← catalogue

The Friendly Road: New Adventures in Contentment

by David Grayson · English · Gutenberg #2479 · 332,668 chars · public domain (US)

The Project Gutenberg eBook of The Friendly Road: New Adventures in Contentment
    
This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and
most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions
whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms
of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online
at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States,
you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located
before using this eBook.

Title: The Friendly Road: New Adventures in Contentment

Author: David Grayson


        
Release date: January 1, 2001 [eBook #2479]
                Most recently updated: March 14, 2018

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/2479

Credits: Produced by Aaron Cannon, and David Widger


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE FRIENDLY ROAD: NEW ADVENTURES IN CONTENTMENT ***




Produced by Aaron Cannon





THE FRIENDLY ROAD

New Adventures in Contentment

By David Grayson (Pseud. of Ray Stannard Baker)


      Author of
     “Adventure in Contentment,”
      “Adventures in Friendship”

Illustrated by Thomas Fogarty

Copyright, 1913, by DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & COMPANY


     “Surely it is good to be alive at a time like this.”




THE FRIENDLY ROAD




A WORD TO HIM WHO OPENS THIS BOOK

I did not plan when I began writing these chapters to make an entire
book, but only to put down the more or less unusual impressions, the
events and adventures, of certain quiet pilgrimages in country roads.
But when I had written down all of these things, I found I had material
in plenty.

“What shall I call it now that I have written it?” I asked myself.

At first I thought I should call it “Adventures on the Road,” or “The
Country Road,” or something equally simple, for I would not have the
title arouse any appetite which the book itself could not satisfy. One
pleasant evening I was sitting on my porch with my dog sleeping near me,
and Harriet not far away rocking and sewing, and as I looked out across
the quiet fields I could see in the distance a curving bit of the town
road. I could see the valley below it and the green hill beyond, and
my mind went out swiftly along the country road which I had so recently
travelled on foot, and I thought with deep satisfaction of all the
people I had met on my pilgrimages--the Country Minister with his
problems, the buoyant Stanleys, Bill Hahn the Socialist, the Vedders in
their garden, the Brush Peddler. I thought of the Wonderful City, and of
how for a time I had been caught up into its life. I thought of the
men I met at the livery stable, especially Healy, the wit, and of that
strange Girl of the Street. And it was good to think of them all living
around me, not so very far away, connected with me through darkness and
space by a certain mysterious human cord. Most of all I love that which
I cannot see beyond the hill.

“Harriet,” I said aloud, “it grows more wonderful every year how full
the world is of friendly people!”

So I got up quickly and came in here to my room, and taking a fresh
sheet of paper I wrote down the title of my new book:

“The Friendly Road.”

I invite you to travel with me upon this friendly road. You may find,
as I did, something which will cause you for a time, to forget yourself
into contentment. But if you chance to be a truly serious person, put
down my book. Let nothing stay your hurried steps, nor keep you from
your way.

As for those of us who remain, we will loiter as much as ever we please.
We'll take toll of these spring days, we'll stop wherever evening
overtakes us, we'll eat the food of hospitality--and make friends for
life!

DAVID GRAYSON.



CONTENTS

Preface

   I.    I Leave My Farm

   II.   I Whistle

   III.  The House by the Side of the Road

   IV.   I Am the Spectator of a Mighty Battle, in which Christian
         Meets Apollyon

   V.    I Play the Part of a Spectacle Peddler

   VI.   An Experiment in Human Nature

   VII.  The Undiscovered Country

   VIII. The Hedge

   IX.   The Man Possessed

   X.    I Am Caught Up Into Life

   XI.   I Come to Grapple with the City

   XII.  The Return




CHAPTER I. I LEAVE MY FARM

     “Is it so small a thing
     To have enjoyed the sun,
     To have lived light in spring?”

It is eight o'clock of a sunny spring morning. I have been on the road
for almost three hours. At five I left the town of Holt, before six I
had crossed the railroad at a place called Martin's Landing, and an hour
ago, at seven, I could see in the distance the spires of Nortontown. And
all the morning as I came tramping along the fine country roads with my
pack-strap resting warmly on my shoulder, and a song in my throat--just
nameless words to a nameless tune--and all the birds singing, and all
the brooks bright under their little bridges, I knew that I must soon
step aside and put down, if I could, some faint impression of the
feeling of this time and place. I cannot hope to convey any adequate
sense of it all--of the feeling of lightness, strength, clearness, I
have as I sit here under this maple tree--but I am going to write as
long as ever I am happy at it, and when I am no longer happy at it, why,
here at my very hand lies the pleasant country road, stretching away
toward newer hills and richer scenes.

Until to-day I have not really been quite clear in my own mind as to the
step I have taken. My sober friend, have you ever tried to do anything
that the world at large considers not quite sensible, not quite sane?
Try it! It is easier to commit a thundering crime. A friend of mine
delights in walking to town bareheaded, and I fully believe the
neighbourhood is more disquieted thereby than it would be if my friend
came home drunken or failed to pay his debts.

Here I am then, a farmer, forty miles from home in planting time, taking
his ease under a maple tree and writing in a little book held on his
knee! Is not that the height of absurdity? Of all my friends the Scotch
Preacher was the only one who seemed to understand why it was that I
must go away for a time. Oh, I am a sinful and revolutionary person!

When I left home last week, if you could have had a truthful picture of
me--for is there not a photography so delicate that it will catch the
dim thought-shapes which attend upon our lives?--if you could have had
such a truthful picture of me, you would have seen, besides a farmer
named Grayson with a gray bag hanging from his shoulder, a strange
company following close upon his steps. Among this crew you would have
made out easily:

Two fine cows. Four Berkshire pigs. One team of gray horses, the
old mare a little lame in her right foreleg. About fifty hens, four
cockerels, and a number of ducks and geese.

More than this--I shall offer no explanation in these writings of any
miracles that may appear--you would have seen an entirely respectable
old farmhouse bumping and hobbling along as best it might in the rear.
And in the doorway, Harriet Grayson, in her immaculate white apron, with
the veritable look in her eyes which she wears when I am not comporting
myself with quite the proper decorum.

Oh, they would not let me go! How they all followed clamoring after me.
My thoughts coursed backward faster than ever I could run away. If you
could have heard that motley crew of the barnyard as I did--the hens
all cackling, the ducks quacking, the pigs grunting, and the old mare
neighing and stamping, you would have thought it a miracle that I
escaped at all.

So often we think in a superior and lordly manner of our possessions,
when, as a matter of fact, we do not really possess them, they possess
us. For ten years I have been the humble servant, attending upon the
commonest daily needs of sundry hens, ducks, geese, pigs, bees, and of
a fussy and exacting old gray mare. And the habit of servitude, I find,
has worn deep scars upon me. I am almost like the life prisoner who
finds the door of his cell suddenly open, and fears to escape. Why, I
had almost become ALL farmer.

On the first morning after I left home I awoke as usual about five
o'clock with the irresistible feeling that I must do the milking. So
well disciplined had I become in my servitude that I instinctively
thrust my leg out of bed--but pulled it quickly back in again, turned
over, drew a long, luxurious breath, and said to myself:

“Avaunt cows! Get thee behind me, swine! Shoo, hens!”

Instantly the clatter of mastery to which I had responded so quickly
for so many years grew perceptibly fainter, the hens cackled less
domineeringly, the pigs squealed less insistently, and as for the
strutting cockerel, that lordly and despotic bird stopped fairly in the
middle of a crow, and his voice gurgled away in a spasm of astonishment.
As for the old farmhouse, it grew so dim I could scarcely see it at all!
Having thus published abroad my Declaration of Independence, nailed my
defiance to the door, and otherwise established myself as a free person,
I turned over in my bed and took another delicious nap.

Do you know, friend, we can be free of many things that dominate our
lives by merely crying out a rebellious “Avaunt!”

But in spite of this bold beginning, I assure you it required several
days to break the habit of cows and hens. The second morning I awakened
again at five o'clock, but my leg did not make for the side of the
bed; the third morning I was only partially awakened, and on the fourth
morning I slept like a millionaire (or at least I slept as a millionaire
is supposed to sleep!) until the clock struck seven.

For some days after I left home--and I walked out as casually that
morning as though I were going to the barn--I scarcely thought or
tried to think of anything but the Road. Such an unrestrained sense of
liberty, such an exaltation of freedom, I have not known since I was a
lad. When I came to my farm from the city many years ago it was as one
bound, as one who had lost out in the World's battle and was seeking
to get hold again somewhere upon the realities of life. I have related
elsewhere how I thus came creeping like one sore wounded from the field
of battle, and how, among our hills, in the hard, steady labour in the
soil of the fields, with new and simple friends around me, I found a
sort of rebirth or resurrection. I that was worn out, bankrupt both
physically and morally, learned to live again. I have achieved something
of high happiness in these years, something I know of pure contentment;
and I have learned two or three deep and simple things about life: I
have learned that happiness is not to be had for the seeking, but comes
quietly to him who pauses at his difficult task and looks upward. I have
learned that friendship is very simple, and, more than all else, I have
learned the lesson of being quiet, of looking out across the meadows and
hills, and of trusting a little in God.

And now, for the moment, I am regaining another of the joys of
youth--that of the sense of perfect freedom. I made no plans when I
left home, I scarcely chose the direction in which I was to travel,
but drifted out, as a boy might, into the great busy world. Oh, I have
dreamed of that! It seems almost as though, after ten years, I might
again really touch the highest joys of adventure!

So I took the Road as it came, as a man takes a woman, for better or
worse--I took the Road, and the farms along it, and the sleepy little
villages, and the streams from the hillsides--all with high enjoyment.
They were good coin in my purse! And when I had passed the narrow
horizon of my acquaintanceship, and reached country new to me, it seemed
as though every sense I had began to awaken. I must have grown dull,
unconsciously, in the last years there on my farm. I cannot describe the
eagerness of discovery I felt at climbing each new hill, nor the long
breath I took at the top of it as I surveyed new stretches of pleasant
countryside.

Assuredly this is one of the royal moments of all the year--fine, cool,
sparkling spring weather. I think I never saw the meadows richer and
greener--and the lilacs are still blooming, and the catbirds and orioles
are here. The oaks are not yet in full leaf, but the maples have nearly
reached their full mantle of verdure--they are very beautiful and
charming to see.

It is curious how at this moment of the year all the world seems astir.
I suppose there is no moment in any of the seasons when the whole army
of agriculture, regulars and reserves, is so fully drafted for service
in the fields. And all the doors and windows, both in the little
villages and on the farms, stand wide open to the sunshine, and all the
women and girls are busy in the yards and gardens. Such a fine, active,
gossipy, adventurous world as it is at this moment of the year!

It is the time, too, when all sorts of travelling people are afoot.
People who have been mewed up in the cities for the winter now take to
the open road--all the peddlers and agents and umbrella-menders, all the
nursery salesmen and fertilizer agents, all the tramps and scientists
and poets--all abroad in the wide sunny roads. They, too, know well this
hospitable moment of the spring; they, too, know that doors and hearts
are open and that even into dull lives creeps a bit of the spirit of
adventure. Why, a farmer will buy a corn planter, feed a tramp, or
listen to a poet twice as easily at this time of year as at any other!

