* * * * *

Lying under my huge army tent, by the shore of pretty little Lake Emily, I dreamed long and often, in the hush of starry midnight, of reconstructing the life of the whole world—­especially the love-life between men and women.

Shelley was my God, not Christ.  Shelley’s notes to Queen Mab were my creed, as his poetry and Whitman’s furnished me my Bible.  Through them I would reform the world!

I had not realised then (as Shelley did not till his death), the terrific inertia of people, their content, even, with the cramping and conventional ideas and beliefs that hold them in unconscious slavery....

I think that summer I learned Shelley and Whitman by heart.

And Keats was more than my creed.  He comprised my life!

Day by day I took care of my body, gaining in weight, filling out the hollows in my face, till I had grown into a presentable young man.  For the first time in my life I knew the meaning of perfect health.  Every atom of my blood tingled with natural happiness as I have felt it in later days, under the stimulation of good wine.

No coffee, no tea, no beefsteak, no alcohol....

On that summer’s ideal living I built the foundation of the health and strength, that, long after, I finally acquired as a permanent possession.

* * * * *

Stephen Barton and I had many interesting talks together.  With the cultural background of Europe he might have been a Rousseau or a Phalanisterian.  As it was, he ran a “natural life” magazine which, though crude, benefited hundreds of people.  What though it showed pictures of stupid men and women revealing, in poses rivalling the contortionist, their physical development acquired through his methods.

* * * * *

We would collect many people about us, to serve as a nucleus from which the future society of men and women would expand ... we would all live together as nearly naked as possible, because that was, after all, the only pure thing ... as Art showed, in its painting and sculpture.  We would make our livings by the manufacture of all sorts of exercising apparatus and health-foods....

And so the world would be leavened with the new idea ... and men and women and little children would wander forth from the great, unclean, insanitary cities and live in clusters of pretty cottages ... naked, in good weather,—­in bad, clothed for warmth and comfort, but not for shame.  And the human body would become holy.

* * * * *

Meanwhile the petty, local fight had started which was to disrupt this hope of Barton’s, and thwart its fulfillment forever.

The town of Andersonville became jealous of the town of Cottswold because the latter handled most of the mail of our city and thereby had achieved the position of third or fourth class postoffice—­I don’t know exactly which.