and finally to him, that he was right. Slowly I began to lean upon his judgment, for time and again I found he could not fail me. In the beginning I have in sheer exhaustion been guilty, though very rarely, of the unworthy ruse of giving in when I was not convinced. But let him suspect the attempted deceit, and the dawning light in his face fell into dark disapprobation. So I came to face every issue with him squarely, no matter what the price in time, inconvenience, nerves, everything.

Luckless was the victim who could not benefit by the brusque tonic of his argument; and, indeed, it was a tonic to himself, until the years when he grew too weary with the hopelessness of leavening the inert mass of humanity. H. G. Wells's definition of the average mind-"A projection of inherent imperfections"-would have suited Jack.

He was an unfailing wonder to us all. Despite his boredom with small minds, one would see him completely possessed, enthralled, by the simple goodness of some character in the humblest walk of life. There were in the neighborhood certain characters who had fallen into ways of hopelessness, and Jack's manly tenderness, always augmented by an unostentatious hand in his pocket, was a speechless pleasure to me, one to emulate for his sweet sake. Then there would be his unbounded appreciation of some tiny farm where, perhaps, a bygone workman of Jack's, with wife and child, lived happily with one cow, one horse, a few chickens. And his delight shone all over him if he detected an idea of his own which had been incor

porated into the other's agricultural equipment.

He cared almost nothing at all, except as it might affect his market and his authority, for public opinion of himself or his books. But I came to find him simply, touchingly sensitive to approval from the exceeding few whom he loved, and another exceeding few whose discrimination he revered.

It is beyond hand of mine to limn with strong and supple strokes a convincing picture of this protean manboy. To me he stands out simple enough in all his complexity, yet I can scarcely hope to leave this impression with the reader, so numberless were the factors in the sum of his glowing personality. And the greatest, perhaps, of all ingredients in his make-up was the surpassing lovableness that made his very deficiencies appear loveworthy. No matter what the irritability of mental stress from whatsoever source, appeal to him with love and desire of understanding, and the world was yours could he give it to you.

One peculiarity or failing I never could fathom. Despite the smallness and fineness of his hands, the taper fingers and delicacy of their touch, he was all thumbs when it came to manipulating small objects, say, rigging up fishing-gear, buttoning or hooking a garment, tending his stylographic inkpencils. He might easily have been the original model of the humorists' exasperated husband playing maid to his wife's back-buttoned raiment. He did it willingly enough when no one else was about, but with much unsaintly verbiage, of which he gave due heralding. Yet with this clumsiness, which was a fount of speculation to Jack, he was able to pride himself that

he never broke anything. This was all the more remarkable when taking into account the fact that he invariably "talked with his hands." Once, waving his arms at a table, I saw him sweep a "student" lamp clear, which he caught before it could reach the floor; but he never broke the finest porcelain.

In these months we rode systemically all over the valley, and explored the sylvan mazes of its embracing ranges and the intricacies of little hills, with their little vales, that to the north

divide the valley proper. And we visited the hot-springs resorts southerly in the valley, Agua Caliente and Boyes, for the tepid swimming-tanks.

We boxed, we swam, we did everything under the sun except walk. Jack never walked any distance save when there was no other way to progress. And I was in entire accord with this, as with a thousand and one other mutual preferences. I have seen him deprive himself of a pleasure if walking was the means of getting at it. "You are the only woman I ever walked far to keep an engagement with," he told me; then spoiled the pretty compliment by adding mischievously, "but I rode most of the way on my bicycle. That night, you remember?-when I got arrested for speeding inside Oakland's city limits."

Those who regarded Jack London as physically powerful were quite right, but they would be astonished to find that his big, shapely muscles of arm and shoulder and leg, equal to any emergency whether from momentary call or of endurance, were not of the stone-hard variety, even under tension. Why, I, "small, tender woman," as he liked to say, could flex a firmer bicep than Jack's, to his eternal amuse

ment. But we were as alike as some twins in many characteristics, particularly our supersensitive flesh. I had always been ashamed that despite years of horseback-riding, let me be away from the saddle for a month or even less, and the first ride would lame my muscles. To my surprise, Jack, who became an enthusiastic and excellent horseman, showed the identical weakness to the end of his life.

