Far be it from me, in the insolent intrepidity of my youth, to make anything like excuse or exculpation to anybody who walks the earth, particularly the citizens of Butte. For I do what I do, and I write what I write, absolutely without let or hindrance, and with naught but high scorn for those who question it. If it's liked or if it's not liked - what boots it? If they line up with the javelins - what's that to me? Inside of me are good and sufficient reasons for what I do and what I write, and that's enough. The public's one privilege anent the matter is to cherish their own opinion. I don't expect them to change it, and a pox o' me, as they say in early English dramas, if they can make me change mine. Still, even that being so, I fain would say here this: If I seem mostly to write about myself for the citizens of Butte to run and read, it is not because of egotism and vanity, or because I'm fond of myself. I have but just my share, my human share, of egotism and no more, and no one who knows me ever saw my thousand faults with a clearer eye or a colder judgment than I do - my word upon it. And as for being fond of myself - Gra- mercy! (to quote again from the aforesaid dramas) - my chief feelings toward me are exasperation with a large "E," bewilderment with a large "B," and despair with a large "D." But I'm fascinated by myself because I'm always fascinated by live persons, and I am the live person I know most about. Of course, people don't admit it, but it's nonetheless evident that to each person the most fascinating thing in life is herself or himself - and next to that we are interested in other personalities. The pictures I have made of my personality have been the most real writing I have done. It was real. It was alive. And it happens to be a field that I have all to myself. Other writers lack the courage, or the audacity, or the gameness, or something, to turn their search-lights inward and write of what they see - and unless they make their fictional characters very strik- ing and original indeed, the reading public will none of them. There are many, many novels published every year, clever ones, written by clever people, that are still-born or strangled at birth - never heard of - merely because they are fiction after all, and not reality. But the red Mary MacLane book, in some ways a far lesser thing than many of the still-born novels, was simply eaten up from the day it was published until two or three years later - it drew instant blood from the newspapers, the public, Anthony Comstock, and the vaudeville stage- not for its cleverness, or its originality, but because it was no little masquerade of fictional characters, but a live portrayal of one live young woman. I would myself give nearly anything in the world if some one else would write that sort of book - for the enthralling pleasure I should have in reading it, in feeling the heart-beats beneath the words.

Before I have done I shall, perhaps, write for the Evening News about such things as the condition of the roads, or the height of the Big Butte, or the look of the highlands, or the color of the sunsets - and lo, the people who condemn me for egotism and all, will be the first to cease reading it. I know human nature and the citizens of Butte well enough to be convinced of that.

Meanwhile, however, I still, in the present page, write of M.MacLane. If you're bored with it, gentle readers, then pray do not read further. Send the papers to the grocer's boy.

Though now I'm indeed of womankind and something-and-twenty years; though I've been cast by the heels out on the hard-paved highways of life; though I've had every possible experience that a young woman can have - except one or two; though I have had all of New York to be reckless in - yet there was a time when they were all far impossibilities, when life was largely mystery and battle, when "green fields and running brooks" were all my surroundings, when the pomps and vanities of this wicked world were all far removed from me; in short, there was a time when I was seven years old.

There are people who will tell you that we do not change with the going of years - we only develop. It might be, and I suppose that I, at seven, was the embryonic M. MacLane of now. But an even half of my character is different as day from night from the character of the hard young villain who was myself at seven, and the other half seems to me the same as it then was, without the development. But you can never tell about those things. The perspective and the view point alter so much that there's no certain comparison.

But my recollections of me at seven, and of the setting of my life, and of my own outlook upon it are as vivid in my memory as if t'were all yestere'en. And yet so remote am I, a complex young woman, from the Primitive Kid of seven that it's as if I were making a picture of some other child.

The Primitive Kid lived in Minnesota, the land of the little lake, the gopher, the hazel nut, and the Norwegian hired girl. It was on the outskirts of a little town - a large gloomy-looking house, surrounded by oak trees, poplars, and balm-o'-Gileads. I can see the trees now on a sultry August afternoon, with a tense stillness upon them, with not a movement of leaf or whisper of branch, and a mysterious fearsomeness in their presence, and I can see the same trees just before sunset, lashing to and fro in the fury of a thunder squall, now looking like black masses of tangled foliage, and anon, lit up by terrific flashes of lightning in which each leaf-vein seemed picked out in silver-point lightning, such as is hardly known but in that region. And there were hedges of wild roses, pink-blooming in June, and a kitchen garden, and a corn field, and two brackish little ponds on our five acres, and stretches of bird-haunted woods. And the air from the wind-swept hillsides came laden with anemone and was exceeding sweet, and the subtle perfume of the meadows was rosemary, and the wet places in spring-time were a-bloom with blackthorn. Green grew the rushes on the shores of the little ponds and winding and devious were the hidden pathways in the woods. Also there was a great red barn where the wrens built their tiny houses over the sliding door and the swallows their mud nests under the eaves. And there was a horse or two and a cow or two inside it, and two spotted pigs in their pen back of it, and a chicken house at the side. It was full of nooks to play in and its possibilities were greater than if it had been a "fretted palace with music in th'enameled walls."