For several days I found myself so fully occupied with the bustling life
of the Road that I scarcely spoke to a living soul, but strode straight
ahead. The spring has been late and cold: most of the corn and some of
the potatoes are not yet in, and the tobacco lands are still bare and
brown. Occasionally I stopped to watch some ploughman in the fields:
I saw with a curious, deep satisfaction how the moist furrows, freshly
turned, glistened in the warm sunshine. There seemed to be something
right and fit about it, as well as human and beautiful. Or at evening
I would stop to watch a ploughman driving homeward across his new brown
fields, raising a cloud of fine dust from the fast drying furrow
crests. The low sun shining through the dust and glorifying it, the
weary-stepping horses, the man all sombre-coloured like the earth
itself and knit into the scene as though a part of it, made a picture
exquisitely fine to see.

And what a joy I had also of the lilacs blooming in many a dooryard, the
odour often trailing after me for a long distance in the road, and of
the pungent scent at evening in the cool hollows of burning brush
heaps and the smell of barnyards as I went by--not unpleasant, not
offensive--and above all, the deep, earthy, moist odour of new-ploughed
fields.

And then, at evening, to hear the sound of voices from the dooryards as
I pass quite unseen; no words, but just pleasant, quiet intonations of
human voices, borne through the still air, or the low sounds of cattle
in the barnyards, quieting down for the night, and often, if near a
village, the distant, slumbrous sound of a church bell, or even the
rumble of a train--how good all these sounds are! They have all come
to me again this week with renewed freshness and impressiveness. I am
living deep again!

It was not, indeed, until last Wednesday that I began to get my fill,
temporarily, of the outward satisfaction of the Road--the primeval
takings of the senses--the mere joys of seeing, hearing, smelling,
touching. But on that day I began to wake up; I began to have a desire
to know something of all the strange and interesting people who are
working in their fields, or standing invitingly in their doorways, or so
busily afoot in the country roads. Let me add, also, for this is one of
the most important parts of my present experience, that this new desire
was far from being wholly esoteric. I had also begun to have cravings
which would not in the least be satisfied by landscapes or dulled by the
sights and sounds of the road. A whiff here and there from a doorway
at mealtime had made me long for my own home, for the sight of Harriet
calling from the steps:

“Dinner, David.”

But I had covenanted with myself long before starting that I would
literally “live light in spring.” It was the one and primary condition I
made with myself--and made with serious purpose--and when I came away I
had only enough money in my pocket and sandwiches in my pack to see me
through the first three or four days. Any man may brutally pay his way
anywhere, but it is quite another thing to be accepted by your humankind
not as a paid lodger but as a friend. Always, it seems to me, I have
wanted to submit myself, and indeed submit the stranger, to that test.
Moreover, how can any man look for true adventure in life if he always
knows to a certainty where his next meal is coming from? In a world so
completely dominated by goods, by things, by possessions, and smothered
by security, what fine adventure is left to a man of spirit save the
adventure of poverty?

I do not mean by this the adventure of involuntary poverty, for I
maintain that involuntary poverty, like involuntary riches, is a credit
to no man. It is only as we dominate life that we really live. What I
mean here, if I may so express it, is an adventure in achieved poverty.
In the lives of such true men as Francis of Assisi and Tolstoi, that
which draws the world to them in secret sympathy is not that they lived
lives of poverty, but rather, having riches at their hands, or for the
very asking, that they chose poverty as the better way of life.

As for me, I do not in the least pretend to have accepted the final
logic of an achieved poverty. I have merely abolished temporarily from
my life a few hens and cows, a comfortable old farmhouse, and--certain
other emoluments and hereditaments--but remain the slave of sundry cloth
upon my back and sundry articles in my gray bag--including a fat pocket
volume or so, and a tin whistle. Let them pass now. To-morrow I may wish
to attempt life with still less. I might survive without my battered
copy of “Montaigne” or even submit to existence without that sense
of distant companionship symbolized by a postage-stamp, and as for
trousers--

In this deceptive world, how difficult of attainment is perfection!

No, I expect I shall continue for a long time to owe the worm his silk,
the beast his hide, the sheep his wool, and the cat his perfume! What
I am seeking is something as simple and as quiet as the trees or the
hills--just to look out around me at the pleasant countryside, to enjoy
a little of this show, to meet (and to help a little if I may) a few
human beings, and thus to get nearly into the sweet kernel of human
life. My friend, you may or may not think this a worthy object; if
you do not, stop here, go no further with me; but if you do, why, we'll
exchange great words on the road; we'll look up at the sky together,
we'll see and hear the finest things in this world! We'll enjoy the sun!
We'll live light in spring!

Until last Tuesday, then, I was carried easily and comfortably onward
by the corn, the eggs, and the honey of my past labours, and before
Wednesday noon I began to experience in certain vital centres
recognizable symptoms of a variety of discomfort anciently familiar to
man. And it was all the sharper because I did not know how or where I
could assuage it. In all my life, in spite of various ups and downs in
a fat world, I don't think I was ever before genuinely hungry. Oh, I've
been hungry in a reasonable, civilized way, but I have always known
where in an hour or so I could get all I wanted to eat--a condition
accountable, in this world, I am convinced, for no end of stupidity. But
to be both physically and, let us say, psychologically hungry, and not
to know where or how to get anything to eat, adds something to the zest
of life.

By noon on Wednesday, then, I was reduced quite to a point of necessity.
But where was I to begin, and how? I know from long experience the
suspicion with which the ordinary farmer meets the Man of the Road--the
man who appears to wish to enjoy the fruits of the earth without working
for them with his hands. It is a distrust deep-seated and ages old. Nor
can the Man of the Road ever quite understand the Man of the Fields. And
here was I, for so long the stationary Man of the Fields, essaying
the role of the Man of the Road. I experienced a sudden sense of the
enlivenment of the faculties: I must now depend upon wit or cunning or
human nature to win my way, not upon mere skill of the hand or strength
in the bent back. Whereas in my former life, when I was assailed by a
Man of the Road, whether tramp or peddler or poet, I had only to stand
stock-still within my fences and say nothing--though indeed I never
could do that, being far too much interested in every one who came my
way--and the invader was soon repelled. There is nothing so resistant as
the dull security of possession the stolidity of ownership!

Many times that day I stopped by a field side or at the end of a lane,
or at a house-gate, and considered the possibilities of making an
attack. Oh, I measured the houses and barns I saw with a new eye! The
kind of country I had known so long and familiarly became a new and
foreign land, full of strange possibilities. I spied out the men in the
fields and did not fail, also, to see what I could of the commissary
department of each farmstead as I passed. I walked for miles looking
thus for a favourable opening--and with a sensation of embarrassment at
once disagreeable and pleasurable. As the afternoon began to deepen I
saw that I must absolutely do something: a whole day tramping in the
open air without a bite to eat is an irresistible argument.

Presently I saw from the road a farmer and his son planting potatoes in
a sloping field. There was no house at all in view. At the bars stood a
light wagon half filled with bags of seed potatoes, and the horse which
had drawn it stood quietly, not far off, tied to the fence. The man and
the boy, each with a basket on his arm, were at the farther end of the
field, dropping potatoes. I stood quietly watching them. They stepped
quickly and kept their eyes on the furrows: good workers. I liked the
looks of them. I liked also the straight, clean furrows; I liked the
appearance of the horse.

“I will stop here,” I said to myself.

I cannot at all convey the sense of high adventure I had as I stood
there. Though I had not the slightest idea of what I should do or say,
yet I was determined upon the attack.

Neither father nor son saw me until they had nearly reached the end of
the field.

“Step lively, Ben,” I heard the man say with some impatience; “we've got
to finish this field to-day.”

“I AM steppin' lively, dad,” responded the boy, “but it's awful hot. We
can't possibly finish to-day. It's too much.”

“We've got to get through here to-day,” the man replied grimly; “we're
already two weeks late.”

I know just how the man felt; for I knew well the difficulty a farmer
has in getting help in planting time. The spring waits for no man. My
heart went out to the man and boy struggling there in the heat of their
field. For this is the real warfare of the common life.

“Why,” I said to myself with a curious lift of the heart, “they have
need of a fellow just like me.”

At that moment the boy saw me and, missing a step in the rhythm of the
planting, the father also looked up and saw me. But neither said a word
until the furrows were finished, and the planters came to refill their
baskets.

“Fine afternoon,” I said, sparring for an opening.

“Fine,” responded the man rather shortly, glancing up from his work. I
recalled the scores of times I had been exactly in his place, and had
glanced up to see the stranger in the road.

“Got another basket handy?” I asked.

“There is one somewhere around here,” he answered not too cordially. The
boy said nothing at all, but eyed me with absorbing interest. The gloomy
look had already gone from his face.

I slipped my gray bag from my shoulder, took off my coat, and put them
both down inside the fence. Then I found the basket and began to fill it
from one of the bags. Both man and boy looked up at me questioningly. I
enjoyed the situation immensely.

“I heard you say to your son,” I said, “that you'd have to hurry in
order to get in your potatoes to-day. I can see that for myself. Let me
take a hand for a row or two.”

The unmistakable shrewd look of the bargainer came suddenly into the
man's face, but when I went about my business without hesitation or
questioning, he said nothing at all. As for the boy, the change in his
countenance was marvellous to see. Something new and astonishing had
come into the world. Oh, I know what a thing it is to be a boy and to
work in trouting time!

“How near are you planting, Ben?” I asked.

“About fourteen inches.”

So we began in fine spirits. I was delighted with the favourable
beginning of my enterprise; there is nothing which so draws men together
as their employment at a common task.

Ben was a lad some fifteen years old-very stout and stocky, with a fine
open countenance and a frank blue eye--all boy. His nose was as freckled
as the belly of a trout. The whole situation, including the prospect of
help in finishing a tiresome job, pleased him hugely. He stole a glimpse
from time to time at me then at his father. Finally he said:

“Say, you'll have to step lively to keep up with dad.”

“I'll show you,” I said, “how we used to drop potatoes when I was a
boy.”

And with that I began to step ahead more quickly and make the pieces
fairly fly.

“We old fellows,” I said to the father, “must give these young sprouts a
lesson once in a while.”

“You will, will you?” responded the boy, and instantly began to drop the
potatoes at a prodigious speed. The father followed with more dignity,
but with evident amusement, and so we all came with a rush to the end of
the row.

“I guess that beats the record across THIS field!” remarked the lad,
puffing and wiping his forehead. “Say, but you're a good one!”

It gave me a peculiar thrill of pleasure; there is nothing more pleasing
than the frank admiration of a boy.

We paused a moment and I said to the man: “This looks like fine potato
land.”

“The' ain't any better in these parts,” he replied with some pride in
his voice.

And so we went at the planting again: and as we planted we had great
talk of seed potatoes and the advantages and disadvantages of mechanical
planters, of cultivating and spraying, and all the lore of prices and
profits. Once we stopped at the lower end of the field to get a drink
from a jug of water set in the shade of a fence corner, and once we set
the horse in the thills and moved the seed farther up the field. And
tired and hungry as I felt I really enjoyed the work; I really enjoyed
talking with this busy father and son, and I wondered what their home
life was like and what were their real ambitions and hopes. Thus the sun
sank lower and lower, the long shadows began to creep into the valleys,
and we came finally toward the end of the field. Suddenly the boy Ben
cried out:

“There's Sis!”

I glanced up and saw standing near the gateway a slim, bright girl of
about twelve in a fresh gingham dress.

“We're coming!” roared Ben, exultantly.

While we were hitching up the horse, the man said to me:

“You'll come down with us and have some supper.”

“Indeed I will,” I replied, trying not to make my response too eager.

“Did mother make gingerbread to-day?” I heard the boy whisper audibly.

