“A few years after his marriage he came West, intending to settle in San Francisco and practise law.  His wife stayed behind until he should get a start.  The gold fever was n’t dead yet in those days, and Moulton had a bad attack of it.  When I came to the Coast he was working in some played-out placer mines, and feeling perfectly sure that he was going to strike a fortune almost any day.  When a man has once dug gold out of the ground with his own hands, he seems to be unfitted for doing anything else.  It’s as bad as the gambler’s mania.  Well, the fever got into Moulton’s blood, and he gave himself up to it, drifting about, prospecting, and sometimes striking a good thing, but often quite the contrary.

“Finally his wife came on, and she persuaded him to give up the gold hunt and his roving life and settle down in San Francisco to the practice of his profession.  He got on remarkably well, had all the business he could attend to, and was making a heap more money than there was the slightest probability of his ever digging out of the ground.  But the fever of his vagrant, irresponsible life was still in his veins, and with all that promise of a successful career before him he was restless and unhappy.  He could not forget the camp fire in the mountains and the whispering of the pine trees and the life of the woods.  I don’t know if you understand—­” and the Artist hesitated, turning upon me an uncertain, questioning glance.

“I know what you mean,” I answered.  “Go on and say what you had in mind.  It’s a fascinating question.”

“That it is,” he replied, “and I never can decide whether it is something fine and high in a man’s nature which makes him want to yield to that sort of a yearning, or whether it is mere latent savagery, coming out all the stronger for having been long repressed.

“But what’s the use of speculating?  The bald truth is that if a man has a strong feeling for Nature and once knows the charm of wandering alone in wild places, he ’ll have a string tied to him forever after, that will give him some mighty hard jerks.

“Moulton felt all that fascination very keenly, and the mountains and the forests seemed to be always calling him and commanding him to return to them.  The follies and the faults of men and the baseness of human nature, of which, of course, the practice of his profession gave him special knowledge, irritated him, and every new case made him more impatient with civilization and more contemptuous of his fellow men.

“I was in the courtroom once when he won a big case which had been bitterly contested.  A crowd of lawyers was there, and they were all enthusiastic about the way he had conducted it and the brilliant victory he had won.  They pressed around to congratulate him, but he got away from them as soon as he could and went into the street with me.  We walked a block or more before he spoke, and then he burst out bitterly: