from sea, just the 
 way we wished it. 
 
 Hastily gathering some dead bushes and 
 grass from the sand-dunes, we buUd a scraggy 
 blind, place our decoys on the edge of the 
 receding surf, and are ready for them. 
 
 How beautifully they come! 
 
 Sometimes they pitch among the decoys. 
 

 j 
 
 i 
 
 
 
 '*^^ 
 
 , .. '^- 
 
 "place our decoys on the edge of the receding surf' 
 
Along Shining Shores 87 
 
 First they come in little bunches of two 
 and three, when we take one with each bar- 
 rel ; then the big flocks begin to streak along 
 the magnificent surf and decoy like chickens. 
 
 They require no calling. The moment 
 they see our decoys they set their wiags in all 
 sorts of fancy shapes and sweep into the 
 happy hunting-ground to share the mussels 
 with our fat wooden birds, whose rotmd 
 shapes no doubt excite their hunger and 
 envy. 
 
 Some set their wings in a beautiful bow- 
 shaped curve, some drop them gracefully 
 downward, some swing them gracefully up- 
 ward and drop their legs as they descend. 
 
 Sometimes the sky is black with them, 
 their wings set at every conceivable angle. 
 Then it was impossible to choose a good shot 
 in the confusion of a hundred challenging 
 groups. We generally take the poorest 
 chance on such occasions, and perhaps get 
 one bird out of five himdred. 
 
88 The Life Worth Living 
 
 The ideal flock has from ten to fifteen 
 birds. We wait for the critical moment 
 when they double in their flight after they 
 swing past the decoys. A shot just at this 
 second will often kill a dozen. 
 
 At the end of three hours the tide has 
 ebbed off, and the sport is over for the day. 
 
 I lie down on the sands, and wait for the 
 flood tide to catch a drum, loath to leave the 
 glorious spot. North and south stretches 
 the long white strip of sand as far as the eye 
 can reach. In front rolls and curls and 
 thunders the surf. Behind me lies in shim- 
 mering beauty the mirror of the Broad- 
 water bay, nine miles wide and eighty miles 
 long. There is not a human habitation in 
 sight. Above me the infinite space, flecked 
 now with white, swift-flying clouds — I dream 
 of a world without ra,ilroads, or mail — ^the 
 happy hunting-ground the red man saw in 
 visions of the olden time. 
 
X 
 
CHAPTER X 
 The Breath of the Southern Seas 
 
 The only way to really get out of doors is 
 to push off fifteen miles from shore into salt 
 water. Our planet is a globe of water 
 through which five or six big lumps of dirt 
 and rock project. We call these lumps of 
 exposed earth, continents, and imagine they 
 are the world, when as a matter of fact they 
 cut a comparatively small figure in the total 
 history of our sphere. 
 
 The man who does not know salt water is 
 lopsided and undeveloped. 
 
 I have known people who spent all their 
 days on one spot of ground on one of these 
 land Itraips and thought they could teach 
 the children of men the deepest truths of 
 universal life. 
 
90 The Life Worth Living 
 
 Has a landlubber lived? 
 
 The sea is our most expressive symbol of 
 the eternal, and the truest test of reality. 
 Fifty cents may pass for a dollar in the in- 
 terior, but when it strikes salt water, it is 
 worth just fifty cents. 
 
 It is so with men. 
 
 I shall never forget the overwhelming 
 sense of my own littleness the first view of 
 the ocean brought me. I had graduated 
 from college, and owned a piece of pig-skin 
 on which was recorded the fact that I was a 
 Master of Arts. One day I climbed a sand 
 mountain on the Cape Hatteras reef and 
 looked out over five miles of roaring white 
 breakers beneath whose angry tread I could 
 feel the earth tremble. As far as the eye 
 could reach they came bounding, hissing and 
 leaping after one another. At first I was 
 stunned, then humbled, and at last moved 
 to love and worship. I took off my hat and 
 felt the breath of the Infinite sweep my soul. 
 
The Breath of the Southern Seas 91 
 
 A boat is the only instrument by which 
 man can move over any considerable part 
 of the earth's surface. 
 
 When I bought my first boat, and became 
 amphibious, I was an efficient inhabitant 
 of the world. The summer before I had 
 chartered a schooner-rigged sharpie, sailed 
 bravely out of a shallow inlet from the 
 Pamlico Sound, skimmed up the coast fif- 
 teen miles to the Oregon Inlet, and tried to 
 come in. Caught by a squall in the act 
 of threading our way through the shoals 
 of this dangerous and crooked channel, we 
 were held there for twenty-three hours be- 
 tween two mountains of breakers with only 
 a quarter inch rusty chain anchoring us to 
 Hfe. 
 
 I said then that if I ever owned a boat it 
 should have a wheel at one end of it and a 
 machine to drive it. So I bought a naphtha 
 launch in New York. 
 
 We named her the Chattahoochee for the 
 
92 The Life Worth Living 
 
 memory of the river on whose beautiful 
 banks I made love to my sweetheart. She 
 was a swift and powerful little craft-^-I mean 
 the launch, of course. For two years we 
 ran her, and, within her sphere, she was ever 
 faithful. After nine years' experience, I am 
 thoroughly convinced that the only safe and 
 reliable power for a small craft (up to twelve 
 horse-power) is this naphtha engine which 
 works on the principle of steam. It cost me 
 several thousand dollars to learn this, but I 
 know it now, and I do not need any further 
 information on the subject. 
 
 We sold the Chattahoochee after two years' 
 service for $850. She cost $900 originally. 
 Then I built a more powerful sea boat on the 
 model of the U. S. Life Saving Surf Boat, 
 decked her over, gave her a nice little cabin 
 with two berths, rigged her with a small cat- 
 sail and put a 2 H.-P. naphtha engine in her. 
 She proved the best boat for her inches I ever 
 saw. I could go out twenty miles at sea, and 
 
The Breath of the Southern Seas 93 
 
 fish all day without a fear, and if a storm 
 struck us, she came scurrying home over 
 miles t)f coaming seas like a gull. She cost 
 me $700, and I sold her for more than she 
 cost, to build a larger and more powerful 
 auxiliary craft on the same model. Then 
 I made the important discovery that a boat 
 has a soul, and that a fool could not build 
 one. This boat cost me $1,850, and five 
 minutes after she was launched I wished to 
 sell her. I had placed in her a 10 H.-P. gaso- 
 lene engine of the explosive type. 
 