“Sh-h--” replied the girl, “who is that man?”

“_I_ don't know” with a great accent of mystery--“and dad don't know.
Did mother make gingerbread?”

“Sh-h--he'll hear you.”

“Gee! but he can plant potatoes. He dropped down on us out of a clear
sky.”

“What is he?” she asked. “A tramp?”

“Nope, not a tramp. He works. But, Sis, did mother make gingerbread?”

So we all got into the light wagon and drove briskly out along the shady
country road. The evening was coming on, and the air was full of the
scent of blossoms. We turned finally into a lane and thus came promptly,
for the horse was as eager as we, to the capacious farmyard. A motherly
woman came out from the house, spoke to her son, and nodded pleasantly
to me. There was no especial introduction. I said merely, “My name is
Grayson,” and I was accepted without a word.

I waited to help the man, whose name I had now learned--it was
Stanley--with his horse and wagon, and then we came up to the house.
Near the back door there was a pump, with a bench and basin set just
within a little cleanly swept, open shed. Rolling back my collar and
baring my arms I washed myself in the cool water, dashing it over my
head until I gasped, and then stepping back, breathless and refreshed,
I found the slim girl, Mary, at my elbow with a clean soft towel. As
I stood wiping quietly I could smell the ambrosial odours from the
kitchen. In all my life I never enjoyed a moment more than that, I
think.

“Come in now,” said the motherly Mrs. Stanley.

So we filed into the roomy kitchen, where an older girl, called Kate,
was flying about placing steaming dishes upon the table. There was also
an older son, who had been at the farm chores. It was altogether a fine,
vigorous, independent American family. So we all sat down and drew up
our chairs. Then we paused a moment, and the father, bowing his head,
said in a low voice:

“For all Thy good gifts, Lord, we thank Thee. Preserve us and keep us
through another night.”

I suppose it was a very ordinary farm meal, but it seems to me I never
tasted a better one. The huge piles of new baked bread, the sweet farm
butter, already delicious with the flavour of new grass, the bacon and
eggs, the potatoes, the rhubarb sauce, the great plates of new, hot
gingerbread and, at the last, the custard pie--a great wedge of it, with
fresh cheese. After the first ravenous appetite of hardworking men was
satisfied, there came to be a good deal of lively conversation. The
girls had some joke between them which Ben was trying in vain to fathom.
The older son told how much milk a certain Alderney cow had given,
and Mr. Stanley, quite changed now as he sat at his own table from the
rather grim farmer of the afternoon, revealed a capacity for a husky
sort of fun, joking Ben about his potato-planting and telling in a
lively way of his race with me. As for Mrs. Stanley, she sat smiling
behind her tall coffee pot, radiating good cheer and hospitality. They
asked me no questions at all, and I was so hungry and tired that I
volunteered no information.

After supper we went out for half or three quarters of an hour to do
some final chores, and Mr. Stanley and I stopped in the cattle yard and
looked over the cows, and talked learnedly about the pigs, and I admired
his spring calves to his hearts content, for they really were a
fine lot. When we came in again the lamps had been lighted in the
sitting-room and the older daughter was at the telephone exchanging
the news of the day with some neighbour--and with great laughter and
enjoyment. Occasionally she would turn and repeat some bit of gossip to
the family, and Mrs. Stanley would claim:

“Do tell!”

“Can't we have a bit of music to-night?” inquired Mr. Stanley.

Instantly Ben and the slim girl, Mary, made a wild dive for the front
room--the parlour--and came out with a first-rate phonograph which they
placed on the table.

“Something lively now,” said Mr. Stanley.

So they put on a rollicking negro song called. “My Georgia Belle,”
 which, besides the tuneful voices, introduced a steamboat whistle and
a musical clangour of bells. When it wound up with a bang, Mr. Stanley
took his big comfortable pipe out of his mouth and cried out:

“Fine, fine!”

We had further music of the same sort and with one record the older
daughter, Kate, broke into the song with a full, strong though
uncultivated voice--which pleased us all very much indeed.

Presently Mrs. Stanley, who was sitting under the lamp with a basket of
socks to mend, began to nod.

“Mother's giving the signal,” said the older son.

“No, no, I'm not a bit sleepy,” exclaimed Mrs. Stanley.

But with further joking and laughing the family began to move about. The
older daughter gave me a hand lamp and showed me the way upstairs to a
little room at the end of the house.

“I think,” she said with pleasant dignity, “you will find everything you
need.”

I cannot tell with what solid pleasure I rolled into bed or how soundly
and sweetly I slept.

This was the first day of my real adventures.



CHAPTER II. I WHISTLE

When I was a boy I learned after many discouragements to play on a tin
whistle. There was a wandering old fellow in our town who would sit for
hours on the shady side of a certain ancient hotel-barn, and with his
little whistle to his lips, and gently swaying his head to his tune and
tapping one foot in the gravel, he would produce the most wonderful
and beguiling melodies. His favourite selections were very lively; he
played, I remember, “Old Dan Tucker,” and “Money Musk,” and the tune of
a rollicking old song, now no doubt long forgotten, called “Wait for
the Wagon.” I can see him yet, with his jolly eyes half closed, his
lips puckered around the whistle, and his fingers curiously and stiffly
poised over the stops. I am sure I shall never forget the thrill which
his music gave to the heart of a certain barefoot boy.

At length, by means I have long since forgotten, I secured a tin whistle
exactly like Old Tom Madison's and began diligently to practise such
tunes as I knew. I am quite sure now that I must have made a nuisance
of myself, for it soon appeared to be the set purpose of every member
of the family to break up my efforts. Whenever my father saw me with the
whistle to my lips, he would instantly set me at some useful work (oh,
he was an adept in discovering useful work to do--for a boy!). And at
the very sight of my stern aunt I would instantly secrete my whistle
in my blouse and fly for the garret or cellar, like a cat caught in the
cream. Such are the early tribulations of musical genius!

At last I discovered a remote spot on a beam in the hay-barn where,
lighted by a ray of sunlight which came through a crack in the eaves
and pointed a dusty golden finger into that hay-scented interior, I
practised rapturously and to my heart's content upon my tin whistle.
I learned “Money Musk” until I could play it in Old Tom Madison's best
style--even to the last nod and final foot-tap. I turned a certain
church hymn called “Yield Not to Temptation” into something quite
inspiriting, and I played “Marching Through Georgia” until all the
“happy hills of hay” were to the fervid eye of a boy's imagination full
of tramping soldiers. Oh, I shall never forget the joys of those hours
in the hay-barn, nor the music of that secret tin whistle! I can hear
yet the crooning of the pigeons in the eaves, and the slatey sound of
their wings as they flew across the open spaces in the great barn; I can
smell yet the odour of the hay.

But with years, and the city, and the shame of youth, I put aside and
almost forgot the art of whistling. When I was preparing for the present
pilgrimage, however, it came to me with a sudden thrill of pleasure that
nothing in the wide world now prevented me from getting a whistle and
seeing whether I had forgotten my early cunning. At the very first
good-sized town I came to I was delighted to find at a little candy and
toy shop just the sort of whistle I wanted, at the extravagant price of
ten cents. I bought it and put it in the bottom of my knapsack.

“Am I not old enough now,” I said to myself, “to be as youthful as I
choose?”

Isn't it the strangest thing in the world how long it takes us to learn
to accept the joys of simple pleasures?--and some of us never learn at
all. “Boo!” says the neighbourhood, and we are instantly frightened into
doing a thousand unnecessary and unpleasant things, or prevented from
doing a thousand beguiling things.

For the first few days I was on the road I thought often with pleasure
of the whistle lying there in my bag, but it was not until after I left
the Stanleys' that I felt exactly in the mood to try it.

The fact is, my adventures on the Stanley farm had left me in a very
cheerful frame of mind. They convinced me that some of the great things
I had expected of my pilgrimage were realizable possibilities. Why, I
had walked right into the heart of as fine a family as I have seen these
many days.

I remained with them the entire day following the potato-planting. We
were out at five o'clock in the morning, and after helping with
the chores, and eating a prodigious breakfast, we went again to the
potato-field, and part of the time I helped plant a few remaining rows,
and part of the time I drove a team attached to a wing-plow to cover the
planting of the previous day.

In the afternoon a slashing spring rain set in, and Mr. Stanley, who
was a forehanded worker, found a job for all of us in the barn. Ben,
the younger son, and I sharpened mower-blades and a scythe or so, Ben
turning the grindstone and I holding the blades and telling him stories
into the bargain. Mr. Stanley and his stout older son overhauled the
work-harness and tinkered the corn-planter. The doors at both ends
of the barn stood wide open, and through one of them, framed like a
picture, we could see the scudding floods descend upon the meadows, and
through the other, across a fine stretch of open country, we could see
all the roads glistening and the treetops moving under the rain.

“Fine, fine!” exclaimed Mr. Stanley, looking out from time to time, “we
got in our potatoes just in the nick of time.”

After supper that evening I told them of my plan to leave them on the
following morning.

“Don't do that,” said Mrs. Stanley heartily; “stay on with us.”

“Yes,” said Mr. Stanley, “we're shorthanded, and I'd be glad to have a
man like you all summer. There ain't any one around here will pay a good
man more'n I will, nor treat 'im better.”

“I'm sure of it, Mr. Stanley,” I said, “but I can't stay with you.”

At that the tide of curiosity which I had seen rising ever since I
came began to break through. Oh, I know how difficult it is to let the
wanderer get by without taking toll of him! There are not so many people
here in the country that we can afford to neglect them. And as I had
nothing in the world to conceal, and, indeed, loved nothing better than
the give and take of getting acquainted, we were soon at it in good
earnest.

But it was not enough to tell them that my name was David Grayson and
where my farm was located, and how many acres there were, and how much
stock I had, and what I raised. The great particular “Why?”--as I knew
it would be--concerned my strange presence on the road at this season of
the year and the reason why I should turn in by chance, as I had done,
to help at their planting. If a man is stationary, it seems quite
impossible for him to imagine why any one should care to wander; and
as for the wanderer it is inconceivable to him how any one can remain
permanently at home.

We were all sitting comfortably around the table in the living-room. The
lamps were lighted, and Mr. Stanley, in slippers, was smoking his pipe
and Mrs. Stanley was darning socks over a mending-gourd, and the two
young Stanleys were whispering and giggling about some matter of supreme
consequence to youth. The windows were open, and we could smell the
sweet scent of the lilacs from the yard and hear the drumming of the
rain as it fell on the roof of the porch.

“It's easy to explain,” I said. “The fact is, it got to the point on my
farm that I wasn't quite sure whether I owned it or it owned me. And I
made up my mind I'd get away for a while from my own horses and cattle
and see what the world was like. I wanted to see how people lived up
here, and what they are thinking about, and how they do their farming.”

As I talked of my plans and of the duty one had, as I saw it, to be a
good broad man as well as a good farmer, I grew more and more interested
and enthusiastic. Mr. Stanley took his pipe slowly from his mouth, held
it poised until it finally went out, and sat looking at me with a rapt
expression. I never had a better audience. Finally, Mr. Stanley said
very earnestly:

“And you have felt that way, too?”

“Why, father!” exclaimed Mrs. Stanley, in astonishment.

Mr. Stanley hastily put his pipe back into his mouth and confusedly
searched in his pockets for a match; but I knew I had struck down deep
into a common experience. Here was this brisk and prosperous farmer
having his dreams too--dreams that even his wife did not know!

