human contacts, family activities, or office doings. The least reference to these latter is full of interest now, whereas my over minute resumptions of natural events are tremendously tiresome.
    Another flaw I find is an all too frequent lack of sincerity afraid even in the seclusion of my diary to be honest with myself. A paragraph written first in fulsome praise of a friend I loved. I later scratched out, or re-wrote, tempering the praise to a stilted non-committal appraisal. I find my self-criticism always embroidered with little smug rebuttals.
     Notes of several of the past few days:
     May 15- To Justice Motor Corp for re-check on car.
     To Show-boat, which, aside from camp by Robeson & Helen Morgan, was pretty tiresome. When I come out, vexed to find a cloudy sky which I had wanted in the cemetery picture. I felt I was wasting my time. Home, but nothing came of my desire to work on the picture anyway, and children disappointed because I had not bought their bicycle.
     May 16- A.M. To Buffalo to get bicycle. Home & see Jim there. Children are wildly excited over the wheel, and so is Jim.
     May 18- P.M. East to work on cemetery. Too much daylight & occasional rain- decide to explore woods to northeast of cemetery. A delightful woods free of underbrush; I walk on and on, feeling at one with my creator; in a beatific state of mind.
     In a portion of the woods low down near the valley I come upon a cow, struggling to give birth to a calf, the calf  already