he was not at home. He was a restless soul—like most Utopists, ill adapted to the permanency of a Paradise. There was, moreover, a steadily disquieting feature in the prospect from his hills. At his feet, the great ships rode at anchor. But before his eyes daily they lifted anchor and spread their wings and sailed away, out through the shining Golden Gate into the Pacific, and disappeared on pathless ways over the rim of the world. For him, even at the age of sixty, the attraction of unknown places was magical. He followed "the gleam" to the islands of the South Seas, to Japan, to Alaska. In 1897–8 he was correspondent of the New York Journal in the Klondike. Trying to pass from the Klondike to the Bering Sea by way of the Yukon, he finds the river closed at the edge of the Arctic Circle. "It was nearly two thousand miles to the sea, all ice and snow, with not so much as a dogtrack before me and only midnight round about me. There was nothing to do but to try to get back to my cabin on the Klondike. In the line of my employment I kept a journal of the solitary seventy-two days and nights—mostly night—spent in the silent and terrible ascent of the savage sea of ice." The imaginative harvest of these later adventures was first gathered up in As it Was in the Beginning, 1903, a curious poetical fantasy, oddly brought forth in San Francisco in pamphlet form with a cover decorated by a figure of a stork bearing in his bill the infant Roosevelt in spectacles. In 1907,