So I continued my talk with even greater fervour. I don't think that the
boy Ben understood all that I said, for I was dealing with experiences
common mostly to older men, but he somehow seemed to get the spirit of
it, for quite unconsciously he began to hitch his chair toward me, then
he laid his hand on my chair-arm and finally and quite simply he rested
his arm against mine and looked at me with all his eyes. I keep learning
that there is nothing which reaches men's hearts like talking straight
out the convictions and emotions of your innermost soul. Those who hear
you may not agree with you, or they may not understand you fully, but
something incalculable, something vital, passes. And as for a boy or
girl it is one of the sorriest of mistakes to talk down to them; almost
always your lad of fifteen thinks more simply, more fundamentally, than
you do; and what he accepts as good coin is not facts or precepts, but
feelings and convictions--LIFE. And why shouldn't we speak out?

“I long ago decided,” I said, “to try to be fully what I am and not to
be anything or anybody else.”

“That's right, that's right,” exclaimed Mr. Stanley, nodding his head
vigorously.

“It's about the oldest wisdom there is,” I said, and with that I thought
of the volume I carried in my pocket, and straightway I pulled it out
and after a moment's search found the passage I wanted.

“Listen,” I said, “to what this old Roman philosopher said”--and I held
the book up to the lamp and read aloud:

“'You can be invincible if you enter into no contest in which it is
not in your power to conquer. Take care, then, when you observe a man
honoured before others or possessed of great power, or highly esteemed
for any reason, not to suppose him happy and be not carried away by the
appearance. For if the nature of the good is in our power, neither envy
nor jealousy will have a place in us. But you yourself will not wish to
be a general or a senator or consul, but a free man, and there is only
one way to do this, to care not for the things which are not in our
power.'”

“That,” said Mr. Stanley, “is exactly what I've always said, but I
didn't know it was in any book. I always said I didn't want to be a
senator or a legislator, or any other sort of office-holder. It's good
enough for me right here on this farm.”

At that moment I glanced down into Ben's shining eyes.

“But I want to be a senator or--something--when I grow up,” he said
eagerly.

At this the older brother, who was sitting not far off, broke into a
laugh, and the boy, who for a moment had been drawn out of his reserve,
shrank back again and coloured to the hair.

“Well, Ben,” said I, putting my hand on his knee, “don't you let
anything stop you. I'll back you up; I'll vote for you.”

After breakfast the next morning Mr. Stanley drew me aside and said:

“Now I want to pay you for your help yesterday and the day before.”

“No,” I said. “I've had more than value received. You've taken me in
like a friend and brother. I've enjoyed it.”

So Mrs. Stanley half filled my knapsack with the finest luncheon I've
seen in many a day, and thus, with as pleasant a farewell as if I'd
been a near relative, I set off up the country road. I was a little
distressed in parting to see nothing of the boy Ben, for I had formed a
genuine liking for him, but upon reaching a clump of trees which hid
the house from the road I saw him standing in the moist grass of a fence
corner.

“I want to say good-bye,” he said in the gruff voice of embarrassment.

“Ben,” I said, “I missed you, and I'd have hated to go off without
seeing you again. Walk a bit with me.”

So we walked side by side, talking quietly and when at last I shook his
hand I said:

“Ben, don't you ever be afraid of acting up to the very best thoughts
you have in your heart.”

He said nothing for a moment, and then: “Gee! I'm sorry you're goin'
away!”

“Gee!” I responded, “I'm sorry, too!”

With that we both laughed, but when I reached the top of the hill, and
looked back, I saw him still standing there bare-footed in the road
looking after me. I waved my hand and he waved his: and I saw him no
more.

No country, after all, produces any better crop than its inhabitants.
And as I travelled onward I liked to think of these brave, temperate,
industrious, God-friendly American people. I have no fear of the country
while so many of them are still to be found upon the farms and in the
towns of this land.

So I tramped onward full of cheerfulness. The rain had ceased, but all
the world was moist and very green and still. I walked for more than
two hours with the greatest pleasure. About ten o'clock in the morning I
stopped near a brook to drink and rest, for I was warm and tired. And it
was then that I bethought me of the little tin pipe in my knapsack, and
straightway I got it out, and, sitting down at the foot of a tree near
the brook, I put it to my lips and felt for the stops with unaccustomed
fingers. At first I made the saddest sort of work of it, and was not a
little disappointed, indeed, with the sound of the whistle itself. It
was nothing to my memory of it! It seemed thin and tinny.

However, I persevered at it, and soon produced a recognizable imitation
of Tom Madison's “Old Dan Tucker.” My success quite pleased me, and
I became so absorbed that I quite lost account of the time and place.
There was no one to hear me save a bluejay which for an hour or more
kept me company. He sat on a twig just across the brook, cocking his
head at me, and saucily wagging his tail. Occasionally he would dart off
among the trees crying shrilly; but his curiosity would always get the
better of him and back he would come again to try to solve the mystery
of this rival whistling, which I'm sure was as shrill and as harsh as
his own.

Presently, quite to my astonishment, I saw a man standing near the
brookside not a dozen paces away from me. How long he had been there
I don't know, for I had heard nothing of his coming. Beyond him in the
town road I could see the head of his horse and the top of his buggy. I
said not a word, but continued with my practising. Why shouldn't I? But
it gave me quite a thrill for the moment; and at once I began to think
of the possibilities of the situation. What a thing it was have so many
unexpected and interesting situations developing! So I nodded my head
and tapped my foot, and blew into my whistle all the more energetically.
I knew my visitor could not possibly keep away. And he could not;
presently he came nearer and said:

“What are you doing, neighbour?”

I continued a moment with my playing, but commanded him with my eye.

Oh, I assure you I assumed all the airs of a virtuoso. When I had
finished my tune I removed my whistle deliberately and wiped my lips.

“Why, enjoying myself,” I replied with greatest good humour. “What are
you doing?”

“Why,” he said, “watching you enjoy yourself. I heard you playing as I
passed in the road, and couldn't imagine what it could be.”

I told him I thought it might still be difficult, having heard me near
at hand, to imagine what it could be--and thus, tossing the ball of
good-humoured repartee back and forth, we walked down to the road
together. He had a quiet old horse and a curious top buggy with the
unmistakable box of an agent or peddler built on behind.

“My name,” he said, “is Canfield. I fight dust.”

“And mine,” I said, “is Grayson. I whistle.”

I discovered that he was an agent for brushes, and he opened his box
and showed me the greatest assortment of big and little brushes: bristle
brushes, broom brushes, yarn brushes, wire brushes, brushes for man and
brushes for beast, brushes of every conceivable size and shape that ever
I saw in all my life. He had out one of his especial pets--he called
it his “leader”--and feeling it familiarly in his hand he instinctively
began the jargon of well-handled and voice-worn phrases which went with
that particular brush. It was just as though some one had touched a
button and had started him going. It was amazing to me that any one
in the world should be so much interested in mere brushes--until he
actually began to make me feel that brushes were as interesting as
anything else!

What a strange, little, dried-up old fellow he was, with his balls
of muttonchop sidewhiskers, his thick eyebrows, and his lively blue
eyes!--a man evidently not readily turned aside by rebuffs. He had
already shown that his wit as a talker had been sharpened by long
and varied contact with a world of reluctant purchasers. I was really
curious to know more of him, so I said finally:

“See here, Mr. Canfield, it's just noon. Why not sit down here with me
and have a bit of luncheon?”

“Why not?” he responded with alacrity. “As the fellow said, why not?”

He unhitched his horse, gave him a drink from the brook, and then
tethered him where he could nip the roadside grass. I opened my bag and
explored the wonders of Mrs. Stanley's luncheon. I cannot describe the
absolutely carefree feeling I had. Always at home, when I would have
liked to stop at the roadside with a stranger, I felt the nudge of a
conscience troubled with cows and corn, but here I could stop where I
liked, or go on when I liked, and talk with whom I pleased, as long as I
pleased.

So we sat there, the brush-peddler and I, under the trees, and ate
Mrs. Stanley's fine luncheon, drank the clear water from the brook,
and talked great talk. Compared with Mr. Canfield I was a babe at
wandering--and equally at talking. Was there any business he had not
been in, or any place in the country he had not visited? He had sold
everything from fly-paper to threshing-machines, he had picked up a
large working knowledge of the weaknesses of human nature, and had
arrived at the age of sixty-six with just enough available cash to pay
the manufacturer for a new supply of brushes. In strict confidence, I
drew certain conclusions from the colour of his nose! He had once had
a family, but dropped them somewhere along the road. Most of our brisk
neighbours would have put him down as a failure--an old man, and nothing
laid by! But I wonder--I wonder. One thing I am coming to learn in this
world, and that is to let people haggle along with their lives as I
haggle along with mine.

We both made tremendous inroads on the luncheon, and I presume we might
have sat there talking all the afternoon if I had not suddenly bethought
myself with a not unpleasant thrill that my resting-place for the night
was still gloriously undecided.

“Friend,” I said, “I've got to be up and going. I haven't so much as a
penny in my pocket, and I've got to find a place to sleep.”

The effect of this remark upon Mr. Canfield was magical. He threw up
both his hands and cried out:

“You're that way, are you?”--as though for the first time he really
understood. We were at last on common ground.

“Partner,” said he, “you needn't tell nothin' about it. I've been right
there myself.”

At once he began to bustle about with great enthusiasm. He was for
taking complete charge of me, and I think, if I had permitted it, would
instantly have made a brush-agent of me. At least he would have carried
me along with him in his buggy; but when he suggested it I felt very
much, I think, as some old monk must have who had taken a vow to do
some particular thing in some particular way. With great difficulty I
convinced him finally that my way was different from his--though he was
regally impartial as to what road he took next--and, finally, with some
reluctance, he started to climb into his buggy.

A thought, however, struck him suddenly, and he stepped down again, ran
around to the box at the back of his buggy, opened it with a mysterious
and smiling look at me, and took out a small broom-brush with which he
instantly began brushing off my coat and trousers--in the liveliest and
most exuberant way. When he had finished this occupation, he quickly
handed the brush to me.

“A token of esteem,” he said, “from a fellow traveller.”

I tried in vain to thank him, but he held up his hand, scrambled quickly
into his buggy, and was for driving off instantly, but paused and
beckoned me toward him. When I approached the buggy, he took hold of one
the lapels of my coat, bent over, and said with the utmost seriousness:

“No man ought to take the road without a brush. A good broom-brush is
the world's greatest civilizer. Are you looking seedy or dusty?--why,
this here brush will instantly make you a respectable citizen. Take my
word for it, friend, never go into any strange house without stoppin'
and brushin' off. It's money in your purse! You can get along without
dinner sometimes, or even without a shirt, but without a brush--never!
There's nothin' in the world so necessary to rich AN' poor, old AN'
young as a good brush!”

And with a final burst of enthusiasm the brush-peddler drove off up the
hill. I stood watching him and when he turned around I waved the brush
high over my head in token of a grateful farewell.

It was a good, serviceable, friendly brush. I carried it throughout my
wanderings; and as I sit here writing in my study, at this moment, I can
see it hanging on a hook at the side of my fireplace.



CHAPTER III. THE HOUSE BY THE SIDE OF THE ROAD

“Everyone,” remarks Tristram Shandy, “will speak of the fair as his own
market has gone in it.”

It came near being a sorry fair for me on the afternoon following my
parting with the amiable brush-peddler. The plain fact is, my success
at the Stanleys', and the easy manner in which I had fallen in with Mr.
Canfield, gave me so much confidence in myself as a sort of Master of
the Road that I proceeded with altogether too much assurance.

