“A close shave, sir!” I remarked.

When I brought him his breakfast he was still trembling.

* * * * *

I left the package freighter Overland.  It was almost time for the new school year.  But Warriors’ River lay in my way back to Laurel, and I determined to stop off and pay a visit to Baxter, at Barton’s Health Home....

* * * * *

I was disappointed with my summer.  In terms of poetic output.  I had written only three or four poems dealing with life on the Lakes, and these were barely publishable in the National Magazine. I realise now that poetic material is not to be collected as a hunter goes gunning for game.  It cannot be deliberately sought and found.  It must just happen.

Yet all the things that I had seen and been through, I knew, would live in my mind till they were ready of themselves to get birth in words.  I knew that I had not lost a single dawn nor one night of ample moon.  And there drifted back into my remembrance that night when the Italian coal-passer had come to my bunk and wakened me, that I might come forth with him and observe a certain wonderful cloud-effect about the full, just-risen moon, over Huron....

I had cursed at him, thought he was trying to make a monkey of me ... for I had dropped on deck a letter to me from Lephil of the National, and so the crew had learned that I was a poet among them.

But I was not being spoofed ... actual tears of surprise and chagrin came into the coal-passer’s eyes.  Then I had been ashamed of myself ...

“Of course I’ll go on deck ... mighty fine of you to wake me!” I slid into my pants and went up the ladder—­

To envisage, rapturous, a great, flaming globe of shadowy silver ... and across it, in a single straight ebony bar, one band of jet-black cloud ... and the water, from us to the apparition of beauty, danced, dappled, with an ecstasy of quivering silver....

I have met many a man in my wanderings, simple and silent, who felt beauty like a poet or an artist, without the poet’s or artist’s gifts of expression,—­with, on the contrary, a queer shame that he was so moved, a suspicion that, somehow, it was not manly to be moved by a sunrise or sunset.

* * * * *

I found Penton Baxter, his wife Hildreth, and their child, Dan, living in two tents, among a grove of trees, near the main building of the Health Home.  These two tents had, of course, board floors, and there was a woman who kept them in condition ... and there was a rack for towels, and hot water was supplied by pipes from a nearby building.  I think the tents were even wired for electric light.

Baxter welcomed me.  But I took a room for a week in town, though he urged me to stay with him.  But when I had the means I liked better to be independent.  I calculated living a week in Warriors’ River for ten or twelve dollars.  That would leave me thirty dollars over, from what I had earned while working on the Overland.