This Holstein aristocrat had a terrible come-down.  He used to stalk around as if he owned the earth, but now he is a common “hewer of wood and drawer of water” like ourselves.

I see him occasionally, now, pulling a heavy load of stones or hay past our place as meekly and quiet as the dull ox by his side, and involuntarily I exclaim:  “How are the mighty fallen!”

I have a horse and a cow.  The artist of the community, who remains as one of my family, took charge of the cow and the care of the horse was distributed among the rest of us.  The house is made comfortable and snug for the winter and I have settled down here for the remainder of my life.

With my family are these two comrades, the artist and the mechanic, and we are in complete harmony in work and ideals.  I have been a gypsy most of my life.  I am to have a respite now.  Here in this corner of Putnam County I have found my happy hills of rest.  My work will always be in the city but here my home is to me and here I am to do my writing, thinking, living.  In the solitude of these woods I am to find inspiration and quiet, here I am to dream my dreams and see my visions.  I am forty-seven years of age now, but I have the health and vigour of a boy and I feel that for me life has just really begun.  I have but one ambition:  it is not wealth, or fame, or even rest.  It is to be of service to my fellow-men; for that is my highest conception of service to God.

This memoir is but a catalogue of events—­a series of milestones that I have passed.  My life has been at times such a tempest and at other times such a calm, and between these extremes I have failed so often and my successes have been so phenomenal that the world would not believe a true recital of the facts, even though I were able to write them.

The conflicts of the soul, the scalding tears that bespeak the breaking heart, can not be reduced to print.  Nevertheless, I hope that what I have written may be of encouragement to my fellow-travellers along the highway of life, especially men who mistakenly imagine they have been worsted in the fight.

There is a great truth in the doctrine of the economic interpretation of history but there is also truth, and a mighty truth, in the spiritual interpretation of life.  The awakened human soul is indissolubly inknit with the warp and woof of things divine.  It fights not alone, it is linked with God.

    “No man is born into the world whose work
    Is not born with him; there is always work
    And tools to work withal for those who will. 
    And blessed are the horny hands of toil! 
    The busy world shoves angrily aside
    The man who stands with arms akimbo set,
    Until occasion tells him what to do;
    And he who waits to have his task worked out—­
    Shall die and leave his errand unfulfilled.”

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