Page:Episodes-before-thirty.djvu/92

Rh Indians by the dozen in their pathetic Reservations, and if they did not, like the spirit of the Medicine Man in Edinburgh, advise me to "scratch," they certainly made up for the omission by constantly scratching themselves. It seems curious to me now that, during those months of happy leisure, the desire to write never once declared itself. It never occurred to me to write even a description of our picturesque way of living, much less to attempt an essay or a story. Nor did plans for finding work in New York—we discussed them by the score—include in their wonderful variety any suggestion of a pen and paper. At the age of twenty-two, literary ambition did not exist at all.

The Muskoka interlude remained for me a sparkling, radiant memory, alight with the sunshine of unclouded skies, with the gleam of stars in a blue-black heaven, swept by forest winds, and set against a background of primeval forests that stretched without a break for six hundred miles of lonely and untrodden beauty.

Rh