 I worked on that engine two hours every 
 morning before starting, and never went out 
 of harbour knowing when I would get back. 
 She had the devil in her from the start. 
 She wouldn't sail, she wouldn't run under 
 her engine, she wouldn't keep still at her 
 anchor in harbour, and she would lie down 
 in a half sea like a balky horse. 
 
 At last I found a man who was looking for 
 that particular kind of engine in a boat of 
 
Q4 The Life Worth Living 
 
 exactly her make. I sold him the boat for 
 $1,200, a hundred dollars less than the hull 
 cost me, took his note for the whole amount, 
 and gave him the engine. 
 
 He has never liked me since. 
 
 Then I built the Swannanoa, a model 
 naphtha cruiser, in the shops at Morris 
 Heights. She was 50 feet long, 10 feet 
 beam, had four berths in her saloon, a neat 
 galley, and' toilet room. She was finished 
 like a piano in mahogany and upholstered 
 in silk and plush. She was a thing of beauty, 
 and in every way a success except thaf she 
 was too fine for comfort in rough cruising on 
 fishing and hunting trips. After one season 
 in Virginia, I ran her back to New York and 
 sold her for $4,500 within two hours after 
 she touched the pier. 
 
 The original cost of the genuine naphtha 
 launch is high, but they can be sold at a 
 small loss. A thing is worth after all what 
 other people will give for it. 
 
The Breath of the Southern Seas 95 
 
 I had now served five years as an appren- 
 tice at boat building and sailing, and had 
 found out what I wanted and what I did not 
 want. While I have never given up the 
 naphtha launch — I still keep a 4 H.-P. hunt- 
 ing knockabout for short trips and a 2 H.-P. 
 for the river — I determined to build a real 
 yacht. 
 
 My five years' experience had taught me 
 the limitations of small-power craft, and the 
 Governmental regulations made a steam 
 yacht impossible. I desired to have a boat 
 of ocean-going capacity of which I could be 
 the legal owner and sailing master. A mil- 
 lionaire may buy a steamer and hire a crew 
 of efficient navigators and seamen, but a 
 man is never a yachtsman until he is the 
 sailing master of his own craft and knows the 
 responsibility of giving orders from her deck 
 that may mean life or death. 
 
 In no way can a man so accurately ex- 
 press his character and temperament as on 
 
96 The Life Worth Living 
 
 the boat he builds if he has had sufficient 
 experience to understand the language of 
 the sea. 
 
 I planned a schooner yacht of ocean- 
 going tonnage, yet of such light draught she 
 could thread her way amid the labyrinths of 
 sand shoals, mud-flats, marshes and creeks 
 that make the home of the wild fowl in Tide- 
 water Virginia. 
 
 Five things I tried to express in this boat — 
 solid comfort, safety, economy, utility and 
 beauty. I planned her 80 feet long, 20 feet 
 beam, and 3 feet draught; and the lowest 
 estimate I could get on her in New York and 
 vicinity was $11,000, without sails. 
 
 This sum was beyond my purse. I came 
 down to the Chesapeake and found Mr. E. J. 
 TuU, of Pocomoke, Maryland, an efficient 
 builder of merchant work boats. He built 
 her hull. Her iron and brass work I had 
 done in New York, and her sails were made 
 at Crisfield, Wh^n §he was finished and 
 
The Breath of the Southern Seas 97 
 
 launched she had cost me $3,500, and I put 
 a naphtha tender on her davits at an addi- 
 tional cost of $600. 
 
 The decks fore and aft took 30 feet of her 
 length. I built a cabin over the 50 feet amid- 
 ships. This gave me head room of six feet 
 six inches, and guaranteed ample Hght and 
 ventilation for winter and summer cruises in 
 Southern waters. The flush deck schooner 
 gives poor Hght and ventilation. I placed 
 in her forty-six bull's-eye windows, one row in 
 her cabin walls, and one row in her hull below 
 decks. Her interior is always as bright and 
 cheerful as a house. The 50-foot house gave 
 me on one side of the companion way a tri- 
 angular toilet room five feet long, and the 
 other side a similar room for wash basin and 
 water cooler. The main saloon is 16 feet 
 square with four seat berths and is lighted 
 by sixteen windows. It is large enough for a 
 sideboard, writing desk, music box, piano, a 
 large dining-table, arm chairs and a stove. 
 
98 The Life Worth Living 
 
 Next to the saloon cabin are two large 
 state-rooms on either side of the hall, each 
 12x8 feet, containing full beds, writing 
 desk, a case of drawers, a clothes closet and 
 wash basin with running water. Next to 
 these is another large state-room 8x8 feet 
 and a pantry opposite, 6x8 feet. Next to 
 the pantry is the galley, 8x8. Opposite 
 the galley is the refrigerator and the cold 
 storage pantry, 4x8 feet, and alongside of 
 this the first-mate's state-room opening into 
 the crew's quarters, 8x16 feet. Under the 
 forward deck are the oil-tanks for naphtha 
 and kerosene, the chain lockers and crew's 
 toilet room. 
 
 In summer an awning, 80 feet long, covers 
 the entire ship, and iron ventilators are set 
 in openings over the saloon and each state- 
 room to catch every breath of wind. Her 
 interior is finished with pine paneling painted 
 white, trimmed in gold; and her upholstery 
 is in dark scarlet corduroy. The odd spaces 
 
The Breath of the Southern Seas 99 
 
 are utilized in the construction of eighteen 
 closets and twelve large drawers. Under her 
 after decks are built three water-tanks which 
 give running water in four state-rooms, the 
 wash-room, galley and crew's quarters. 
 
 I attained safety in constructing her of 
 the best and the heaviest material. Her 
 outside skin is of 2-inch heart pine, her ribs 
 4-inch oak doubled, and her inside skin 2-inch 
 heart pine. Her planking outside and inside 
 is fastened to her ribs with 6-inch galvanized 
 iron spikes. Her crossbeams overhead are 
 6 and 8-inch heart pine. Her masts are 
 single sticks, the foremast 80 feet and the 
 mainmast 72 feet, and she is rigged with the 
 Chesapeake Buckeye Sharp Sail, the safest 
 and most powerful sail that can be put on a 
 boat for heavy work in winter gales. 
 
