I was a hero. You notice my tenses are past. I am a
simple school-teacher now, a prisoner in Black Log. There are no bars
to my keep, only the wall of mountains that make the valley; and look
at them on a clear day, when sunshine and shadow play over their green
slopes, when the clouds all white and gold swing lazily in the blue
above them, and they speak of freedom and of life immeasurable. There
are no chains to my prison, no steel cuffs to gall the limbs, no guards
to threaten and cow me. Yet here I stay year after year. Here I was
born and here I shall die.
I am a traveller. In my mind I have gone the world over, and those
wanderings have been unhampered by the limitations of mere time, for I
know my India of the First Century as well as that of the Twentieth,
and the China of Confucius is as real to me as that of Kwang Su.
Without stirring from my little porch down here in the valley I have
pierced the African jungles and surveyed the Arctic ice-floes. Often
the mountains call me to come again, to climb them, to see the real
world beyond, to live in it, to be of it, but I am a prisoner.
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