I am firmly convinced that the prime quality to be cultivated by the
pilgrim is humility of spirit; he must be willing to accept Adventure in
whatever garb she chooses to present herself. He must be able to see the
shining form of the unusual through the dull garments of the normal.

The fact is, I walked that afternoon with my head in air and passed many
a pleasant farmstead where men were working in the fields, and many an
open doorway, and a mill or two, and a town--always looking for some
Great Adventure.

Somewhere upon this road, I thought to myself, I shall fall in with a
Great Person, or become a part of a Great Incident. I recalled with keen
pleasure the experience of that young Spanish student of Carlyle
writes in one of his volumes, who, riding out from Madrid one day, came
unexpectedly upon the greatest man in the world. This great man, of whom
Carlyle observes (I have looked up the passage since I came home), “a
kindlier, meeker, braver heart has seldom looked upon the sky in this
world,” had ridden out from the city for the last time in his life “to
take one other look at the azure firmament and green mosaic pavements
and the strange carpentry and arras work of this noble palace of a
world.”

As the old story has it, the young student “came pricking on hastily,
complaining that they went at such a pace as gave him little chance of
keeping up with them. One of the party made answer that the blame
lay with the horse of Don Miguel de Cervantes, whose trot was of the
speediest. He had hardly pronounced the name when the student dismounted
and, touching the hem of Cervantes' left sleeve, said, 'Yes, yes, it is
indeed the maimed perfection, the all-famous, the delightful writer, the
joy and darling of the Muses! You are that brave Miguel.'”

It may seem absurd to some in this cool and calculating twentieth
century that any one should indulge in such vain imaginings as I have
described--and yet, why not? All things are as we see them. I once heard
a man--a modern man, living to-day--tell with a hush in his voice, and
a peculiar light in his eye, how, walking in the outskirts of an
unromantic town in New Jersey, he came suddenly upon a vigorous,
bearded, rather rough-looking man swinging his stick as he walked, and
stopping often at the roadside and often looking up at the sky. I shall
never forget the curious thrill in his voice as he said:

“And THAT was Walt Whitman.”

And thus quite absurdly intoxicated by the possibilities of the road, I
let the big full afternoon slip by--I let slip the rich possibilities
of half a hundred farms and scores of travelling people--and as evening
began to fall I came to a stretch of wilder country with wooded hills
and a dashing stream by the roadside. It was a fine and beautiful
country--to look at--but the farms, and with them the chances of dinner,
and a friendly place to sleep, grew momentarily scarcer. Upon the hills
here and there, indeed, were to be seen the pretentious summer homes
of rich dwellers from the cities, but I looked upon them with no great
hopefulness.

“Of all places in the world,” I said to myself, “surely none could be
more unfriendly to a man like me.”

But I amused myself with conjectures as to what might happen (until the
adventure seemed almost worth trying) if a dusty man with a bag on
his back should appear at the door of one of those well-groomed
establishments. It came to me, indeed, with a sudden deep sense of
understanding, that I should probably find there, as everywhere else,
just men and women. And with that I fell into a sort of Socratic
dialogue with myself:

ME: Having decided that the people in these houses are, after all,
merely men and women, what is the best way of reaching them?

MYSELF: Undoubtedly by giving them something they want and have not.

ME: But these are rich people from the city; what can they want that
they have not?

MYSELF: Believe me, of all people in the world those who want the
most are those who have the most. These people are also consumed with
desires.

ME: And what, pray, do you suppose they desire?

MYSELF: They want what they have not got; they want the unattainable:
they want chiefly the rarest and most precious of all things--a little
mystery in their lives.

“That's it!” I said aloud; “that's it! Mystery--the things of the
spirit, the things above ordinary living--is not that the
essential thing for which the world is sighing, and groaning, and
longing--consciously, or unconsciously?”

I have always believed that men in their innermost souls desire the
highest, bravest, finest things they can hear, or see, or feel in all
the world. Tell a man how he can increase his income and he will be
grateful to you and soon forget you; but show him the highest, most
mysterious things in his own soul and give him the word which will
convince him that the finest things are really attainable, and he will
love and follow you always.

I now began to look with much excitement to a visit at one of the
houses on the hill, but to my disappointment I found the next two that
I approached still closed up, for the spring was not yet far enough
advanced to attract the owners to the country. I walked rapidly onward
through the gathering twilight, but with increasing uneasiness as to the
prospects for the night, and thus came suddenly upon the scene of an odd
adventure.

From some distance I had seen a veritable palace set high among the
trees and overlooking a wonderful green valley--and, drawing nearer,
I saw evidences of well-kept roadways and a visible effort to make
invisible the attempt to preserve the wild beauty of the place. I saw,
or thought I saw, people on the wide veranda, and I was sure I heard the
snort of a climbing motor-car, but I had scarcely decided to make my way
up to the house when I came, at the turning of the country road, upon
a bit of open land laid out neatly as a garden, near the edge of which,
nestling among the trees, stood a small cottage. It seemed somehow
to belong to the great estate above it, and I concluded, at the first
glance, that it was the home of some caretaker or gardener.

It was a charming place to see, and especially the plantation of trees
and shrubs. My eye fell instantly upon a fine magnolia--rare in this
country--which had not yet cast all its blossoms, and I paused for
a moment to look at it more closely. I myself have tried to raise
magnolias near my house, and I know how difficult it is.

As I approached nearer to the cottage, I could see a man and woman
sitting on the porch in the twilight and swaying back and forth in
rocking-chairs. I fancied--it may have been only a fancy--that when I
first saw them their hands were clasped as they rocked side by side.

It was indeed a charming little cottage. Crimson ramblers, giving
promise of the bloom that was yet to come, climbed over one end of the
porch, and there were fine dark-leaved lilac-bushes near the doorway:
oh, a pleasant, friendly, quiet place!

I opened the front gate and walked straight in, as though I had at last
reached my destination. I cannot give any idea of the lift of the heart
with which I entered upon this new adventure. Without the premeditation
and not knowing what I should say or do, I realized that everything
depended upon a few sentences spoken within the next minute or two.
Believe me, this experience to a man who does not know where his next
meal is coming from, nor where he is to spend the night, is well worth
having. It is a marvellous sharpener of the facts.

I knew, of course, just how these people of the cottage would ordinarily
regard an intruder whose bag and clothing must infallibly class him as a
follower of the road. And so many followers of the road are--well--

As I came nearer, the man and woman stopped rocking, but said nothing.
An old dog that had been sleeping on the top step rose slowly and stood
there.

“As I passed your garden,” I said, grasping desperately for a way of
approach, “I saw your beautiful specimen of the magnolia tree--the one
still in blossom. I myself have tried to grow magnolias--but with
small success--and I'm making bold to inquire what variety you are so
successful with.”

It was a shot in the air--but I knew from what I had seen that they must
be enthusiastic gardeners. The man glanced around at the magnolia with
evident pride, and was about to answer when the woman rose and with a
pleasant, quiet cordiality said:

“Won't you step up and have a chair?”

I swung my bag from my shoulder and took the proffered seat. As I did so
I saw, on the table just behind me a number magazines and books--books
of unusual sizes and shapes, indicating that they were not mere summer
novels.

“They like books!” I said to myself, with a sudden rise of spirits.

“I have tried magnolias, too,” said the man, “but this is the only one
that has been really successful. It is a Chinese white magnolia.”

“The one Downing describes?” I asked.

This was also a random shot, but I conjectured that if they loved both
books gardens they would know Downing--Bible of the gardener. And if
they did, we belonged to the same church.

“The very same,” exclaimed the woman; “it was Downing's enthusiasm for
the Chinese magnolia which led us first to try it.”

With that, like true disciples, we fell into great talk of Downing,
at first all in praise of him, and later--for may not the faithful be
permitted latitude in their comments so long as it is all within the
cloister?--we indulged in a bit of higher criticism.

“It won't do,” said the man, “to follow too slavishly every detail of
practice as recommended by Downing. We have learned a good many things
since the forties.”

“The fact is,” I said, “no literal-minded man should be trusted with
Downing.”

“Any more than with the Holy Scriptures,” exclaimed the woman.

“Exactly!” I responded with the greatest enthusiasm; “exactly! We go to
him for inspiration, for fundamental teachings, for the great literature
and poetry of the art. Do you remember,” I asked, “that passage in
which Downing quotes from some old Chinaman upon the true secret of the
pleasures of a garden--?”

“Do we?” exclaimed the man, jumping up instantly; “do we? Just let me
get the book--”

With that he went into the house and came back immediately bringing a
lamp in one hand--for it had grown pretty dark--and a familiar, portly,
blue-bound book in the other. While he was gone the woman said:

“You have touched Mr. Vedder in his weakest spot.”

“I know of no combination in this world,” said I, “so certain to produce
a happy heart as good books and a farm or garden.”

Mr. Vedder, having returned, slipped on his spectacles, sat forward on
the edge of his rocking-chair, and opened the book with pious hands.

“I'll find it,” he said. “I can put my finger right on it.”

“You'll find it,” said Mrs. Vedder, “in the chapter on 'Hedges.'”

“You are wrong, my dear,” he responded, “it is in 'Mistakes of Citizens
in Country Life.'”


He turned the leaves eagerly.

“No,” he said, “here it is in 'Rural Taste.' Let me read you the
passage, Mr.--”

“Grayson.”

“--Mr. Grayson. The Chinaman's name was Lieu-tscheu. 'What is it,' asks
this old Chinaman, 'that we seek in the pleasure of a garden? It has
always been agreed that these plantations should make men amends
for living at a distance from what would be their more congenial
and agreeable dwelling-place--in the midst of nature, free and
unrestrained.'”

“That's it,” I exclaimed, “and the old Chinaman was right! A garden
excuses civilization.”

“It's what brought us here,” said Mrs. Vedder.

With that we fell into the liveliest discussion of gardening and farming
and country life in all their phases, resolving that while there were
bugs and blights, and droughts and floods, yet upon the whole there was
no life so completely satisfying as life in which one may watch daily
the unfolding of natural life.

A hundred things we talked about freely that had often risen dimly in
my own mind almost to the point--but not quite--of spilling over into
articulate form. The marvellous thing about good conversation is that
it brings to birth so many half-realized thoughts of our own--besides
sowing the seed of innumerable other thought-plants. How they enjoyed
their garden, those two, and not only the garden itself, but all the
lore and poetry of gardening!

We had been talking thus an hour or more when, quite unexpectedly, I had
what was certainly one of the most amusing adventures of my whole life.
I can scarcely think of it now without a thrill of pleasure. I have had
pay for my work in many but never such a reward as this.

“By the way,” said Mr. Vedder, “I have recently come across a book which
is full of the spirit of the garden as we have long known it, although
the author is not treating directly of gardens, but of farming and of
human nature.”

“It is really all one subject,” I interrupted.

“Certainly,” said Mr. Vedder, “but many gardeners are nothing but
gardeners. Well, the book to which I refer is called 'Adventures in
Contentment,' and is by--Why, a man of your own name!”

With that Mr. Vedder reached for a book--a familiar-looking book--on the
table, but Mrs. Vedder looked at me. I give you my word, my heart turned
entirely over, and in a most remarkable way righted itself again; and I
saw Roman candles and Fourth of July rockets in front of my eyes. Never
in all my experience was I so completely bowled over. I felt like
a small boy who has been caught in the pantry with one hand in the
jam-pot--and plenty of jam on his nose. And like that small boy I
enjoyed the jam, but did not like being caught at it.

