TRAMPING WITH A POET IN THE ROCKIES.* LIKE the Walrus

and the Carpenter, Mr. Stephen Graham and Mr. Va,chel Lindsay walked hand in hand ; like them, they indulged in a great deal of agreeable and highly speculative conversation. But there the resemblance ended, for Mr. Stephen Graham and the poet walked on no level beach, and indulged in no oyster feasts, and were, indeed, altogether f as more guileless, ascetic and energetic than our childhood's friends, that " slim " and sinister pair. Indeed, on more than one occasion they nearly killed themselves—sometimes by starvation, sometimes by drowning, sometimes by annihilation over incredible precipices, and sometimes by freezing to death in blizzards. But they saw the Rockies ; they saw themselves ; and they saw life with a detachment which is impossible to us, so completely and abominably immersed in it as we are. Mr. Stephen Graham has seen to it that his readers should see not only the little, toiling, indomitable pair—now crawling endlessly up the rocks of some steep mountain, now slithering perilously down the shale on the other side—but should also get a wonder- ful view of the Rockies themselves. The scene is animated by the tourists and the bears who are to be found in the Grand Glacier Park ; by the hortatory pioneers of British Alberta ; by members of the Mormon community in Canada ; and by various Americans whom the travellers either met or remembered.

It is a charming book, and written with great good taste. Perhaps those who knew and got to like and understand Mr. Vachel Lindsay when he came over to England may have rather shrunk from the book, half fearing a sort of exploitation, a meaningless publicity, but the present writer (who is proud to count himself a friend of Mr. Lindsay's) can assure them they need have no fears. It is all delightful, and Mr. Lindsay is treated neither with adulation nor With irritation. To those who care for the mountains the book will be as much of a delight as it should be to boys and girls whom a natural propensity or the

• Tramping with- a Poet in the Rockies. By Stephen Graham. London 'Macmillan. [8a. 13(14

Scout movement has brought to love an outdoor life. It is an . almost day-by-day account of an "open road" life of remarkable charm, simplicity, and hardship. We are given the domestic details that have such a fascination for all of us, as well as an extremely good impression of beauties and wonders :—

" It cleared up before dawn, but it rained for three hours after dawn. Vachel got up in the night and relit the fire and made himself a hot rock. Coming back into our dark and gloomy thicket, he mistook my form for a bear, and his heart jumped. We lived in expectation of meeting bears. 'There'll just be one heading in the Illinois Register,' says Vachel- ATE BY BEARS.' We placed our bacon twenty yards away from where we slept, and hoped tacitly that they would take the bacon and spare us. Our knapsacks weighed double next morning because of the wet in our things. We got wetter still as we ploughed out through flower fields of a drowned paradise."

But the sun rose and presently dried the drowned flowers and the drowned travellers, and they climbed up and up through the primeval forest, where the trees grew so close that with packs it was often difficult to squeeze between them, and quite impossible to see where they were going to. What would they find when they got to the end of the wood ? Both prophesied ; both were wrong !

"Our primeval forest came sharply to an end on a deep, green, wind-bitten line where the branches of the trees were gnarled and twisted and beaten downward. Beyond that was a boulder- strewn upper mountain region and a wall of rock. We asked no questions as to the morrow, but camped beside a huge stone. It was twelve feet high, but one could creep under it and be safe from the rain. And a few feet away was our first snow- bank. We built a big fire and made tea of melted snow, and Lindsay made ice-cream of sugar and condensed milk and snow, which we voted very good, and we made eight or nine hot rocks for our bed. Because of the mountain wall above us sunset took place at about four in the afternoon here. But a beautiful evening endured long in the east below us. We were so exalted that we looked a hundred miles over the plains and saw, as it were, the whole world picked out in shadow and sunshine below. Sunset slowly advanced over it all, and with reflected rays from an unseen west the day passed serenely away. Lindsay, being the colder man, slept under the great boulder, and I smoothed out a recess at the side. I lay beside scores of daintily hooded yellow columbines and looked out to the occasional licked-sweet redness of an Indian paint brush. A chipmunk rudely squeaked at us, and as a last visitor a humming-bird boomed over our heads like a night-awakened beetle.

The book is interspersed with poems by Mr. Vachel Lindsay, often giving his account of an incident previously narrated by Mr. Stephen Graham. Here is what Mr. Lindsay has to say of what we have just quoted :—

" We cut off the top of the snow with a sharp piece of slate,

And took the purer under-snow to make our coffee, To make-ice-cream : Fastidious creatures !

And then we stood in the snow-hole And washed with warm water,

And rubbed ourselves all over with handfuls of sloppy snow—

Disgusting old tramps !

The discreet birds watched us, The chipmunks squeaked at us, You didn't see us."

The travellers seem to have been an extremely good-tempered pair. They never quarrelled. Those who know Mr. Vachel Lindsay will see the full force of the following passage. They never came any nearer to strife:— "We set off next day for the Kootenai River, and Vachel had tied up his game foot in a dozen ropes and bindings, and it was soaking in iodine besides, and we went very slowly and he sang hymns all the way. I said to him, 'You won't mind, Vachel, if I go ahead some distance.' For his singing scared the wild animals. The white-vested woodpecker walking like a great fly up the dead poles of old pines, tapping as he went, paused meditatively at the sound of Vachel's voice ; the grouse and the ptarmigan tripped ahead of us like hens, and scurried out of view ; little piggy the porcupine trembled in all his beautiful quills ; and the squirrels scolded from all the trees as if we were a terrible annoyance. I am not surprised. At school at Springfield the teacher used to say : All sing except Vachel,' the reason being that he has his own voice entirely. Thus, in slow and devastating accents, keeping pace with the enforced slow walk and pine-cudgel progress, you might have heard him singing, 'We . . . shall. . . dwell. . . in that fair and happy . . . land Just across . . . from the ever-green sh-o-o-re ; and I put distance between us, but ever as he caught up I could hear the scared animals rushing away."

Mr. Stephen Graham is to be congratulated upon a most charming, readable, and. above all, adroit and good-humoured

book.