I took train for my friend Sandys' country place near Cleveland, forbidding Woodruff or Burbank or my secretaries to communicate with me. Sandys had no interest in politics—his fortune was in real estate and, therefore, did not tempt or force him into relations with political machines.

Early in the morning after my arrival I got away from the others and, with a stag-hound who remembered me with favor from my last visit, struck into woods that had never been despoiled by man. As I tramped on and on, my mind seemed to revive, and I tried to take up the plots and schemes that had been all-important yesterday. But I could not. Instead, as any sane man must when he and nature are alone and face to face, I fell to marveling that I could burn up myself, the best of me, the best years of my one life, in such a fever of folly and fraud as this political career of mine. I seemed to be in a lucid interval between paroxysms of insanity. I reviewed the men and things of my world as one recalls the absurd and repellent visions of a nightmare. I shrank from passing from this mood of wakefulness and reason back into the unreal reality of what had for years been my all-in-all. I wandered hour after hour, sometimes imagining that I was flying from the life I loathed, again that somewhere in those cool, green, golden-lighted mazes I should find—my lost youth, and her. For, how could I think of it without thinking of her also? It had been lighted by her; it had gone with her; it lived in memory, illumined by her.

The beautiful, beautiful world-that-ought-to-be! The hideous, the horrible world-that-is!

I did not return to the house until almost dinner-time. "I have to go away to-morrow morning," I announced after dinner. For I felt that, if I did not fly at once, I should lose all heart for the task which must be finished.

"Why," protested Sandys, "you came to stay until we all started with you for St. Louis."

"I must go," I repeated. I did not care to invent an excuse; I could not give the reason. Had I followed my impulse, I should have gone at once, that night.

By noon the next day I had again flung myself into the vexed political ocean whose incessant buffetings give the swimmers small chance to think of anything beyond the next oncoming wave.