is a view of life that hardly goes to make good citizenship, but, on the other hand, it tends to keep the heart young, to prevent too early hardening of the mental arteries, while it certainly militates against the dread disease of boredom. Une vie mouvementée has its vagabond values. To a certain side of my nature Old Louis's wiser epitaph ("Sorry I spoke; sorry they spoke") made less appeal than some anonymous verses I came across in Scribner's Magazine with the title "A Vagrant's Epitaph"—verses I knew by heart after a first reading:
Love could not hold him; Duty forged no chain.
The wide seas and the mountains called him,
And grey dawns saw his camp-fires in the rain.
Revel might hold him for a little space;
But, turning past the laughter and the lamps,
His eyes must ever catch the luring Face.
Rare lips a-quiver, silently implore;
But he must ever turn his furtive head,
And hear that other summons at the door.
The dark firs knew his whistle up the trail.
Why tarries he to-day? . . . And yesternight
Adventure lit her stars without avail.
The plague of possessions, at any rate, has never troubled me, either actually or in desire, while the instinct to reduce life to its simplest terms has strengthened. The homeless feeling of living in my trunks is happiness, the idea of domesticity appals, and the comforts of rich friends wake no echo in me, assuredly no envy. A home, as a settled place one owns and expects to live in for years, perhaps for ever, is abhorrent to every instinct in me, and when acquaintances show off with pride their cottage, their flat, their furniture, their "collections," even their "not a bad little garden, is it?" my heart confesses to a vague depression which makes it difficult