 This Buckeye rig gave me the most eco- 
 nomical yacht that could be built. It costs 
 only $30 to put a new set of running rigging 
 on her, and I never hire more than two men 
 
loo The Life Worth Living 
 
 and a boy for the cre\y. I pay one of these 
 men, the first mate, $50 a month. He is an 
 experienced sea-dog and an expert himter 
 and guide. The cook, the second man, costs 
 $16 a month, and a cabin boy, $8. We can 
 keep her in commission six months of the 
 year at a total cost, including provisions, of 
 $750, which is cheaper than we can live 
 ashore. 
 
 Such a craft is the most useful boat in 
 Virginia waters a man can build. She will 
 go into more places and do more things than 
 any other boat of her size afloat. She is so 
 powerfully built that she stands up straight 
 on a sand-bar or mud-flat as comfortably as 
 afloat and without damage. We can anchor 
 on the feeding grovmds of wild fowl where the 
 tide leaves her high and dry tmce a day, and 
 stay as long as we like. She is a powerful sea 
 boat when she drops her centreboard and 
 draws 10 feet of water, and if overtaken in such 
 a storm at sea that she could not live, she can 
 
The Breath of the Southern Seas loi 
 
 lift her board, and in 3 feet of water walk up 
 on the beach and land her passengers in 
 safety to them, if she lose her own life. 
 
 That she has beautiful lines I leave her 
 picture to say. 
 
 The only weakness of such a craft is that 
 she is not so fast as the full gaff-rigged 
 schooner in the light airs of siunmer. And 
 yet in four years' cruising in Virginia waters 
 I have never brushed up against any boat of 
 her size of any rig that has been able to keep 
 up with her, though I have never tried her 
 with anything except working vessels. 
 
 It is a peculiar pleasure, as well as an ele- 
 mental education in the fundamental things 
 of life, to fit out such a boat for a month's 
 cruise. It takes her crew of three about a 
 week to fit her sails, fill her water-tanks, coal 
 and wood bunkers, and stock her refrigerator 
 and pantry. We make list after list of the 
 things needed, and when ten miles off shore 
 always find we have left behind some of the 
 
I02 The Life Worth Living 
 
 most important of the little things we are 
 sure to need first. My wife has become an 
 expert at this work with four years' experi- 
 ence. The man who loves the water is thrice 
 happy if his wife has similar tastes or has 
 the adaptabiHty necessary to acquire them. 
 I can safely say that the happiest hours of 
 our married life have been on board this 
 schooner yacht. On her long graceful bow 
 are carved in oak on either side the smil- 
 ing face of a negro looking at a row of 
 flying ducks, s5rmbolic of her name and 
 habitat. 
 
 I was anxious to get the opinion of my 
 sea-dog, Captain George IsdeU, on this boat 
 when he first brought her home from her 
 cradle at Pocomoke where she was bom in 
 December, 1897. 
 
 His face was wreathed in smiles. Such 
 men are always blunt and plain spoken to 
 the point of rudeness when they talk about 
 the qtialities of a boat. They find her weak 
 
The Breath of the Southern Seas 103 
 
 spots in twenty-four hours, and tell you with 
 authority what she is worth. 
 
 " How is she, George? " I asked as I sprang 
 up her steps the day she arrived. 
 
 " She's a Jim-dandy!" he cried with a grin. 
 
 " She goes through the water slicker'n a eel. 
 
 She stands right up in a blow and leaves a 
 
 white streak behind her as far as you can see." 
 
 And so I found her. 
 
 When all is ready for the winter cruise, 
 and we had said good-bye for a month to the 
 little world on shore, we began to set her big 
 white sails. 
 
 I take a hand with the boys clearing her 
 decks and storing everything snug. Her 
 gunning boats and decoys are sltmg in on 
 deck and her tenders on her davits. 
 
 "It looks nasty in the nor'west — ^we're 
 goin' to have weather," was George's proph- 
 ecy, as we swtmg the big forty-foot boom of 
 her foresail up from its saddle and Hfted it 
 to the highest reach of her canvas. 
 
I04 The Life Worth Living 
 
 " Well, we'll hustle and get to the grounds 
 and then let the north wind howl," I replied. 
 "That's what we want for the ducks." 
 
 As we swting out into the channel and 
 headed for the Chesapeake Bay, black 
 scurrying clouds from the north came sweep- 
 ing down and obsctured the sun. In a quar- 
 ter of an hour the bay was a white smother. 
 I heard her new steel shrouds crack as her 
 tall masts heeled over and tested their 
 temper. 
 
 "That's only the lanyards finding them- 
 selves," said George. 
 
 . "Do you think we'U have to reef her?" I 
 asked. 
 
 "Na — sir, she don't know it's a blowin' 
 with only them three sails. She wants a 
 thirty-mile breeze to show you what she 
 can do." 
 
 And we got it. 
 
 She swept down the dark waters of the 
 bay like a great white startled swan, her 
 
The Breath of the Southern Seas 105 
 
 lower row of windows under water, leaving 
 a white thread of foam behind her that you 
 could see for a mile. 
 
 "Time her now between these seven-mile 
 buoys!" cried George, as we flashed by a red 
 can bobbing up and down in a mass of spray. 
 
 I looked at my watch. Heavens, how she 
 flew! She was alive, and the wind seemed 
 the breath of her joyous soul. As I held her 
 wheel, I could feel the beat of her heart and 
 the quiver of her nerves. When I moved it, 
 she was as sensitive to my hand as a maiden 
 to the touch of her lover. There is some- 
 thing about sailboats that steam craft can 
 never imitate, something that links them to 
 Nature and makes their movements part of 
 the throb of universal life. The man who 
 has felt his heart quicken to the rhythm of 
 this joy will never forget it, nor prove false 
 to the love bom in that hour. 
 
 "Now, your watch again!" cried George 
 as we flashed past another buoy. 
 
io6 The Life Worth Living 
 
 "Twenty-eight minutes," I answered. 
 
