romances: one of the heart, which had filled his life for many years, and a second of the mind—of the imagination. Just when the morning brightness of the world was wearing off for him, along came Outland and brought him a kind of second youth.
Through Outland’s studies, long after they had ceased to be pupil and master, he had been able to experience afresh things that had grown dull with use.
The boy’s mind had the superabundance of heat which is always present where there is rich germination. To share his thoughts was to see old perspectives transformed by new effects of light.
If the last four volumes of The Spanish Adventurers were more simple and inevitable than those that went before, it was largely because of Outland.
When St. Peter first began his work, he realized that his great drawback was the lack of early association, the fact that he had not spent his youth in the great dazzling Southwest country which was the scene of his explorers’ adventures.
By the time he had got as far as the third volume, into his house walked a boy who had grown up there, a boy with imagination, with the training and insight resulting from a very curious experience; who had in his pocket the secrets which old trails and stones and watercourses tell only to adolescence.
Two years after Tom’s graduation they took the copy of Fray Garces’ manuscript that the Professor had made from the original in Spain, and went down into the Southwest together. By autumn they had been over every mile of his trail on horseback. Tom could take a sentence from Garces’ diary and find the exact spot at which the missionary crossed the Rio Colorado on a certain Sunday in