Mr. Vedder had no sooner got the book in his hand than I saw Mrs. Vedder
rising as though she had seen a spectre, and pointing dramatically at
me, she exclaimed:

“You are David Grayson!”

I can say truthfully now that I know how the prisoner at the bar must
feel when the judge, leaning over his desk, looks at him sternly and
says:

“I declare you guilty of the offence as charged, and sentence you--” and
so on, and so on.

Mr. Vedder stiffened up, and I can see him yet looking at me through his
glasses. I must have looked as foolishly guilty as any man ever looked,
for Mr. Vedder said promptly:

“Let me take you by the hand, sir. We know you, and have known you for a
long time.”

I shall not attempt to relate the conversation which followed, nor tell
of the keen joy I had in it--after the first cold plunge. We found that
we had a thousand common interests and enthusiasms. I had to tell them
of my farm, and why I had left it temporarily, and of the experiences on
the road. No sooner had I related what had befallen me at the Stanleys'
than Mrs. Vedder disappeared into the house and came out again presently
with a tray loaded with cold meat, bread, a pitcher of fine milk, and
other good things.

“I shall not offer any excuses,” said I, “I'm hungry,” and with that I
laid in, Mr. Vedder helping with the milk, and all three of us talking
as fast as ever we could.

It was nearly midnight when at last Mr. Vedder led the way to the
immaculate little bedroom where I spent the night.

The next morning I awoke early, and quietly dressing, slipped down
to the garden and walked about among the trees and the shrubs and the
flower-beds. The sun was just coming up over the hill, the air was
full of the fresh odours of morning, and the orioles and cat-birds were
singing.

In the back of the garden I found a charming rustic arbour with seats
around a little table. And here I sat down to listen to the morning
concert, and I saw, cut or carved upon the table, this verse, which so
pleased me that I copied it in my book:

     A garden is a lovesome thing, God wot!
     Rose plot,
     Fringed pool,
     Ferned grot--
     The veriest school of peace; and yet
     the fool
     Contends that God is not--
     Not God! in gardens? when the even
     is cool?
     Nay, but I have a sign,
     'Tis very sure God walks in mine.

I looked about after copying this verse, and said aloud:

“I like this garden: I like these Vedders.”

And with that I had a moment of wild enthusiasm.

“I will come,” I said, “and buy a little garden next them, and bring
Harriet, and we will live here always. What's a farm compared with a
friend?”

But with that I thought of the Scotch preacher, and of Horace, and Mr.
and Mrs. Starkweather, and I knew I could never leave the friends at
home.

“It's astonishing how many fine people there are in this world,” I said
aloud; “one can't escape them!”

“Good morning, David Grayson,” I heard some one saying, and glancing up
I saw Mrs. Vedder at the doorway. “Are you hungry?”

“I am always hungry,” I said.

Mr. Vedder came out and linking his arm in mine and pointing out various
spireas and Japanese barberries, of which he was very proud, we walked
into the house together.

I did not think of it especially at time--Harriet says I never see
anything really worth while, by which she means dishes, dresses,
doilies, and such like but as I remembered afterward the table that Mrs.
Vedder set was wonderfully dainty--dainty not merely with flowers (with
which it was loaded), but with the quality of the china and silver. It
was plainly the table of no ordinary gardener or caretaker--but this
conclusion did not come to me until afterward, for as I remember it, we
were in a deep discussion of fertilizers.

Mrs. Vedder cooked and served breakfast herself, and did it with a skill
almost equal to Harriet's--so skillfully that the talk went on and we
never once heard the machinery of service.

After breakfast we all went out into the garden, Mrs. Vedder in an
old straw hat and a big apron, and Mr. Vedder in a pair of old brown
overalls. Two men had appeared from somewhere, and were digging in the
vegetable garden. After giving them certain directions Mr. Vedder and
I both found five-tined forks and went into the rose garden and began
turning over the rich soil, while Mrs. Vedder, with pruning-shears, kept
near us, cutting out the dead wood.

It was one of the charming forenoons of my life. This pleasant work,
spiced with the most interesting conversation and interrupted by a
hundred little excursions into other parts of the garden, to see this
or that wonder of vegetation, brought us to dinner-time before we fairly
knew it.

About the middle of the afternoon I made the next discovery. I heard
first the choking cough of a big motor-car in the country road, and
a moment later it stopped at our gate. I thought I saw the Vedders
exchanging significant glances. A number of merry young people tumbled
out, and an especially pretty girl of about twenty came running through
the garden.

“Mother,” she exclaimed, “you MUST come with us!”

“I can't, I can't,” said Mrs. Vedder, “the roses MUST be pruned--and
see! The azaleas are coming into bloom.”

With that she presented me to her daughter.

And, then, shortly, for it could no longer be concealed, I learned that
Mr. and Mrs. Vedder were not the caretakers but the owners of the estate
and of the great house I had seen on the hill. That evening, with an air
almost of apology, they explained to me how it all came about.

“We first came out here,” said Mrs. Vedder, “nearly twenty years ago,
and built the big house on the hill. But the more we came to know
of country life the more we wanted to get down into it. We found it
impossible up there--so many unnecessary things to see to and care
for--and we couldn't--we didn't see--”

“The fact is,” Mr. Vedder put in, “we were losing touch with each
other.”

“There is nothing like a big house,” said Mrs. Vedder, “to separate a
man and his wife.”

“So we came down here,” said Mr. Vedder, “built this little cottage, and
developed this garden mostly with our own hands. We would have sold the
big house long ago if it hadn't been for our friends. They like it.”

“I have never heard a more truly romantic story,” said I.

And it WAS romantic: these fine people escaping from too many
possessions, too much property, to the peace and quietude of a garden
where they could be lovers again.

“It seems, sometimes,” said Mrs. Vedder, “that I never really believed
in God until we came down here--”

“I saw the verse on the table in the arbour,” said I.

“And it is true,” said Mr. Vedder. “We got a long, long way from God for
many years: here we seem to get back to Him.”

I had fully intended to take the road again that afternoon, but how
could any one leave such people as those? We talked again late that
night, but the next morning, at the leisurely Sunday breakfast, I set
my hour of departure with all the firmness I could command. I left
them, indeed, before ten o'clock that forenoon. I shall never forget
the parting. They walked with me to the top of the hill, and there we
stopped and looked back. We could see the cottage half hidden among the
trees, and the little opening that the precious garden made. For a time
we stood there quite silent.

“Do you remember,” I said presently, “that character in Homer who was
a friend of men and lived in a house by the side of the road? I shall
always think of you as friends of men--you took in a dusty traveller.
And I shall never forget your house by the side of the road.”

“The House by the Side of the Road--you have christened it anew, David
Grayson,” exclaimed Mrs. Vedder.

And so we parted like old friends, and I left them to return to their
garden, where “'tis very sure God walks.”



CHAPTER IV. I AM THE SPECTATOR OF A MIGHTY BATTLE, IN WHICH CHRISTIAN
MEETS APPOLLYON

It is one of the prime joys of the long road that no two days are ever
remotely alike--no two hours even; and sometimes a day that begins
calmly will end with the most stirring events.

It was thus, indeed, with that perfect spring Sunday, when I left my
friends, the Vedders, and turned my face again to the open country. It
began as quietly as any Sabbath morning of my life, but what an end it
had! I would have travelled a thousand miles for the adventures which a
bounteous road that day spilled carelessly into my willing hands.

I can give no adequate reason why it should be so, but there are Sunday
mornings in the spring--at least in our country--which seem to put on,
like a Sabbath garment, an atmosphere of divine quietude. Warm, soft,
clear, but, above all, immeasurably serene.

Such was that Sunday morning; and I was no sooner well afoot than I
yielded to the ingratiating mood of the day. Usually I am an active
walker, loving the sense of quick motion and the stir it imparts to both
body and mind, but that morning I found myself loitering, looking widely
about me, and enjoying the lesser and quieter aspects of nature. It was
a fine wooded country in which I found myself, and I soon struck off the
beaten road and took to the forest and the fields. In places the ground
was almost covered with meadow-rue, like green shadows on the hillsides,
not yet in seed, but richly umbrageous. In the long green grass of the
meadows shone the yellow star-flowers, and the sweet-flags were blooming
along the marshy edges of the ponds. The violets had disappeared, but
they were succeeded by wild geraniums and rank-growing vetches.

I remember that I kept thinking from time to time, all the forenoon, as
my mind went back swiftly and warmly to the two fine friends from whom I
had so recently parted:

How the Vedders would enjoy this! Or, I must tell the Vedders that. And
two or three times I found myself in animated conversations with them
in which I generously supplied all three parts. It may be true for some
natures, as Leonardo said, that “if you are alone you belong wholly to
yourself; if you have a companion, you belong only half to yourself”;
but it is certainly not so with me. With me friendship never divides: it
multiplies. A friend always makes me more than I am, better than I am,
bigger than I am. We two make four, or fifteen, or forty.

Well, I loitered through the fields and woods for a long time that
Sunday forenoon, not knowing in the least that Chance held me close
by the hand and was leading me onward to great events. I knew, of
course, that I had yet to find a place for the night, and that this might
be difficult on Sunday, and yet I spent that forenoon as a man spends
his immortal youth--with a glorious disregard for the future.


Some time after noon--for the sun was high and the day was growing much
warmer--I turned from the road, climbed an inviting little hill, and
chose a spot in an old meadow in the shade of an apple tree and there
I lay down on the grass, and looked up into the dusky shadows of the
branches above me. I could feel the soft airs on my face; I could hear
the buzzing of bees in the meadow flowers, and by turning my head just a
little I could see the slow fleecy clouds, high up, drifting across the
perfect blue of the sky. And the scent of the fields in spring!--he who
has known it, even once, may indeed die happy.

Men worship God in various ways: it seemed to me that Sabbath morning,
as I lay quietly there in the warm silence of midday, that I was truly
worshipping God. That Sunday morning everything about me seemed somehow
to be a miracle--a miracle gratefully accepted and explainable only by
the presence of God. There was another strange, deep feeling which I had
that morning, which I have had a few other times in my life at the rare
heights of experience--I hesitate always when I try to put down the
deep, deep things of the human heart--a feeling immeasurably real,
that if I should turn my head quickly I should indeed SEE that Immanent
Presence....

One of the few birds I know that sings through the long midday is the
vireo. The vireo sings when otherwise the woods are still. You do not
see him; you cannot find him; but you know he is there. And his singing
is wild, and shy, and mystical. Often it haunts you like the memory of
some former happiness. That day I heard the vireo singing....

I don't know how long I lay there under the tree in the meadow, but
presently I heard, from no great distance, the sound of a church-bell.
It was ringing for the afternoon service which among the farmers of this
part of the country often takes the place, in summer, of both morning
and evening services.

“I believe I'll go,” I said, thinking first of all, I confess, of the
interesting people I might meet there.

But when I sat up and looked about me the desire faded, and rummaging
in my bag I came across my tin whistle. Immediately I began practising
a tune called “Sweet Afton,” which I had learned when a boy; and, as
I played, my mood changed swiftly, and I began to smile at myself as
a tragically serious person, and to think of pat phrases with which to
characterize the execrableness of my attempts upon the tin whistle. I
should have liked some one near to joke with.