 "Seven miles in twenty-eight minutes; 
 she's a peach! That's mor'n fourteen miles 
 an hotir. There ain't a boat afloat can beat 
 her in a gala" 
 
 In four hours and a half we made the forty 
 mUe run, crossing the long mud-flats with 
 only the jib set. She swung to her anchor 
 at sundown on the ducking grounds, and 
 when her jib ran down with a crash, a great 
 flock of brant rose with a chorus of protest 
 that rang over the waters like the baying of 
 a thousand hounds. The flock was two 
 miles long and three hundred feet deep and 
 their flight darkened the sky like a storm 
 cloud. 
 
 "Never mind, old boys, we'U give you 
 something to talk about to-morrow if this 
 wind holds to the nor'west," was George's 
 answer to their cry. 
 
CHAPTER XI 
 In the Haunts of Wild Fowl 
 
 We had dropped our anchor in the deep 
 water at the head of a channel in one of the 
 innumerable shallow bays of Tidewater 
 Virginia. We were in the midst now of the 
 haunts of almost every wild fowl that spreads 
 his wings along the Atlantic Seaboard. 
 
 The prayer of the huntsman in search of 
 ducks, geese and brant is for cold, stormy 
 weather. 
 
 It is impossible to get many wild fowl in 
 mild weather. They will not decoy, but 
 wiU drift around the bay in great masses 
 talking, laughing, screaming and joking at 
 fool hunters they can see plainly squatting 
 in blinds surrounded by wooden humbug 
 birds. They never come closer than a mile 
 
io8 The Life Worth Living 
 
 in such weather, and what a man says on 
 these days would not do to go in a Sunday 
 School book. 
 
 But when a stiff breeze blows and the 
 decoys begin to nod and bob in the water, 
 with life in every movement, then we can 
 fool Mr. Duck and Mr. Brant, stock our 
 pantry for rainy days and make glad the 
 heart of friends in town with the call of the 
 expressman. 
 
 I never knew how much beautiful weather 
 there was in winter until I began cruising for 
 ducks and geese. I had an idea before that 
 about half the days of our winter life are 
 bleak and stormy. I have found by nine 
 years' experience that on an average there 
 are about four days in each winter month in 
 which the weather is bad enough to make a 
 good day for ducks. If we get more than 
 four days of stormy weather in a month, fit 
 for good shooting, it is a streak of extraordi- 
 nary luck. And if one or two of those fovir 
 

 'l never knew how much beautiful weather there was in 
 
 winter" 
 
In the Haunts of Wild Fowl 109 
 
 grand storm days do not fall on Sundays, it 
 is downright rabbit's foot luck. 
 
 At night in the snug crew's quarters for- 
 ward, there is the hum of sportsman indus- 
 try. The boys are loading shells with number 
 two shot for brant. 
 
 The wind is howling a steady gale from 
 the north and increasing the length of its 
 gusts with steady persistence. 
 
 "Hear them shrouds taUcin'?" cried 
 George with a broad grin. " If this wind 
 hangs on here till momin' we'U bum them 
 brant. Confound 'em, they're the most 
 tantalizin' bird that ever pitched in this bay. 
 I never killed a one of 'em the whole of last 
 winter. There were no younguns among 
 'em. It's funny. Some years there's thou- 
 sands of younguns. But last year I didn't 
 hear the squawk of a dozen, and you can't 
 kill an old brant. This year the bay's full 
 of 'em and we'll bum 'em up to-morrow — 
 see if we don't," 
 
no The Life Worth Living 
 
 "I hope so" I replied. "They made me 
 mad enough last winter's cruise, flying all over 
 me, laughing and joking about us the whole 
 month." 
 
 " Yes, and they kept it up till they left in 
 the spring. Nobody killed any the whole 
 season. But if we don't have brant for sup- 
 per to-morrow night, I'll eat my old cap." 
 
 When George was willing to stake his old 
 slouch cap with its long visor, that looked 
 Kke a duck's bill, he was in dead earnest. 
 
 "If the wind will just hold on!" I ex- 
 claimed, with sad memories of high hopes 
 many times shattered before. 
 
 "Don't worry. You'll git all you want 
 to-morrow. It'll be a question whether we 
 can git to the blind. Don't you hear them 
 flaws gittin' longer and longer? That's been 
 goin' on all day. It'll be as long goin' as it 
 was comin' and it ain't got nigh the top yit." 
 
 Sure enough, the next morning, as we ate 
 breakfast by lampHght at 5.30, the wind 
 
In the Haunts of Wild Fowl iir 
 
 was howling and shrieking through the rig- 
 ging like a thousand devils. 
 
 George looked grave. I asked what trou- 
 bled his mind. 
 
 "I'm studyin' 'bout gittin' to that blind. 
 We're goin' to the Boss blind and we'll have 
 a tussle to make it with the wind on our 
 quarter. We ought to 'a' gone to the wind- 
 'ard further before we anchored." 
 
 And we did have a tussle. 
 
 We took off half our decoys from the gun- 
 ning dink and with two ten-foot oars began 
 to shove our craft out over the foaming 
 storm-tossed waters. It was all we could do 
 to stand up against the wind ; and with both 
 oars fixed on the bottom, the strength of two 
 men could barely move the fifteen-foot, light 
 cedar boat. It took us an hour to push her 
 three-quarters of a mile to the blind. It was 
 freezing cold, but we were both wet with 
 sweat when we got there. 
 
 The Boss blind is a famous one in this bay, 
 
112 The Life Worth Living 
 
 that stands far out on the mud-flats near the 
 edge of a ship channel. It was first stuck 
 there by Uncle Nathan Cobb, the king of 
 wild fowl hunters in Tidewater Virginia, 
 nicknamed the " Old Boss" by his admirers. 
 
 This particular bay has 4,000 acres of mud- 
 flats on which the wild celery grass grows, 
 furnishing rich food for the birds. There 
 are many blinds of cedar bushes stuck over 
 its wide sweep, but the old Boss blind is yet 
 the king of them all. It was placed there 
 fifty years ago with consummate skill, in the 
 track of the brant and ducks, and all the 
 ingenuity of rival hunters has never been 
 able to place a blind anywhere in that 4,000 
 acres to interfere with the flight of birds that 
 pass it in stormy weather. 
 
 The tide was just right. It made high 
 water at daylight. This gave us the whole 
 of the ebb tide, the low water and the first 
 movement of the flood tide for shooting. 
 The tides are right for blind shooting on the 
 
In the Haunts of Wild Fowl 113 
 
 two weeks of full and new moon, and wrong 
 on the two quarters. 
 