We were three who played and quarreled frantically together within its red portals. I, aged seven; Jim, my brother and henchman, aged five; and a chronic playmate and neighbor of ours, named Henrietta, aged six. I was a slim, tanned, pig-tailed person in a faded gingham frock reaching not quite to my knees - the same being handed down from my sister, whose cast-off, outgrown, faded summer-before's wardrobe meant tight detestation to me. I looked, on general principles, rather too much like a shanghai rooster to be quite beautiful. Also I was insuf- ferably arrogant and proud-stomached - a leader and a tyrant. Jim, my henchman, was an equally slim and somewhat freckled individual, plaid-kilted and glengarry-bonneted, a craven soul if ever there was one, whose keeper I seemed to be (very much against my will), whose lickings I had to take, whose business in life was four-flushing. And his sense of humor was a weird and astounding thing. But let me add for him that his four-flushing was done with extreme cleverness, that he was a faithful henchman and in crucial moments a game loser. That he was scared to death of a good, strong mosquito, hawk, or a humming bird in a rampant state, and would turn tail and run like a deer from an infant garter snake, that he had no imagination whatsoever, and was unable to project his mind so much as four minutes into the future, that he believed absolutely everything that was told him, by anybody - these were points in his makeup perhaps more to be pitied than censured. It is not to condemn him now for his defects. Say rather that as a henchman he was perfect. As for Henrietta, she was too oft the scapegoat of us both. She was a smooth, rather plump, yellow-haired fluffy personage, afflicted with a weak will and an erratic mother. She had shapely legs, a round pink and white face, and a quite unholy passion for brown sugar. She was not so craven as the Henchman - she had far more temper and enterprise - what is technically known as "spunk" - but she was by nature a grafter, was Henrietta, with too much the spirit of the genus tight-wad upon her. Still she was a not unfascinating companion and no raid on the pantry, braving the fire of that arch enemy the hired girl, was a real success without Henrietta on picket duty - albeit she did require infinite brown sugar as her reward. Failing that from the raid she would sell out both the Henchman and me to the Arch Enemy for one lump of it.

As we were of the vintage of the late '80s, when Harrison was President, the three of us - Henrietta, the Henchman, and I - wore our hair in a thick breastwork of "bangs" across our foreheads, the feature which would be most noticeable in us could we fare forth now. For the present-day fringe on boys is but the pallid ghost of the amazing bangs of '88. Mine was straw-colored, Henrietta's hay-colored, and the Henchman's a neat chocolate brown

It remains but to describe the hired girl, who was a poignant factor in our lives. She was a person who chewed gum without ceasing and had teeth which were very, very false - quite the falsest teeth I have seen before or since. She wore her hair in a sort of tight cylinder above her forehead in what was then known as a "French twist" - and she had an arm like a sledge-hammer and a voice like a foghorn. She used to sing a mournful ballad about a butcher's boy whom she had loved not wisely, but too well. Her classic name was Ida, and she concocted strange pies which came out of the oven looking rather black. Her ruling passion was not for brown sugar but for laying out in the barrel-stave hammock under the trees and dozing there, oblivious to pies and all the other mundane things - with the possible exception of woodticks. Follows is a hypothetical bit of a diary such as I might have written at seven had I been able to write at all - which I couldn't, not having been sent to school till eight - and had I possessed a vocabulary. I had plenty of ideas and plenty of analytic introspection in those days, but a limited erudition. So the vocabulary and the diction and the idiom of the hour in the following bits of diary must be more or less those of my present day.

