190 WOODLAND IDYLS. 



inate a style of which they never thought and 

 perform deeds which they never dared to plan 

 and do. In that manner only can we ourselves 

 become masters or rather leaders, not followers, 

 in the great world about us. Some master mind 

 in Paris thinks out a garment or originates an 

 idea for a hat, different from all others, makes 

 it or has it made, wears it or puts it on the per- 

 son of some notable and sets thus the fashion for 

 the world. If a writer would become a master 

 of style, a leader in literature, he must think 

 something original, have a ' ' brain fancy ' ' which 

 no one else has had, then set it before the world 

 in its proper light. 



Most men write of other men and women, 

 their deeds, their love affairs, their inventions, 

 their markets, their wars, their petty quarrels 

 and, if their subjects are notable enough, their 

 marriages and deaths. I would sweep man aside 

 from the horizon and write only of the great 

 round earth and the objects other than man and 

 his creations which thereon exist. Following no 

 master of literature, no master of anything, I 

 strive to write in simple language of the things 

 I see and the deeds they do. 



We, each of us, have queer likes and dislikes, 

 queer tastes and distastes, not inbred but mostly 

 acquired. For example, were 1 to go to Eng- 

 land to-day I would not care half as much to 

 see Burns' cottage or Shakespeare's Stratford as 