 As the waters fall off the flats the birds 
 come in to feed on the grass as soon as they 
 can reach bottom with their biUs, and, when 
 hungry from a long run of high tides, they 
 come out hours before they can reach bot- 
 tom in search of shoal places. 
 
 We had just put out our decoys as the sun 
 rose, and were pushing into the blind, when 
 a broadbiU swept in range before I had 
 loaded a gun. 
 
 "They'll come to-day like chickens!" cried 
 George. 
 
 "There's a blackduck in the decoys!" I 
 whispered, as he handed me my number ten 
 gun. I bagged him, and then for an hour 
 we were kept busy with the broadbiU and 
 blackducks. 
 
 At last a flock of brant of about two hun- 
 dred headed in straight for us. I seized my 
 second gun, loaded with nvmaber two shot, and 
 
114 The Life Worth Living 
 
 made ready. They were flying low in the 
 teeth of the gale. Now I could see their 
 long, black necks and snowy feathers around 
 their legs, and they looked as big as geese. 
 As they drew nearer, with every throat in 
 fuU cry, the noise sounded like the roar of a 
 fire sweeping a canebrake, exploding the 
 joints of two hundred canes a second! I 
 held my breath, and as they swept in range 
 about thirty yards from the bHnd, I blazed 
 away, bang! hang! I expected to see it rain 
 brant. I hadn't touched a feather! 
 
 "Well, I'll be, !" exclaimed George. 
 
 I had the dry-grins, and looked down at 
 my gun to see if it was really a gun, when I 
 noticed my hands trembling like a leaf. 
 
 "Brant fever," was George's dry remark. 
 " You must git over that, if we are to do our 
 duty here to-day." 
 
 "I'll maul 'em next time," I promised. 
 
 In half an hour another bunch swung in 
 and I brought down three with the first bar- 
 
In the Haunts of Wild Fowl 115 
 
 rel and two with the second. Then for five 
 hours we had the sport of which I had 
 dreamed. 
 
 When the tide had ebbed off and left the 
 fiats dry, we counted our game, and we had 
 17 brant, 16 blackducks and 10 broadbill, a 
 total of 43, as fat and toothsome birds as ever 
 tickled the palate of man. 
 
 When the tide began to flow back in flood 
 on the flats the wind had died down to a 
 gentle breeze. We took up our decoys, 
 stowed our birds under decks, set our little 
 sail, and as the sun sank in a sea of scarlet 
 glory swept slowly and contentedly back to 
 the Dixie. 
 
 It was a red-letter day — one to tell young 
 folks about in the far-away years when one 
 becomes a grandpa anfi must ask his son for 
 permission to venture out on a stormy day. 
 
 Then followed a week of tantalizingly 
 beautiful weather in which the ducks and 
 geese and brant had it all their own way. 
 
ii6 The Life Worth Living 
 
 Some days we would get a half dozen — 
 oftener two or three. But the glorious 
 moonlit nights, with the chorus of birds 
 chattering and feeding about us, had their 
 compensations of eoul peace and dreams. 
 
 And then the dinners on board! Of 
 course, salt water gives a man an appetite 
 that balks at few things containing nourish- 
 ment for the human body, yet it is equally 
 true that one can Uve as royally on a yacht 
 in Tidewater Virginia as in the palace of a 
 king. And the way my wife cooks brant 
 and ducks and fixes diamond-back terrapin 
 on board a boat is a secret beyond the ken 
 of any hotel kitchen. 
 
 This is how she says it is done. The birds 
 are dressed and placed to soak in salt water 
 five hours. Then they are rubbed thor- 
 oughly with salt and pepper, and basted 
 about two hours in a very hot stove imtil 
 so tender you can stick a fork into the breast 
 and turn it easily. 
 
In the Haunts of Wild Fowl 117 
 
 We are ready now for dinner at 6.30. 
 The saloon is bright and cheerful, and the 
 stove glows with a bed of red-hot coals. We 
 start the music box, and take our places at 
 the four sides of the table. There are four 
 of us — ^my wife, our two boys, aged fourteen 
 and ten, and myself, but we figiu-e for the 
 needs of eight normal appetites. The first 
 course is fat oysters on the half -shell, picked 
 up by the bushel on the flats at low tide by 
 the cook. The oyster plates give way to 
 diamond-back terrapin stew. We catch our 
 own terrapin. They cost us nothing except 
 the fun of catching them. When I strike 
 terrapin at a banquet in New York I 
 generally have to ask what it is. After 
 the terrapin, the cook sends in the ducks — 
 four browned, juicy, smoking balls on a 
 big game platter! It takes a whole duck 
 for each ravenous appetite — ^meat so deli- 
 cious, so tender and toothsome it fairly 
 melts in your mouth ! We serve with grape 
 
ii8 The Life Worth Living 
 
 jelly, candied sweet potatoes, and steaming 
 hot coffee. 
 
 I dream of these dinners the other eleven 
 months of the year. How far away and un- 
 important the land world seems now! We 
 are fifteen miles off shore — fifteen miles from 
 a post-office, telegraph line, or a railroad. 
 We never see a newspaper, know nothing 
 about what is going on in the big, steaming, 
 festering cities, and have ceased to care to 
 know. Our world is now a beautiful bay, 
 fed from the sea by two pulsing tides a day. 
 Only the winds and tides are important. 
 How vain and stupid and unreal seem the 
 vulgar ambitions of men and women who herd 
 in those big iron and stone-bound hives and 
 strive with one another! 
 
 It was here that the sense of the pity, the 
 pathos, and the folly of this struggle first 
 stole into my heart, and I ceased to care to 
 be great. I used to think that I was carry- 
 ing a large part of the world on my shoul- 
 
In the Haunts of Wild Fowl 119 
 
 ders, and if I dropped it, things would stop 
 with a crash. Here in this mysterious realm 
 of s\m and moon and star, wind and tide, 
 bay and sea, sand beach and solemn sweep- 
 ing marsh, how small and poor that other 
 world, and how little it seemed to need me! 
 
 Swiftly the days fly. Ten days go flashing 
 by as a dream, and we rub our eyes in vain 
 effort to account for them. 
 
