And when I ride home at night my pipe and slippers are put away in places where they cannot be found.

But who cares for that?  Who cares—­who cares?

TO HIM WHO WAITS

The Hermit of the Hudson was hustling about his cave with unusual animation.

The cave was on or in the top of a little spur of the Catskills that had strayed down to the river’s edge, and, not having a ferry ticket, had to stop there.  The bijou mountains were densely wooded and were infested by ferocious squirrels and woodpeckers that forever menaced the summer transients.  Like a badly sewn strip of white braid, a macadamized road ran between the green skirt of the hills and the foamy lace of the river’s edge.  A dim path wound from the comfortable road up a rocky height to the hermit’s cave.  One mile upstream was the Viewpoint Inn, to which summer folk from the city came; leaving cool, electric-fanned apartments that they might be driven about in burning sunshine, shrieking, in gasoline launches, by spindle-legged Modreds bearing the blankest of shields.

Train your lorgnette upon the hermit and let your eye receive the personal touch that shall endear you to the hero.

A man of forty, judging him fairly, with long hair curling at the ends, dramatic eyes, and a forked brown beard like those that were imposed upon the West some years ago by self-appointed “divine healers” who succeeded the grasshopper crop.  His outward vesture appeared to be kind of gunny-sacking, cut and made into a garment that would have made the fortune of a London tailor.  His long, well-shaped fingers, delicate nose, and poise of manner raised him high above the class of hermits who fear water and bury money in oyster-cans in their caves in spots indicated by rude crosses chipped in the stone wall above.

The hermit’s home was not altogether a cave.  The cave was an addition to the hermitage, which was a rude hut made of poles daubed with clay and covered with the best quality of rust-proof zinc roofing.

In the house proper there were stone slabs for seats, a rustic bookcase made of unplaned poplar planks, and a table formed of a wooden slab laid across two upright pieces of granite—­something between the furniture of a Druid temple and that of a Broadway beefsteak dungeon.  Hung against the walls were skins of wild animals purchased in the vicinity of Eighth Street and University Place, New York.

The rear of the cabin merged into the cave.  There the hermit cooked his meals on a rude stone hearth.  With infinite patience and an old axe he had chopped natural shelves in the rocky walls.  On them stood his stores of flour, bacon, lard, talcum-powder, kerosene, baking-powder, soda-mint tablets, pepper, salt, and Olivo-Cremo Emulsion for chaps and roughness of the hands and face.