.. I've been rather hasty,
rather inhospitable ... you are not to go to the inn, but stay with us.
The girls have persuaded me ... the tent, down beside the little house,
is yours all summer, if you like."
* * * * *
I found the tent in a clump of trees ... it had a hard board floor, a
wash-stand, table, chair, and cot.
Along with the rest of the household, I retired early ... but not to
sleep.
I lit my big kerosene lamp and sat propped up with the pillows,
reading, till late, the poetry of Norah May French, the beautiful,
red-headed girl who had, like myself, also lived in Eos, where Roderick
Spalton's Artworks were....
She had been, Penton informed me, when he handed me her book, one of the
famous Bohemians of the San Francisco and Carmel art and literary
crowd....
After a brief career of adventurous poverty, she had committed suicide
over a love affair.
Her poetry was full of beauty and spontaneity ... a grey mist dancing
full of rainbows, like those you see at the foot of Niagara....
I must have read myself to sleep, for the lamp was still lit when I woke
up early with the dawn ... it was the singing of the birds that woke me
on my second day at Eden....
Working on farms, in factories, on ships at sea, being up at all hours
to catch freights out of town had instilled in me the habit of early
rising; I would have risen at dawn anyhow without the birds to wake me.
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