 We waked one morning and found that 
 old Neptune had hauled his wind to the 
 southeast in the night and drawn about us 
 the grey mantle of mystery, a fog. All day 
 long it hung on, dense and clinging, putting 
 out the light of sun, moon, star and friendly 
 lighthouse. The birds never moved a wing 
 or uttered a cry. They huddled in groups 
 wherever the fog caught them. Far out 
 over the sand beach we could hear the 
 deep bay of the ocean hounds crying their 
 distress. It was no use to grumble. We 
 had learned to take things as they came. 
 
I20 The Life Worth Living 
 
 A fog meant a stay indoors : talk and dream 
 and read. From oiir little library we drew 
 forth otir treasures and forgot the fog. 
 
 Next morning it was just the same. 
 
 "Look out for weather when this clears 
 up," was George's greeting as I walked into 
 the crew's quarters after breakfast. 
 
 "What sort of weather?" 
 
 "Cold, freezin', goose weather. I see 
 them geese feedin' out there in the sink every 
 day the last week. If this wind hauls into 
 the nor'west to-night, the fog wiU lift, and 
 we'll talk goose talk in that sink blind in a 
 way that'll make your heart flutter to- 
 morrow." 
 
 Next morning it was freezing and the 
 wind was howling a thirty-mile gale from 
 the north. 
 
 We went to the goose blind located in the 
 sink, a deep place in the mud-fiats that rarely 
 goes dry. 
 
 "The wind's just right," said George. 
 
In the Haunts of Wild Fowl 121 
 
 "Every goose oughter pass this blind to- 
 day. The wind's blowin' straight across 
 their track, the flocks can't hear otir 
 guns, and we can hammer 'em the whole 
 tide." 
 
 The goose is the wildest and smartest of 
 all the fowl of our coast and the most diffi- 
 cult to kill. I had shot only four in several 
 years' outing in Virginia, and was crazy for a 
 storm day in their track. 
 
 At last it had come. The wind was blow- 
 ing now a furious gale — so strong were its 
 gusts it was almost impossible to shove out 
 of our blind against it. 
 
 The first flock of geese show by their flight 
 the track they will follow for the day. The 
 soxind of one gun heard by them will change 
 their plans instantly and cause them to 
 take a new course ten or twelve miles in the 
 opposite direction. 
 
 But we had them to-day. The wind was 
 at right angles to their course^ and they could 
 
122 The Life Worth Living 
 
 hear nothing. The first flock came as 
 straight for our blind as an arrow. 
 
 What a sight, as they came honk! honk! 
 in long, streaming lines, their necks stretched 
 and their big, ten-foot wings battling with 
 the storm! 
 
 Crack! Crack! went four barrels in per- 
 fect time, sounding like pop-guns in the howl 
 of the wind, and three big fellows tumbled. 
 WTien they came swirling down it looked as 
 though we had knocked out a piece of the 
 sky. 
 
 We pushed rapidly after them, and yet so 
 terrific was the wind they were swept a hun- 
 dred yards to the leeward before we could 
 reach them. Then we had a battle royal to 
 get back to the blind. We had barely 
 started shoving with our oars with all the 
 power of every muscle, when a flock of over 
 fifty geese circled over otir decoys. And 
 two big flocks followed close on their heels. 
 Hundreds had passed before we got back. 
 
In the Haunts of Wild Fowl 123 
 
 Suddenly the sky was darkened with such 
 a flock of blackducks as I had never seen at 
 close range. There must have been a thou- 
 sand of them. They sailed straight in and 
 pitched in our decoys and rolled up in a 
 great black sheet within easy gunshot. 
 
 Trembling^ with excitement, I raised to 
 make the one mighty pot-shot of my life and 
 kill a hundred, when George seized my arm. 
 
 "Don't shoot. There's a hundred geese 
 comin' right in. Don't fool with blackducks 
 — this is goose day." 
 
 I let them alone and killed two geese out 
 of the bunch that came, but I've regretted 
 that lost shot into those blackducks a thou- 
 sand times since, when they have been tan- 
 talizing me on fair days with their insolent 
 display of knowledge. 
 
 When the tide had ebbed off at the end of 
 three hours we had seventeen geese that 
 weighed 214 pounds. We hung them up on 
 the big foreboom of the Dixie, George and I 
 
124 The Life Worth Living 
 
 crouched among them, and one of the boys 
 snapped the camera at us. 
 
 It was a day never to he forgotten, and it 
 will be many moons before we see its like 
 again. 
 
 It was the harbinger of the greatest freeze 
 Tidewater Virginia ever saw in its three 
 hundred years of English history, and the 
 geese knew it was coming. 
 
 Some winters ice does not form at all in 
 these waters. As a rule, it freezes for two 
 or three days in February and then thaws 
 quickly. Sometimes, once in ten years 
 perhaps, the bays will be frozen for a week 
 at -a time. But now the mercury suddenly 
 dropped to nine degrees below zero, turning 
 a rainstorm into hail, and freezing our 
 soaked sails as hard as a rock. In three days 
 the bay was frozen solid and the ebb and 
 flow of the tides began to pile the ice against 
 every obstruction in its path. It trimmed 
 our bhnds off as smoothly as though a big 
 
In the Haunts of Wild Fowl 125 
 
 steel razor had done the work, and in four 
 days the bay looked like a picture of the 
 Arctic Ocean, and our yacht like a craft 
 caught in the ice in search of the North Pole. 
 
 We lifted her big anchors on the catheads 
 and tried to patiently wait for a thaw. 
 Each day we expected a change, but it only 
 grew worse. Two storms had met on the 
 coast and aU weather charts were smashed. 
 
 The day before this freeze, guests had un- 
 expectedly arrived from New York, and the 
 drain on our pantry had exhausted the sup- 
 ply of fimdamentals. At the end of ten 
 days we were out of wood, out of coal, out 
 of oil and short of rations. Then we found 
 that goose bacon is better than Swift's or 
 Armoxur's. 
 
 The .whole sweep of Tidewater Virginia 
 was a white desolation of ice; the Chesa- 
 peake Bay was frozen eighteen miles from 
 shore to shore ; and the ice was packed out 
 sixteen miles into the Atlantic Ocean. 
 