Long ago I made a motto about boys: Look for a boy anywhere. Never be
surprised when you shake a cherry tree if a boy drops out of it;
never be disturbed when you think yourself in complete solitude if you
discover a boy peering out at you from a fence corner.

I had not been playing long before I saw two boys looking at me from out
of a thicket by the roadside; and a moment later two others appeared.

Instantly I switched into “Marching Through Georgia,” and began to
nod my head and tap my toe in the liveliest fashion. Presently one boy
climbed up on the fence, then another, then a third. I continued to
play. The fourth boy, a little chap, ventured to climb up on the fence.

They were bright-faced, tow-headed lads, all in Sunday clothes.

“It's hard luck,” said I, taking my whistle from my lips, “to have to
wear shoes and stockings on a warm Sunday like this.”

“You bet it is!” said the bold leader.

“In that case,” said I, “I will play 'Yankee Doodle.'”

I played. All the boys, including the little chap, came up around me,
and two of them sat down quite familiarly on the grass. I never had a
more devoted audience. I don't know what interesting event might have
happened next, for the bold leader, who stood nearest, was becoming
dangerously inflated with questions--I don't know what might have
happened had we not been interrupted by the appearance of a Spectre in
Black. It appeared before us there in the broad daylight in the middle
of a sunny afternoon while we were playing “Yankee Doodle.” First I
saw the top of a black hat rising over the rim of the hill. This was
followed quickly by a black tie, a long black coat, black trousers, and,
finally, black shoes. I admit I was shaken, but being a person of iron
nerve in facing such phenomena, I continued to play “Yankee Doodle.”
 In spite of this counter-attraction, toward which all four boys turned
uneasy glances, I held my audience. The Black Spectre, with a black book
under its arm, drew nearer. Still I continued to play and nod my head
and tap my toe. I felt like some modern Pied Piper piping away the
children of these modern hills--piping them away from older people who
could not understand them.

I could see an accusing look on the Spectre's face. I don't know what
put it into my head, and I had no sooner said it than I was sorry for my
levity, but the figure with the sad garments there in the matchless and
triumphant spring day affected me with a curious, sharp impatience. Had
any one the right to look out so dolefully upon such a day and such a
scene of simple happiness as this? So I took my whistle from my lips and
asked:

“Is God dead?”

I shall never forget the indescribable look of horror and astonishment
that swept over the young man's face.

“What do you mean, sir?” he asked with an air of stern authority which
surprised me. His calling for the moment lifted him above himself: it
was the Church which spoke.

I was on my feet in an instant, regretting the pain I had given him;
and yet it seemed worth while now, having made my inadvertent remark, to
show him frankly what lay in my mind. Such things sometimes help men.

“I meant no offence, sir,” I said, “and I apologize for my flummery, but
when I saw you coming up the hill, looking so gloomy and disconsolate on
this bright day, as though you disapproved of God's world, the question
slipped out before I knew it.”

My words evidently struck deep down into some disturbed inner
consciousness, for he asked--and his words seemed to slip out before he
thought:

“Is THAT the way I impressed you?”

I found my heart going out strongly toward him. “Here,” I thought to
myself, “is a man in trouble.”

I took a good long look at him. He still a young man, though
worn-looking--and sad as I now saw it, rather than gloomy--with the
sensitive lips and the unworldly look one sees sometimes in the faces of
saints. His black coat was immaculately neat, but the worn button-covers
and the shiny lapels told their own eloquent story. Oh, it seemed to me
I knew him as well as if every incident of his life were written
plainly upon his high, pale forehead! I have lived long in a country
neighbourhood, and I knew him--poor flagellant of the rural church--I
knew how he groaned under the sins of a Community too comfortably
willing to cast all its burdens on the Lord, or on the Lord's accredited
local representative. I inferred also the usual large family and the low
salary (scandalously unpaid) and the frequent moves from place to place.

Unconsciously heaving a sigh the young man turned partly aside and said
to me in a low, gentle voice:

“You are detaining my boys from church.”

“I am very sorry,” I said, “and I will detain them no longer,” and with
that I put aside my whistle, took up my bag and moved down the hill with
them.

“The fact is,” I said, “when I heard your bell I thought of going to
church myself.”

“Did you?” he asked eagerly. “Did you?”

I could see that my proposal of going to church had instantly affected
his spirits. Then he hesitated abruptly with a sidelong glance at my bag
and rusty clothing. I could see exactly what was passing in his mind.

“No,” I said, smiling, as though answering a spoken question, “I am not
exactly what you would call a tramp.”

He flushed.

“I didn't mean--I WANT you to come. That's what a church is for. If I
thought--”

But he did not tell me what he thought; and, though he walked quietly
at my side, he was evidently deeply disturbed. Something of his
discouragement I sensed even then, and I don't think I was ever sorrier
for a man in my life than I was for him at that moment. Talk about the
suffering sinners! I wonder if they are to be compared with the trials
of the saints?

So we approached the little white church, and caused, I am certain,
a tremendous sensation. Nowhere does the unpredictable, the unusual,
excite such confusion as in that settled institution--the church.

I left my bag in the vestibule, where I have no doubt it was the object
of much inquiring and suspicious scrutiny, and took my place in a
convenient pew. It was a small church with an odd air of domesticity,
and the proportion of old ladies and children in the audience was
pathetically large. As a ruddy, vigorous, out-of-door person, with the
dust of life upon him, I felt distinctly out of place.

I could pick out easily the Deacon, the Old Lady Who Brought Flowers,
the President of the Sewing Circle, and, above all, the Chief Pharisee,
sitting in his high place. The Chief Pharisee--his name I learned was
Nash, Mr. J. H. Nash (I did not know then that I was soon to make his
acquaintance)--the Chief Pharisee looked as hard as nails, a middle-aged
man with stiff chin-whiskers, small round, sharp eyes, and a pugnacious
jaw.

“That man,” said I to myself, “runs this church,” and instantly I found
myself looking upon him as a sort of personification of the troubles I
had seen in the minister's eyes.

I shall not attempt to describe the service in detail. There was a
discouraging droop and quaver in the singing, and the mournful-looking
deacon who passed the collection-plate seemed inured to disappointment.
The prayer had in it a note of despairing appeal which fell like a cold
hand upon one's living soul. It gave one the impression that this
was indeed a miserable, dark, despairing world, which deserved to be
wrathfully destroyed, and that this miserable world was full of equally
miserable, broken, sinful, sickly people.

The sermon was a little better, for somewhere hidden within him this
pale young man had a spark of the divine fire, but it was so dampened by
the atmosphere of the church that it never rose above a pale luminosity.

I found the service indescribably depressing. I had an impulse to rise
up and cry out--almost anything to shock these people into opening their
eyes upon real life. Indeed, though I hesitate about setting it down
here, I was filled for some time with the liveliest imaginings of the
following serio-comic enterprise:

I would step up the aisle, take my place in front of the Chief Pharisee,
wag my finger under his nose, and tell him a thing or two about the
condition of the church.

“The only live thing here,” I would tell him, “is the spark in that pale
minister's soul; and you're doing your best to smother that.”

And I fully made up my mind that when he answered back in his
chief-pharisaical way I would gently--but firmly remove him from his
seat, shake him vigorously two or three times (men's souls have often
been saved with less!), deposit him flat in the aisle, and yes--stand on
him while I elucidated the situation to the audience at large. While
I confined this amusing and interesting project to the humours of the
imagination I am still convinced that something of the sort would have
helped enormously in clearing up the religious and moral atmosphere of
the place.

I had a wonderful sensation of relief when at last I stepped out again
into the clear afternoon sunshine and got a reviving glimpse of the
smiling green hills and the quiet fields and the sincere trees--and felt
the welcome of the friendly road.

I would have made straight for the hills, but the thought of that pale
minister held me back; and I waited quietly there under the trees till
he came out. He was plainly looking for me, and asked me to wait and
walk along with him, at which his four boys, whose acquaintance I had
made under such thrilling circumstances earlier in the day, seemed
highly delighted, and waited with me under the tree and told me a
hundred important things about a certain calf, a pig, a kite, and other
things at home.

Arriving at the minister's gate, I was invited in with a
whole-heartedness that was altogether charming. The minister's wife,
a faded-looking woman who had once possessed a delicate sort of
prettiness, was waiting for us on the steps with a fine chubby baby on
her arm--number five.

The home was much the sort of place I had imagined--a small house
undesirably located (but cheap!), with a few straggling acres of
garden and meadow upon which the minister and his boys were trying with
inexperienced hands to piece out their inadequate living. At the very
first glimpse of the garden I wanted to throw off my coat and go at it.

And yet--and yet----what a wonderful thing love is! There was, after
all, something incalculable, something pervasively beautiful about this
poor household. The moment the minister stepped inside his own door he
became a different and livelier person. Something boyish crept into his
manner, and a new look came into the eyes of his faded wife that made
her almost pretty again. And the fat, comfortable baby rolled and
gurgled about on the floor as happily as though there had been two
nurses and a governess to look after him. As for the four boys, I have
never seen healthier or happier ones.

I sat with them at their Sunday-evening luncheon. As the minister bowed
his head to say grace I felt him clasp my hand on one side while the
oldest boy clasped my hand on the other, and thus, linked together, and
accepting the stranger utterly, the family looked up to God.

There was a fine, modest gayety about the meal. In front of Mrs.
Minister stood a very large yellow bowl filled with what she called
rusk--a preparation unfamiliar to me, made by browning and crushing the
crusts of bread and then rolling them down into a coarse meal. A bowl of
this, with sweet, rich, yellow milk (for they kept their own cow), made
one of the most appetizing dishes that ever I ate. It was downright
good: it gave one the unalloyed aroma of the sweet new milk and the
satisfying taste of the crisp bread.

Nor have I ever enjoyed a more perfect hospitality. I have been in
many a richer home where there was not a hundredth part of the true
gentility--the gentility of unapologizing simplicity and kindness.

And after it was over and cleared away--the minister himself donning a
long apron and helping his wife--and the chubby baby put to bed, we all
sat around the table in the gathering twilight.

I think men perish sometimes from sheer untalked talk. For lack of
a creative listener they gradually fill up with unexpressed emotion.
Presently this emotion begins to ferment, and finally--bang!--they blow
up, burst, disappear in thin air. In all that community I suppose there
was no one but the little faded wife to whom the minister dared open his
heart, and I think he found me a godsend. All I really did was to look
from one to the other and put in here and there an inciting comment or
ask an understanding question. After he had told me his situation and
the difficulties which confronted him and his small church, he exclaimed
suddenly:

“A minister should by rights be a leader, not only inside of his church,
but outside it in the community.”

“You are right,” I exclaimed with great earnestness; “you are right.”

And with that I told him of our own Scotch preacher and how he led and
moulded our community; and as I talked I could see him actually growing,
unfolding, under my eyes.

“Why,” said I, “you not only ought to be the moral leader of this
community, but you are!”

“That's what I tell him,” exclaimed his wife.

“But he persists in thinking, doesn't he, that he is a poor sinner?”

“He thinks it too much,” she laughed.

“Yes, yes,” he said, as much to himself as to us, “a minister ought to
be a fighter!”

It was beautiful, the boyish flush which now came into his face and the
light that came into his eyes. I should never have identified him with
the Black Spectre of the afternoon.

“Why,” said I, “you ARE a fighter; you're fighting the greatest battle
in the world today--the only real battle--the battle for the spiritual
view of life.”

