Evening Sun, was exhausted for me. The pleasant and unpleasant sides of it I knew by heart. Though I took no action, my mind began to cast about for other fields. I had saved a little cash. My thoughts turned westwards, California, the Pacific Coast, the bright sunshine and blue waters of the southern seas even. I was past twenty-seven. To be a New York reporter all my life did not appeal. Nor was it yet time to go back to England. No trace of literary faculty, nor any desire to write, much less a consciousness that I could write perhaps, had declared themselves. My summer holidays of two weeks I spent again in the backwoods, with a view to some woodland life which was to include, this time, Old Louis, too. Obstacles everywhere made me feel, however, that it was not to be, for though they were obstacles I could have overcome, I took them as an indication that fate had other views for my future. When a thing was meant to be, it invariably came of itself, I found. My temperament, at any rate, noted and obeyed these hints. Old Louis, too, who was to collect his poems in our woodland home, to write new ones as well, met all practical suggestions with, "Let us consider, Figlio, a little longer first." He was to write also a political history of the United States and "I must collect more data before I am ready to go." The dread of being fixed and settled, a captive in a place I could not leave at a moment's notice, did not operate where Nature was concerned. The idea of living in the forests had no fear of prison in it.
Events, moreover, which brought big changes into my life had always come, I noticed, from outside, rather than as a result of definite action on my own part. A chance meeting in a hotel-bar set me reporting, a chance meeting with Mullins landed me on the Times, a chance meeting with Angus Hamilton in Piccadilly Circus led to my writing books, a chance meeting with William E. Dodge now suddenly heaved me up another rung of life into the position of private secretary to a millionaire banker.
To me it has always seemed that some outside power,
