And I knew that he fought that temptation over and over again; for that little experience out on the Gallatin bench had only partially turned his life from the channels of wandering, although it had bereft him of the old desire to seek for gold.  Often he outlined to me a well-formulated plan; perhaps he had to tell some one, lest the fever should take too strong a hold upon him, and force his surrender.  His plan was this:  He would teach a term here and there, gradually working his way westward, always toward the remote corners of the earth into which his roving instinct seemed unerringly to lead him.  Alaska, Hawaii, and the Philippines seemed easy enough to access; surely, he thought, teachers must be needed in all those regions.  And when he should have turned these pages, he might have mastered his vocation in a degree sufficient to warrant his attempting an alien soil.  Then he would sail away into the South Seas, with New Zealand and Australia as a base.  And gradually moving westward through English-speaking settlements and colonies he would finally complete the circuit of the globe.

And the full fruition of that plan might have formed a fitting climax to my tale, were I telling it for the sake of its romance; but my purpose demands a different conclusion.  My hero is now principal of schools in a little city of the mountains,—­a city so tiny that its name would be unknown to most of you.  And I have heard vague rumors that he is rising rapidly in his profession and that the community he serves will not listen to anything but a permanent tenure of his office.  All of which seems to indicate to me that he has abandoned, for the while at least, his intention to turn quite all the pages of the world’s great book, and is content to live true to the ideal that was born in the log schoolhouse—­the conviction that the true life is the life of service, and that the love of wandering and the lure of gold are only siren calls that lead one always toward, but never to, the promised land of dreams that seems to lie just over the western range where the pink sunset stands sharp against the purple shadows.

The ending of my story is prosaic, but everything in this world is prosaic, unless you view it either in the perspective of time or space, or in the contrasts that bring out the high lights and deepen the shadows.

But if I have left my hero happily married to his profession, the courtship and winning of which formed the theme of my tale, I may be permitted to indulge in a very little moralizing of a rather more explicit sort than I have yet attempted.