Fergus Falls, Minnesota
Aug. 13, 1889

This is Tuesday. The hired girl is ironing in the kitchen. I want my bean blower off the window sill, but I don't dare go after it, and it's no use sending Jim. He would bungle and be sure to let her see him going out with it. She would instantly take it and smash it, because I hit her in the ear with a kidney bean. Besides, she is still mad over the dead toad we dropped in the churn. To pay me for that what does she do but go and gobble up my half of the peach turnover. She is a devil. But I'll be even with her yet. The last time she ate pie off me I had Jim go upstairs and spit in her hat - the one with the gilt bunch grass on it. He did it. No, she doesn't get the start of me. While we are waiting for Henrietta we'll go and play in the barn. It is nice in the barn. I would rather be there than in the house any day. I like to be with the horse. He is a nice horse and we feed him lots of oats. Then we bring him ever so much water, nearly a tubful, in the wooden pail, and he drinks it all up through his nose. Then he makes a noise inside like an engine just starting. And when the hired man comes in he says, "What the deuce've you young brats been feeding this horse today? You want to give 'im the heaves?" I'm sure it's not we that's giving him heaves, if he gets any. We never give him anything but a few oats and a little water. The hired man is crazy. He is a good healthy horse. I wish he would have a colt this summer - a Shetland pony one. So does Jim. But no such luck. We have wished that for years, and he has never had a colt yet. I see Henrietta coming so I guess we'll go over by old man Causs's garden to play. Their melons are getting ripe.

Aug. 14

We had such a delightful time yesterday afternoon. There wasn't much doing over at old man Causs's in the way of melons - old man Causs was at work in his garden. So we came home and I tried to get Henrietta to go and get the bean blower. But no chance. She couldn't see any brown sugar in it, and besides she's even more afraid of Ida than I am. While we stood looking at the Arch Enemy from the wood shed off the kitchen a bright thought came to me. I had a match in my pocket that I had found under the stove, and it came over me in a flash what a dandy idea it would be to light it and set fire to the hired girl, and just burn her up. No sooner said than done. She was standing with her back to us ironing and chewing gum, and I softly lit the match on the doorsill and said to my henchman: "Here, Jim, you take this and slip up behind her and light the bottom of her dress - and don't let her hear you or see you." Jim was delighted. Jim is no good at all in laying plans or bringing them, unaided, to fruition. But as a serving man I think he has no equal. My plans always make an instant hit with him, moreover - he knows by long experience that they seldom fail to furnish prolonged entertainment for him and Henrietta and me. So he took the match and, slipping up on the hired girl, he held it to the bottom of her calico dress. He held it till a little blue blaze was well started, while Ida continued ironing and chewing in happy oblivion, and Henrietta and I watched from the wood shed door. I can see now the little blue blaze turning yellow and getting larger. I can see the Arch Enemy suddenly leave off her ironing - and eke her chewing - and with a flatiron in her poised hand begin to sniff the air and exclaim: "Something's burning." I can see Jim - Jim, who like the perfect fool he is, knew no more than to first set a hired girl on fire and then go and tell of it - I can see Jim, pleased at being able to convey useful information, pointing out to her the source of the burnt odor. I can see her glance follow the direction of Jim's pointing finger and herself suddenly become aware of the location of the blaze. And I can see her, with the iron in her hand, begin to whirl round and round and round, like a kitten chasing its own tail, in a very vain effort to catch the fire. The heavy flatiron lent her a momentum which she otherwise lacked, and she spun around like a human teetotum, while the Henchman, with the burnt match still in his fingers, and his eyes popping out of his head, stood back, rooted to the floor with astonishment at the antics he had caused, and Henrietta and I looked on with excitement and pleasure from the wood shed. The hired girl brought matters to a quick terminus by sitting down abruptly in the water pail, which stood beside her table - and, of course, the fun was over. The Henchman made a hurried exit at my behest and we all three retired to a safe sequestered nook to talk it over. For about two minutes, we had one grand time. The Arch Enemy, with a flatiron at one end of her and a fire at the other, doing a frenzied waltz around the kitchen, with fright writ large on her countenance, was a sight which brought keen delight to us and one we rarely witnessed. Henrietta even forgot to require brown sugar, and he, like me, took an artist's impersonal pleasure in the neat unusual form of our revenge. It was well worth the loss of my half of the peach turnover. She'll think twice before she eats another off me, I guess.

Aug. 15

What do you think of this for news? Today the Frankberg kid, the little one, came and offered to fight me. He shook his fist in my face and called me a low-down blackguard. Now, I don't take that from any- body, and it was hardly a minute before the fight was on. I had only Henrietta, the Henchman, Milly Wessberg, and Georgie Lee lined up behind me, while he was being backed up by the entire Norwegian Sunday school. But I didn't care. I knew what the outcome would be. He had something on me in weight and reach, and that's all. My wallop is known for as much as a mile around here, to say nothing of my left hook, and everybody knows how quick I am on my feet. He came in for punishment and went home, after between two and three rounds, a bloody-nosed and beaten kid. The Norwegian Sunday school, if it had had it in mind to move in an armed phalanx on Henrietta, the Hench- man, Milly Wessberg, and Georgie Lee, changed its mind and followed him. The yelling on both sides beat anything that has ever been heard before in this vicinity. Ida put her head - with her gum in it - out the kitchen window and remarked in no uncertain terms that if we didn't all shut up and clear out she'd give us all something to yell for. This may have had a little to do with the retreat of the phalanx and the Frankberg kid - but something tells me that he won't soon call me a low-down blackguard again. I don't know what is a blackguard. It sounds to me like a turnip or something of the sort.