§ 7

As the weeks warmed into summer, campers flocked to Wake Robin, and the swimming pool in Sonoma Creek, below the Fish Ranch's banks, was a place of wild romping every afternoon. Jack taught the young folk to swim and dive, and to live without breathing during exciting tournaments of under-water tag, or searching for hidden objects.

There were mad frolics on the sandy beach at the northern edge of the bathing-hole, and no child so boisterous or enthusiastic or resourceful as Jack, “joyously noisy with life's arrogance." He trained the young campers to box and to wrestle, and all, instructor and pupils, took on their varying gilds of sun-bronze from the ardent California sky that tanned the whole land to warm russet.

I am suddenly aware of the fact that much as Jack shared his afternoons in sport with vacation troops of campers, many as were the health-giving things of flesh and spirit which he taught them, not one learned from him in the sport of hunting. Nor can I remember him ever going out hunting in this period. The only times we saw him with firearms in his hands were at intervals when we all practised shooting with rifle and revolver at a target

tacked against the end of an ancient, ruined dam across the Sonoma. Once, long afterward, in southwestern Oregon, Jack was taken bear-hunting in the mountains. When he returned to the ranch-house he said:

"Mate, these good men don't know what to make of me. They offered me what the average hunting man would give a year of his life to have the chance of getting a bear. As it happened, we did not see any bear; but coming into a clearing, there stood the most gorgeous antlered buck you ever want to see, on a little ridge, silhouetted against the sunset. The men whispered to me that now was my chance. They were fairly trembling with anxiety for fear I might miss such a perfect shot. And I did n't even raise my gun. I just could n't shoot that great, glorious wild thing that had no show against the long arm of my rifle."

So the children at Wake Robinhow little a child will miss!-resurrected the old ditty of two summers gone, about "The kindest friend the rabbits ever knew," and loved their big-hearted play-friend the more.

One small Oakland shaver, badly out of sorts with his maternal parent, one afternoon began "shying" pebbles at all and sundry. After every one else had gone to supper, Jack excepted, the little fellow sullenly turned his jaundiced attention to the one live target remaining, friend or foe it mattered not. Jack admonished him to stop, but instead, he selected larger missiles and went on firing them. Furious because Jack laughingly dodged them all, the mite jumped up and down in baffled wrath and shrieked: "You hoodlum! You hoodlum!"

"Now, I wonder," Jack reflected

through a cloud of cigarette smoke after supper, "where he heard me called a hoodlum."

Again recurring to Jack's alleged brutality, I smile to think how considerate he usually was. In all the rough-and-tumble play with the children and often young folk of maturer growth, any one who was hurt by him quickly smothered the involuntary "ouch" because all knew it was unintentional.

About the water-hole, not one playfellow but would gladly drop the strenuous fun to listen to Jack read aloud, and sometimes, at special urging from the charmed ring, he would with secret gratification respond to a request for some story of his own making. Joshua Slocum's "Sailing Alone around the World" came in for its turn, and suddenly, one day, Jack laid down the book and said to Uncle Roscoe Eames:

"If Slocum could do it alone in a thirty-five-foot sloop, with an old tin clock for chronometer, why could n't we do it in a ten-foot-longer boat with better equipment and more company?"

Uncle Roscoe, devoted yachtsman all his life, and to all appearance as devoted as ever at nearly sixty, beamed with interest. The two fell with vim to comparing models of craft, their audience open-mouthed at the proposition. All at once Jack turned to me, and I am sure there was no misgiving in his heart.

"What do you say, Charmian? Suppose five years from now, after we 're married and have built our house somewhere, we start on a voyage around the world in a forty-five-foot yacht. It'll take a good while to build her, and we 've got a lot of other things to do besides."

