I fled away to yet other friends.  I sought vindication.  The thing had become vital, and I needs must put myself right.  I felt called upon to explain, though well knowing that he who explains is lost.  I told the story of the poppy over again.  I went into the minutest details.  I added to it, and expanded.  I talked myself hoarse, and when I could talk no more they looked bored.  Also, they said insipid things, and soothful things, and things concerning other things, and not at all to the point.  I was consumed with anger, and there and then I renounced them all.

At the bungalow I lie in wait for chance visitors.  Craftily I broach the subject, watching their faces closely the while to detect first signs of disapprobation, whereupon I empty long-stored vials of wrath upon their heads.  I wrangle for hours with whosoever does not say I am right.  I am become like Guy de Maupassant’s old man who picked up a piece of string.  I am incessantly explaining, and nobody will understand.  I have become more brusque in my treatment of the predatory city folk.  No longer do I take delight in their disburdenment, for it has become an onerous duty, a wearisome and distasteful task.  My friends look askance and murmur pityingly on the side when we meet in the city.  They rarely come to see me now.  They are afraid.  I am an embittered and disappointed man, and all the light seems to have gone out of my life and into my blazing field.  So one pays for things.

Piedmont, California. 
April 1902.

THE SHRINKAGE OF THE PLANET

What a tremendous affair it was, the world of Homer, with its indeterminate boundaries, vast regions, and immeasurable distances.  The Mediterranean and the Euxine were illimitable stretches of ocean waste over which years could be spent in endless wandering.  On their mysterious shores were the improbable homes of impossible peoples.  The Great Sea, the Broad Sea, the Boundless Sea; the Ethiopians, “dwelling far away, the most distant of men,” and the Cimmerians, “covered with darkness and cloud,” where “baleful night is spread over timid mortals.”  Phonicia was a sore journey, Egypt simply unattainable, while the Pillars of Hercules marked the extreme edge of the universe.  Ulysses was nine days in sailing from Ismarus the city of the Ciconians, to the country of the Lotus-eaters—­a period of time which to-day would breed anxiety in the hearts of the underwriters should it be occupied by the slowest tramp steamer in traversing the Mediterranean and Black Seas from Gibraltar to Sebastopol.