I2& The Life Worth Living 
 
 We had. to knock up the small boats, tear 
 the shelving out of the forecastle, and split 
 up our decoys for wood with which to cook 
 two short meals a day. It was fifteen days 
 before the ice field thawed under the South- 
 em sun and rain and began to move out to 
 sea. The rain had at last rotted it enough 
 for our big anchor chain to cut it. So we 
 dropped old "Sleep Easy," and his chain 
 cut the 4,000-acre field in two and it passed 
 harmlessly by. 
 
 It was a rough experience, but was worth 
 more than it cost. We had met the ice 
 king clad in his white robes of omnipotent 
 power. We had seen the miracle his breath 
 could work on the face of beautiful waters. 
 In a night he had given to the tide gleaming 
 teeth that could bite an anchor chain- in two 
 as though it were a straw. We had seen both 
 anchors on the Dixie's catheads with her 
 sails rolled up. How helpless she looked in 
 this abject surrender! 
 
In the Haunts of Wild Fowl 127 
 
 Strange noises filled the air. One night 
 the flood tide pushed us out of the channel 
 up on the edge of the high mud-flat. On 
 the ebb the ice began to crowd its tons 
 against the Dixie's upper side. Suddenly 
 it pushed her off the edge of the channel 
 where she had been caught, and when she fell 
 into the deep water her masts quivered like 
 reeds, and the crash rang through her hull 
 like the roar of an earthquake. We were all 
 sound asleep when it happened, but the jump 
 out of bed was unanimous, and the chorus of 
 inquiry had the flavour of Chimmey Fadden's 
 famous remark. We had a laugh all round 
 and went back to sleep. 
 
 Of all the sounds I have ever heard a mov- 
 ing ice field, crunching against the sides of a 
 vessel, is the strangest and most thrilling. 
 It comes like the distant, sonorous roar of a 
 storm sweeping down a mountain gorge, 
 and yet it is so close and has such a chorus 
 of intermingled notes that there is absolutely 
 
128 The Life Worth Living 
 
 nothing like it in nature. The hollow body 
 of the boat becomes the sounding drum of a 
 great musical instrunient, and the Spirit of 
 Winter sweeps its strings with trembling, 
 crystal fingers ! We sit and listen breathless. 
 No master musician ever composed such 
 music and no orchestra could be found to 
 play it. 
 
 The lighthouses, that had been blinking 
 their kindly eyes at us through so many 
 long nights, seemed to have assumed now a 
 strange, glittering stare, and one night, when 
 the storm was at its darkest and wildest 
 pranks, the nearby light was suddenly ob- 
 scured. Great flocks of geese, brant and 
 ducks, lost and crazed by the storm, were 
 dashing themselves in despair to death 
 against the glearhing lens. 
 
 I never cruise in these waters and go home 
 willingly. When the time comes to leave, I 
 feel like a schoolboy driven back to his tasks. 
 
 Swiftly a month rolls away. Days seera 
 
WE ARE HOMEWARD BOUND NOW, WITH HER BIG YACHT ENSIGN 
 SET AFT AND HER COLORS AT HER MASTHEAD*' 
 
In the Haunts of Wild Fowl 129 
 
 but hours, and the fatal one dawns, the very 
 last I dare to spend. There are engagements 
 to be met back in that dimly remembered 
 little world where they have mails, telegraph 
 lines, railroads and newspapers. How I hate 
 it aU now! I resolve, when I go back, to 
 make a million dollars, sail away and never 
 return except for coal and water. 
 
 The order is given to get under way. 
 The boys beg for one more day, but at last 
 give up, begin to swallow lumps in their 
 throats, and fight to keep back the tears. I 
 know my boys do this, because their father 
 and mother do the same thing when they are 
 not looking. 
 
 We are homeward bound now, with her 
 big yacht ensign set aft and her colors at her 
 masthead. Every heart is heavy and no 
 one speaks. We feel as though we are sail- 
 ing away into a strange world. 
 
CHAPTER XII 
 The Frozen Fountain 
 
 AH day the wind has been blowing from 
 the north, and dull grey clouds cover the sky. 
 
 I awake at home in the morning to find my 
 Southland clothed in the ermine robe of the 
 North — ^more dazzling in beauty, true; but 
 cold, still, white and deathlike. 
 
 The green leaves of the magnolias bend 
 and curve and shrink under their burden, 
 and their satin finger-tips fiash with a strange 
 brilliance against the snow's canvas. 
 
 The berries of the holly seem groups of 
 tiny altar candles smothered beneath the 
 storm's blanket. 
 
 When the first boyish exhilaration passes— 
 the inheritance of childhood's memories 
 — a feeling of sadness creeps over me. The 
 
I li ij'^n 
 
 '»->f? 
 
 "the ermine robe of the north 
 
The Frozen Fountain 131 
 
 house seems immense, and cold, though I 
 feel the warm air pouring through the regis- 
 ter and a wood fire roars and crackles in the 
 open fireplace. I am mistaken. The room 
 is not cold, and a greater fear oppresses me. 
 The sense of chill must be in my heart. 
 Even the glow of a wood fire may not reach 
 the soul's hiding-place. 
 
 I resolve to take a ride. The sweet breath 
 of the naoming, the warmth of my mare's 
 glistening back, the quick beat of her hoof, 
 the pride of her arched neck, and the 
 rhythmic union of my life with hers in the 
 sport we both love — yes, it will warm me. 
 
 And then I reniember that the snow is 
 piled in drifts and my Bess is from the 
 far Southland, a shining child of the sun. 
 Snow is the only thing in aU nature's pranks 
 that frightens her. When her footfall comes 
 back muffled, and the packed snow from her 
 shoes begins to strike her breast and flanks, 
 the big, half -human eyes turn and look back 
 
132 The Life Worth Living 
 
 at me in terror. No, she shall not suffer: I 
 love her — and she cannot understand. 
 
 The water is dark in the middle of the 
 river, and I see a widening fringe of ice along 
 the shores. The creek that flows through the 
 lawn is dead and motionless — a flashing sheet 
 of ice. The fountains a^^e still and frozen. 
 
 The birds huddle about the door, silent 
 and dazed. I hasten down to grind some 
 com for them and pour it in heaps in the 
 sheltered places. They find it quickly. The 
 redbirds are first; the larks come in droves 
 and eat as though they are starved; and, 
 last, the mockingbirds and wrens. 
 
 I place one pile deep down in the glade 
 behind the garden for the quail I have left 
 to breed two coveys for the next season in 
 the orchard. 
 