"I'm with you every foot of the

way," I declared; "but why wait five years? Why not begin construction in the spring and let the house wait? No use putting up a home and running right away and leaving it. I love a boat, you love a boat; let 's call the boat our house until we get ready to stay a little while in one place. We'll never be any younger, or want to go any more keenly than right now. You know," I struck home, "you 're always reminding me that we are dying, cell by cell, every minute."

"Hoist by my own petard!" Jack growled facetiously, but inwardly approving.

And this was the inception of the Snark voyage, most wonderful of all our glittering rosary of adventurings.

§ 8

Aside from the campers, who did not invade his sanctuary, Jack saw almost no visitors. "One," he once told a reporter, "was a Russian Revolutionist; the other I avoided." Never shall I forget the latter incident. We were swinging in his hammock at the far end of "Jack's House" from the road, when we glimpsed the unannounced and unwelcome figure on the pathway from my aunt's home. Undetected, we slipped from the hammock, and kept still invisible as we soft-padded around the cottage, always keeping on the opposite side from the searching caller, who shortly went away. "I'm going to put up two signs on my entrances," Jack said with a twinkle. "On the front door will be read: 'No admission except on business. No business transacted here.' On the back: 'Please do not enter without knocking. Please do not knock."

He was as good as his word. I lettered the legends, and Manyoungi nailed them up, to the scandal of the neighbors. But this summer was the one and only period of inhospitality of any length in Jack's whole life, an instance when he really wanted to be let alone, a necessity in his development at that phase. A few months later, in Boston, he gave this out to one of the papers:

"No, I do not care for societymuch. I have n't the time. And, besides, society and I disagree as to how I should dress and as to how I should do a great many other things. I have no time for pink teas nor for pink souls. I find that I can get along now less vexatiously and more happily without very much personal dealing with what I may call general humanity. Yet I am not a hermit; I have simply reduced my visiting-list."

Society always had him at bay about his clothing. Once he wrote: "I have been real, and did not cheat reality any step of the way, even in so microscopically small and comically ludicrous a detail as the wearing of starched collar when it would have hurt my neck had I worn it." How he would have bidden to his heart that "Shaw of Tailors," H. Dennis Bradley of London Town, who wishes, amid other current post-bellum revolutions, revolution in the matter of starch: "If starch is a food," he adjures, "for goodness sake eat it; do not plaster it on your bosom and bend it round your neck. The war has taught the value of soft silken shirts and collars; and we shall not return to the Prussianism and the militarism of the blind, unreasoning 'boiled' shirt without a murmur.”

HAD long expected far-famed Rio to be the climax and end of my South American wanderings. The Portuguese civilization had never aroused any great interest within me; a glimpse of Brazil, with possibly a glance at Venezuela on my way home, to complete my acquaintance with the former Spanish colonies, seemed a fitting conclusion of a journey that had already stretched out into almost three years. Unfortunately, I had not been keeping my ear to the ground. Years of carefree wandering in those regions of the earth where life is simple and in which man learns to depend chiefly on himself had caused me to overlook certain characteristics of the more complicated world I was now rejoining. The reserve fund I had unexpectedly succeeded in saving from the maw of Brazilian profiteers was in paper milreis, but as one had always been

able for more than a decade to turn 300$000 into twenty English gold sovereigns at will, I had neglected to do so at once.

On the bright winter morning of Saturday, the first of August, I strolled out of my modest hotel and along the Avenida Central with the usual leisurely manner of a man who has not a care in the world, almost instantly to recognize that there was something strange in the air. Before the offices of the "Jornal do Commercio" and the "Jornal do Brasil" were gathered seething crowds, eagerly spelling out the unusually voluminous bulletins in the windows. I paused to read with them. Some one, it seemed, had kicked over the balance of power in Europe, and France and Russia had decided to try to give Germany the licking for which she had long been spoiling.

The news came to me out of a trop