But it will be, not be of, indoors.  Three sides of it will be open.  The fourth side will divide it from the rest of the house.  The three sides will be screened against the creeping, fluttering things, but not against the good fresh air and all the breezes that blow.  For protection against storm, to keep out the driving rain, there will be a sliding glass, so made that when not in use it will occupy small space and shut out very little air.

There is little more to say about this house.  I am to build seven or ten years from now.  There is plenty of time in which to work up all the details in accord with the general principles I have laid down.  It will be a usable house and a beautiful house, wherein the aesthetic guest can find comfort for his eyes as well as for his body.  It will be a happy house—­or else I’ll burn it down.  It will be a house of air and sunshine and laughter.  These three cannot be divorced.  Laughter without air and sunshine becomes morbid, decadent, demoniac.  I have in me a thousand generations.  Laughter that is decadent is not good for these thousand generations.

Glen Ellen, California. 
July 1906.

THE GOLD HUNTERS OF THE NORTH

“Where the Northern Lights come down a’ nights to dance on the houseless snow.”

“Ivan, I forbid you to go farther in this undertaking.  Not a word about this, or we are all undone.  Let the Americans and the English know that we have gold in these mountains, then we are ruined.  They will rush in on us by thousands, and crowd us to the wall—­to the death.”

So spoke the old Russian governor, Baranov, at Sitka, in 1804, to one of his Slavonian hunters, who had just drawn from his pocket a handful of golden nuggets.  Full well Baranov, fur trader and autocrat, understood and feared the coming of the sturdy, indomitable gold hunters of Anglo-Saxon stock.  And thus he suppressed the news, as did the governors that followed him, so that when the United States bought Alaska in 1867, she bought it for its furs and fisheries, without a thought of its treasures underground.

No sooner, however, had Alaska become American soil than thousands of our adventurers were afoot and afloat for the north.  They were the men of “the days of gold,” the men of California, Fraser, Cassiar, and Cariboo.  With the mysterious, infinite faith of the prospector, they believed that the gold streak, which ran through the Americas from Cape Horn to California, did not “peter out” in British Columbia.  That it extended farther north, was their creed, and “Farther North” became their cry.  No time was lost, and in the early seventies, leaving the Treadwell and the Silver Bow Basin to be discovered by those who came after, they went plunging on into the white unknown.  North, farther north, they struggled, till their picks rang in the frozen beaches of the Arctic Ocean, and they shivered by driftwood fires on the ruby sands of Nome.