Aug. 16

Life is so dull here. There's positively nothing interesting to do. This afternoon my brother Jack brought home some fish that he had caught, and one was a horned-pout, which Ida and the family rejected as food. So Jim and I and Henrietta took him and put him in the rain barrel in the hope that he would entertain us by coming to life and swimming. But he wouldn't. So we took him out and tied a pink ribbon very tight around his waist - so tight that his eyes looked prominent - and brought him into the house to show the family. But if they were uninterested in him as a fish, they were still less interested in him as the wearer of a sash. Ida was told to take him out and dispose of him. I last saw him in the warm embrace of the cat. His sash was the worse for wear. It's so difficult to find anything amusing to do. Henrietta went home in despair and in search of brown sugar, and the Henchman and I went upstairs by the back way and rummaged awhile in Ida's

Aug. 17

The Henchman, Henrietta, and I went up the hill back of the barn to play today. We had a good time, though nothing happened. Jim was mad because he had to wear his red suit that's got all the pockets ripped off. If he had to wear what I do he might have something to rew about. Dolly must have used the one I've got on today to play run-sheep-run in the back pasture in. t does not look like a hand-me-down merely - it is more like an heirloom. Henrietta had about a peck of brown sugar that she had lifted off the grocery wagon while it was standing at our gate. And Jim and I took a package of figs that the grocery man had left on our kitchen table. He was busy talking to Ida at the side door. Every time he comes to her and says, "Well, how's my best girl today?" And she says, "Go along with you, you pelican." The grocery man says that to everybody's hired girl. We knew Ida had not missed the figs when we got to the top of the hill because we could hear issuing from the kitchen -

In Jer-sey - town
Where-I-Once-Did-Dwell
Lived a butch - er's-boy
I-Loved-Too-Well.
Oh, what a fool - ish, fool-lish joy
To - wreck--my - life
For-A-Butcher's-Boy!

We sat down on the windy hilltop and had a feast. Henrietta, who would willingly pawn her soul for an ounce of brown sugar, for once had almost as much as she wanted of it. I had some matches and I brought the hatchet and the buggy whip so we could cut it up and smoke it. I cut off a short piece like a cigar, and so did Henrietta, but the Henchman, thinking doubtless that if a short one would taste good a long one would taste better, hacked off a piece about a foot long and smoked it - with very much difficulty. It was manual labor, but Hen- rietta and I didn't have so far to draw in the smoke, so we got along better. But a buggy whip cigar is rather strong. We laid ours down after about five minutes and filled in the time with conversation. Jim had already laid his down and laid himself down beside it. He keeled over in a pale, red-kilted heap. It was the figs as much as anything, I guess. He looked figgy. But he got over it presently.

"I," said Henrietta, "am going to be a hired girl when I get big." "I'm going to be a pirate," said the Henchman, instantly.

They asked me what I was going to be, but I have no wish except to grow up into a grown woman and to get away - away, to the other side of the horizon, where I'm sure are wonderful things that glitter and dazzle - to break the chrysalis, to be free: the desire of the moth for the star.

I have had my wish.

"The bird of time has but a little way to flutter," and alack, the bird even then was "on the wing." I have got to the other side of the horizon and seen and touched the wonderful things. And it's to never, never return. Much farther off now is the day of the Primitive Kid than ever was the horizon at that time. I think of Henrietta as the companion of another life, and wonder where she is. In me rises a hope that the gods have been kind to her, and that their largess included limitless brown sugar. And I wonder what fates gathered in the hired girl, and whether they battered her, and "who's kissing her now." As for the Henchman - vanished, gone. Back of me as I write sits what once was he - with a volume of de Maupassant and a pipe, and a measure of contempt and indifference in his philosophy that rivals even mine. He is not indeed a pirate, but it's possible he is a henchman - of another color.

I mix me a mental cocktail - of the gin of introspect, the vermouth of retrospect, and the subtle bitter of unshed tears - and I drink it to the memory of: Henrietta, the Henchman, the Hired Girl, and me.

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