The Jacket (The Star-Rover)

is to be. Read back into your childhood, and this sense of awareness I speak of will be remembered as an experience of your childhood. You were then

bstance of them? Our dreams are grotesquely compounded of the things we know. The stuff of our sheerest dreams is the stuff of our experience. As a child, a wee child, you dreamed you fell great heights; you dreamed you flew through the air as things

of your particular life. Then whence? Other lives? Other worlds? Perhaps, when you have read all that I shall write, you will have r

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or any man. What he knew, you know, any man knows. But he most aptly stated it in

imes and places. We, helpless infants in arms or creeping quadruped-like on the floor, dreamed our dreams of air-flight. Yes; and we endured the torment and tor

en then did I know that I had been a star-rover. Yes, I, whose lips had never lisped the word "king," remembered that I had once

ot yet cooled solid in the mould of my particular flesh and time and place. In that period all that I had ever been in te

on these matters, that through bloody nights and sweats of dark that lasted years-long, I have been alone with my many selves to consult and contemplate my

ot my voice that cried out in the night in fear of things known, which I, forsooth, did not and could not know. The same with my childish angers, my loves, and my laughters. Other voices screamed through my voice, the voices of men and women aforetime, of all shadowy hosts of

ell to a high place with unstable flooring, graced above by a well-stretched rope; and there they will hang me by the neck until I am dead. The red wrath

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s will know me immediately. But to the majority, who are bound to be strangers, let me exposit myself. Eight years ago I was Professor of Agronomics in the College of Agriculture of the University of Cal

uss. It was purely a private matter. The point is, that in a surge of anger, obsessed by that catastrophic red wrath that has curs

the dark. Solitary confinement, they call it. Men who endure it, call it living death. But through these five years of death-in-life I managed to attain freedom such as few men have ever known. Closest-confined of prisoners, not only did I range the world, but I ranged time. The

ther was Chauncey Standing, of old American stock. He traced back to Alfred Standing, an indentured servant, or slave if you please, who was transport

ommon soldier in the Philippines, in our latest war, and to do so I resigned, in the full early ripeness of career, my professorship in the University of Nebraska. Good heavens, when I so resigned I was headed for the Deanship of the College o

the servants of the state will lead me away into what they fondly believe is the dark-the dark they fear; the dark that gives them fearsome

ok, not at land, but at landscape, and pronounce the virtues and the shortcomings of the soil. Litmus paper is not necessary when I determine a soil to be acid or alkali. I repeat, farm-husbandry, in its highest scientific terms, was my genius, and is my genius. And yet the state, which includes all the citizens of th

n dollars. This is history. Many a farmer, riding in his motor-car to-day, knows who made possible that motor-car. Many a sweet-bosomed girl and b

r. There is my handbook and tables on the subject. Beyond the shadow of any doubt, at this present moment, a hundred thousand farmers are knotting their brows over its spread pages ere they tap out their

w that means lights out. Even now, I hear the soft tread of the gum-shoed guard as he comes to cen