Oh, I knew exactly what was the trouble with his religion--at least the
religion which, under the pressure of that church he felt obliged to
preach! It was the old, groaning, denying, resisting religion. It was
the sort of religion which sets a man apart and assures him that the
entire universe in the guise of the Powers of Darkness is leagued
against him. What he needed was a reviving draught of the new faith
which affirms, accepts, rejoices, which feels the universe triumphantly
behind it. And so whenever the minister told me what he ought to be--for
he too sensed the new impulse--I merely told him he was just that. He
needed only this little encouragement to unfold.

“Yes,” said he again, “I am the real moral leader here.”

At this I saw Mrs. Minister nodding her head vigorously.

“It's you,” she said, “and not Mr. Nash, who should lead this
community.”

How a woman loves concrete applications. She is your only true
pragmatist. If a philosophy will not work, says she, why bother with it?

The minister rose quickly from his chair, threw back his head, and
strode quickly up and down the room.

“You are right,” said he; “and I WILL lead it. I'll have my farmers'
meetings as I planned.”

It may have been the effect of the lamplight, but it seemed to me that
little Mrs. Minister, as she glanced up at him, looked actually pretty.

The minister continued to stride up and down the room with his chin in
the air.

“Mr. Nash,” said she in a low voice to me, “is always trying to hold
him down and keep him back. My husband WANTS to do the great
things”--wistfully.

“By every right,” the minister was repeating, quite oblivious of our
presence, “I should lead these people.”

“He sees the weakness of the church,” she continued, “as well as
any one, and he wants to start some vigorous community work--have
agricultural meetings and boys' clubs, and lots of things like that--but
Mr. Nash says it is no part of a minister's work: that it cheapens
religion. He says that when a parson--Mr. Nash always calls him parson,
and I just LOATHE that name--has preached, and prayed, and visited the
sick, that's enough for HIM.”

At this very moment a step sounded upon the walk, and an instant later a
figure appeared in the doorway.

“Why, Mr. Nash,” exclaimed little Mrs. Minister, exhibiting that
astonishing gift of swift recovery which is the possession of even the
simplest women, “come right in.”

It was some seconds before the minister could come down from the heights
and greet Mr. Nash. As for me, I was never more interested in my life.

“Now,” said I to myself, “we shall see Christian meet Apollyon.”

As soon as Mrs. Minister lighted the lamp I was introduced to the great
man. He looked at me sharply with his small, round eyes, and said:

“Oh, you are the--the man who was in church this afternoon.”

I admitted it, and he looked around at the minister with an accusing
expression. He evidently did not approve of me, nor could I wholly blame
him, for I knew well how he, as a rich farmer, must look upon a rusty
man of the road like me. I should have liked dearly to cross swords with
him myself, but greater events were imminent.

In no time at all the discussion, which had evidently been broken off at
some previous meeting, concerning the proposed farmers' assembly at the
church, had taken on a really lively tone. Mr. Nash was evidently in
the somewhat irritable mood with which important people may sometimes
indulge themselves, for he bit off his words in a way that was
calculated to make any but an unusually meek and saintly man exceedingly
uncomfortable. But the minister, with the fine, high humility of those
whose passion is for great or true things, was quite oblivious to the
harsh words. Borne along by an irresistible enthusiasm, he told in
glowing terms what his plan would mean to the community, how the
people needed a new social and civic spirit--a “neighbourhood religious
feeling” he called it. And as he talked his face flushed, and his eyes
shone with the pure fire of a great purpose. But I could see that all
this enthusiasm impressed the practical Mr. Nash as mere moonshine.
He grew more and more uneasy. Finally he brought his hand down with a
resounding thwack upon his knee, and said in a high, cutting voice:

“I don't believe in any such newfangled nonsense. It ain't none of a
parson's business what the community does. You're hired, ain't you, an'
paid to run the church? That's the end of it. We ain't goin' to have any
mixin' of religion an' farmin' in THIS neighbourhood.”

My eyes were on the pale man of God. I felt as though a human soul were
being weighed in the balance. What would he do now? What was he worth
REALLY as a man as well as a minister?

He paused a moment with downcast eyes. I saw little Mrs. Minister glance
at him--once--wistfully. He rose from his place, drew himself up to his
full height--I shall not soon forget the look on his face--and uttered
these amazing words:

“Martha, bring the ginger-jar.”

Mrs. Minister, without a word, went to a little cupboard on the farther
side of the room and took down a brown earthenware jar, which she
brought over and placed on the table, Mr. Nash following her movements
with astonished eyes. No one spoke.

The minister took the jar in his hands as he might the communion-cup
just before saying the prayer of the sacrament.

“Mr. Nash,” said he in a loud voice, “I've decided to hold that farmers'
meeting.”

Before Mr. Nash could reply the minister seated himself and was pouring
out the contents of the jar upon the table--a clatter of dimes, nickels,
pennies, a few quarters and half dollars, and a very few bills.

“Martha, just how much money is there?”

“Twenty-four dollars and sixteen cents.”

The minister put his hand into his pocket and, after counting out
certain coins, said:

“Here's one dollar and eighty-four cents more. That makes twenty-six
dollars. Now, Mr. Nash, you're the largest contributor to my salary in
this neighbourhood. You gave twenty-six dollars last year--fifty cents a
week. It is a generous contribution, but I cannot take it any longer.
It is fortunate that my wife has saved up this money to buy a
sewing-machine, so that we can pay back your contribution in full.”

He paused; no one of us spoke a word.

“Mr. Nash,” he continued, and his face was good to see, “I am the
minister here. I am convinced that what the community needs is more of a
religious and social spirit, and I am going about getting it in the way
the Lord leads me.”

At this I saw Mrs. Minister look up at her husband with such a light in
her eyes as any man might well barter his life for--I could not keep my
own eyes from pure beauty of it.

I knew too what this defiance meant. It meant that this little family
was placing its all upon the altar--even the pitiful coins for which
they had skimped and saved for months for a particular purpose. Talk of
the heroism of the men who charged with Pickett at Gettysburg! Here was
a courage higher and whiter than that; here was a courage that dared to
fight alone.

As for Mr. Nash, the face of that Chief Pharisee was a study. Nothing is
so paralyzing to a rich man as to find suddenly that his money will
no longer command him any advantage. Like all hard-shelled, practical
people, Mr. Nash could only dominate in a world which recognized the
same material supremacy that he recognized. Any one who insisted upon
flying was lost to Mr. Nash.

The minister pushed the little pile of coins toward him.

“Take it, Mr. Nash,” said he.

At that Mr. Nash rose hastily.

“I will not,” he said gruffly.

He paused, and looked at the minister with a strange expression in his
small round eyes--was it anger, or was it fear, or could it have been
admiration?

“If you want to waste your time on fiddlin' farmers' meetings--a man
that knows as little of farmin' as you do--why go ahead for all o' me.
But don't count me in.”

He turned, reached for his hat, and then went out of the door into the
darkness.

For a moment we all sat perfectly silent, then the minister rose, and
said solemnly:

“Martha, let's sing something.”

Martha crossed the room to the cottage organ and seated herself on the
stool.

“What shall we sing?” said she.

“Something with fight in it, Martha,” he responded; “something with
plenty of fight in it.”

So we sang “Onward, Christian Soldier, Marching as to War,” and followed
up with:

Awake, my soul, stretch every nerve And press with rigour on; A heavenly
race demands thy zeal And an immortal crown.


When we had finished, and as Martha rose from her seat, the minister
impulsively put his hands on her shoulders, and said:

“Martha, this is the greatest night of my life.”

He took a turn up and down the room, and then with an exultant boyish
laugh said:

“We'll go to town to-morrow and pick out that sewing-machine!”


I remained with them that night and part of the following day, taking
a hand with them in the garden, but of the events of that day I shall
speak in another chapter.



CHAPTER V. I PLAY THE PART OF A SPECTACLE PEDDLER

Yesterday was exactly the sort of a day I love best--a spicy,
unexpected, amusing day--crowned with a droll adventure.

I cannot account for it, but it seems to me I take the road each morning
with a livelier mind and keener curiosity. If you were to watch me
narrowly these days you would see I am slowly shedding my years. I
suspect that some one of the clear hill streams from which I have been
drinking (lying prone on my face) was in reality the fountain of eternal
youth. I shall not go back to see.

It seems to me, when I feel like this, that in every least thing upon
the roadside, or upon the hill, lurks the stuff of adventure. What a
world it is! A mile south of here I shall find all that Stanley found in
the jungles of Africa; a mile north I am Peary at the Pole!

You there, brown-clad farmer on the tall seat of your wagon, driving
townward with a red heifer for sale, I can show you that life--your
life--is not all a gray smudge, as you think it is, but crammed, packed,
loaded with miraculous things. I can show you wonders past belief in
your own soul. I can easily convince you that you are in reality a poet,
a hero, a true lover, a saint.

It is because we are not humble enough in the presence of the divine
daily fact that adventure knocks so rarely at our door. A thousand times
I have had to learn this truth (what lesson so hard to learn as the
lesson of humility!) and I suppose I shall have to learn it a thousand
times more. This very day, straining my eyes to see the distant wonders
of the mountains, I nearly missed a miracle by the roadside.

Soon after leaving the minister and his family--I worked with them in
their garden with great delight most of the forenoon--I came, within a
mile--to the wide white turnpike--the Great Road.

Now, I usually prefer the little roads, the little, unexpected, curving,
leisurely country roads. The sharp hills, the pleasant deep valleys, the
bridges not too well kept, the verdure deep grown along old fences, the
houses opening hospitably at the very roadside, all these things I love.
They come to me with the same sort of charm and flavour, only vastly
magnified, which I find often in the essays of the older writers--those
leisurely old fellows who took time to write, REALLY write. The
important thing to me about a road, as about life--and literature, is
not that it goes anywhere, but that it is livable while it goes. For
if I were to arrive--and who knows that I ever shall arrive?--I think I
should be no happier than I am here.

Thus I have commonly avoided the Great White Road--the broad, smooth
turnpike--rock-bottomed and rolled by a State--without so much as a
loitering curve to whet one's curiosity, nor a thank-you-ma'am to laugh
over, nor a sinful hill to test your endurance--not so much as a dreamy
valley! It pursues its hard, unshaded, practical way directly from some
particular place to some other particular place and from time to time a
motor-car shoots in at one end of it and out at the other, leaving its
dust to settle upon quiet travellers like me.

Thus to-day when I came to the turnpike I was at first for making
straight across it and taking to the hills beyond, but at that very
moment a motor-car whirled past me as I stood there and a girl with a
merry face waved her hand at me. I lifted my hat in return--and as
I watched them out of sight I felt a curious new sense of warmth and
friendliness there in the Great Road.

“These are just people, too,” I said aloud--“and maybe they really like
it!”

And with that I began laughing at myself, and at the whole, big,
amazing, interesting world. Here was I pitying them for their benighted
state, and there were they, no doubt, pitying me for mine!

And with that pleasant and satisfactory thought in my mind and a song in
my throat I swung into the Great Road.

“It doesn't matter in the least,” said I to myself, “whether a man takes
hold of life by the great road or the little ones so long as he takes
hold.”

And oh, it was a wonderful day! A day with movement in it; a day that
flowed! In every field the farmers were at work, the cattle fed widely
in the meadows, and the Great Road itself was alive with a hundred
varied sorts of activity. Light winds stirred the tree-tops and rippled
in the new grass; and from the thickets I heard the blackbirds crying.
Everything animate and inanimate, that morning, seemed to have its
own clear voice and to cry out at me for my interest, or curiosity, or
sympathy. