Arthur Preston Hankins

“ The banks of the river were endowed with graceful willows, alders, yews, incense cedars, cottonwoods, oaks, California buckeyes, red madrones, spicy bays, and occasional pines and spruces, with grape vines crawling and climbing everywhere. The river bottoms were rank with huckleberry bushes, and Andy said:
“Find a bee tree and we’ll get some honey and preserve those berries and grapes in Indian jars—if we find any more. Stretch a piece of hide over the mouth and seal it with spruce gum. Stay here all our lives, by golly! No? Yes?”
It was like a park, this Valley of Arcana. ”

“ And thinking is the hardest work that one can do.
Andy loved her—or thought he did. Quite well was she aware of that. And it pleased her. She wanted fine young men to love her. She could not help it. She—they—are born that way. Would men have it otherwise?
But Dr. Shonto! The radiance with which the morning had endued her transparent skin was heightened by the glowing thought. If she had swayed Shonto, either by her physical or her mental or her plain womanly charms, or all these combined (herself, in short) , she had made a conquest to be proud of. ”

“ Sheep glands substituted for his own worthless organs would not serve to purge his corroded soul nor wipe from his fading mind the cobwebs of superstition and ignorance and prejudice that put him out of step in the march of progress. Such as he should be left to die and be forgotten; it seemed a crime to help him to perpetuate himself, and bring into the world stupid offspring handicapped by heredity from the very start! No, the hope of progress lay in new blood. Let the old generation, with its ignorance and its out-of-tune ideas, become extinct. ”