* * * * *

We began the building of the city.  We laid out the streets through the pines ... many of us went clad in trunks ... or in nothing ... as we surveyed, and drove stakes.  The play of the sun and the wind on the naked skin—­there is nothing pleasanter, what though one has to slap away horseflies and mosquitoes ... the vistas through the pines were glorious.  I saw in my mind’s eyes a world of the physically perfect!

As the laying out of the sites and the streets progressed, dwellers came to join with us ... fanatics ... “nuts” of every description ... the sick....

* * * * *

A woman, the wife of some bishop or other, came to join us early in the season.  She had cancer and came there to be cured of it by the nature treatment.  She brought with her an old-fashioned army tent, and rented for its location the most desirable site on the lake shore.

She had a disagreement with Barton—­and left to consult regular doctors.  She turned over all rights to her tent and to the site to me.

“And mind you, Mr. Gregory,” she admonished, “this tent and the place it stands on is as much yours as if you paid for it ... for it’s paid for till Christmas.”

So, with my Shelley, my Keats, and my growing pile of manuscript, I took possession.  And with covering from the wet and weather over my head and with plenty of mosquito netting, I felt established for the summer.

Every morning I rose to behold the beauty of the little, mist-wreathed lake.  Every morning I plunged, naked, into the water, and swam the quarter of a mile out to the float, and there went through my system of calisthenics.

I lived religiously on one meal a day—­a mono-diet (mostly) of whole wheat grains, soaked in water till they burst open to the white of the inside kernel....

Everybody in our rapidly increasing tent-colony enjoyed a fad of his or her own.  There was a little brown woman like the shrivelled inside of an old walnut, who believed that you should imbibe no fluid other than that found in the eating of fruits ... when she wanted a drink she never went to the pitcher, bucket, or well ... instead she sucked oranges or ate some watermelon.  There was a man from Philadelphia who ate nothing but raw meat.  He had eruptions all over his body from the diet, but still persisted in it.  There were several young Italian nature-folk who ate nothing but vegetables and fruits, raw.  They insisted that all the ills of flesh came to humanity with the cooking of food, that the sun was enough of a chef.  If appearances prove anything, theirs was the theory nearest right.  They were like two fine, sleek animals.  A fire of health shone in their eyes.  As they swam off the dam they looked like two strong seals.

Each had his special method of exercising—­bending, jumping, flexing the muscles this way or that ... lying, sitting, standing!... those who brought children allowed them to run naked.  And we older ones went naked, when we reached secluded places in the woods.