 I tramp through the snow back to the 
 house, still struggling with a sense of vague 
 uneasiness. 
 
 Tired of watching the fire, I go to the 
 
The Frozen Fountain 133 
 
 window and stand for an hour gazing over 
 the freezing waters. My wife is softly play- 
 ing the piano. Her music has always been 
 a joy to me. Yet, somehow, to-day each 
 sweet note is heavy with tears and their 
 sub-tones begin to stir memories of another 
 life in another world. The wind howls and 
 moans without and sweeps my soul now 
 with desolation. 
 
 Yes, there is something the matter with 
 me. Perhaps, after all, I'm not well. Yet 
 my face is bronzed and hardened and every 
 muscle tense as steel. I never felt stronger, 
 and my heart beats with the conscious stroke 
 of new and enormous reserve powers. Per- 
 haps I have come home from hunting too 
 soon. No, I'm just a little tired of hunting. 
 The last quail I shot fluttered pathetically in 
 my hand, and left a tiny blood-mark on my 
 finger. And I thought of it afterwards. I 
 did not enjoy the quail on toast for break- 
 fast quite as well as usual. 
 
134 The Life Worth Living 
 
 As I stand looking down the river in 
 brooding silence, suddenly the. Old Dominion 
 steamer sweeps around the bend, the storm 
 spray dashing against her bow, her black and 
 yellow fuimel pouring a cloud of smoke into 
 the sky. Her deep bass voice breaks the 
 stillness at the sight of her pier. Three times 
 it rings in triumph over the icy waters, 
 the summons of the big world from whence 
 she comes, where man has built a home 
 beyond the frost line. 
 
 I know now, and I begin to pack. I am 
 going back to town. 
 
CHAPTER XIII 
 The City's Lambent Flame 
 
 The old fever is in my blood. I have not 
 lived it down. Why should I strangle the 
 impulse, if God put it within? After aU, it 
 is His breath. This longing for fellowship, 
 this consciousness of kinship with the herd 
 is upon me and ray heart is beating to its 
 wild music. I lift my head and sniff from 
 afar the dust of their hoofbeat, and my soul 
 answers with a cry. 
 
 On the horizon of the night I see the city's 
 lambent flame, the light that never grows 
 dim, the life that never sleeps. 
 
 Again I plunge into its htiman tides and 
 feel the enfolding contagion of their animal 
 and spiritual magnetism. Again I bathe 
 in my favourite pool — the whirlpool at Madi- 
 
136 The Life Worth Living 
 
 son Square — ^the vortex into which swift 
 httman rivers pour their waters. At this 
 spot, he who has ears caq always hear the 
 roar of a Niagara more thrilling than the 
 music of the leap of rivers from granite cliffs. 
 
 I see the miles of electric lights flash 
 brighter than the stars, and the glow and 
 splendour and mystery of it aU stirs my soul. 
 
 Warm hands clasp mine, and the faces of 
 friends smile their greetings. 
 
 I hear the music of the orchestra, the 
 tumult and the shout of Broadway on gala 
 nights of grand opera, the voices of my 
 favourites singing as never before — and I 
 am glad. 
 
 I slip back into my study hard by the 
 Square — I confess I have always kept it 
 there — and turn up the lights with a sneak- 
 ing joy at my inconsistency. I hate con- 
 sistent people, anyhow. 
 
CHAPTER XIV 
 What is Life? 
 
 I have taken it for granted that no life is 
 worth discussion which is not useful; that 
 every life worth the candle is spent in the 
 service of our loved ones and our fellow man, 
 to the end that the world in which we live 
 shall be brighter, wiser, or more beautiful 
 because we have passed through it. 
 
 My search is for the highest pathway of 
 this life, and I am convinced that it can only 
 be found in the growth of every power of 
 the soul and the body to the utmost reach 
 of their capacity. 
 
 This acme of living cannot be attained in 
 the city. In the city we are spendthrifts. 
 We give, give, give and never receive. I be- 
 lieve that man's full growth wiU be best 
 
138 The Life Worth Living 
 
 reached by spending one-third of his time in 
 town and two-thirds in touch with Nature. 
 
 To hve is to will. To cease to wiU is to 
 
 die. He who has ceased to will is dead 
 
 already — ^he may fool the undertaker for a 
 
 while, but he is dead and he ought to be 
 
 -buried. 
 
 The gravest charge against the modem 
 city is not merely that its continuous unrest 
 starves the soul, brutalizes the senses, de- 
 stroys repose, develops insolent and savage 
 impulses — ^but worse than all this, it mur- 
 ders the will and destroys personality, thus 
 sapping the fountain of life. The collec- 
 tive instincts of the herd-groups in which 
 we move strangle at last the individual, and 
 man becomes but a grain of dust blown 
 hither and thither by the breath of a crowd. 
 
 The city's chief crimes are noise and un- 
 rest. The human soul cannot grow in an 
 uproar. The crucial moments of history are 
 not found in the hours in which armies 
 
What is Life? 139 
 
 charge. They are in the still, small voices 
 of the inner life of man. The shriek of shells 
 and the shout of hosts are but their sequence. 
 
 Search for the hour of the birth of modem 
 civilization, even in its material aspects, and 
 it will be found in the sHence of a lonely 
 room, where a solitary man sat watching the 
 lid of a tea-kettle rise and fall. From that 
 hour flowed the history of a century of pro- 
 gress — ^the wonders of the age of steam. 
 
 These hours of stillness and light are the 
 secret sources of the wealth of life. No man 
 who is without them can live or maintain his 
 sanity. 
 
 A Western train on which I was travelling 
 one day suddenly shot forward at breakneck 
 speed. Around dangerous curves we plunged, 
 dashing the passengers from side to side. 
 On past a station we swept, through an 
 excited village, and disappeared in a cloud 
 of dust. No signal to stop was heeded in the 
 engine's cab. At last the conductor crawled 
 
I40 , The Life Worth Living 
 
 over the tender, knocked the engineer on the 
 head, grasped the throttle and applied the 
 air brakes. The engineer had gone mad. 
 Leaning far out his window, his hair stream- 
 ing in the wind, his eyes set on the track, 
 he was muttering unintelligible words. 
 
 Only a madman rushes forward without 
 pause. The soul that lives must have hours 
 of silence and repose. 
 
 THE END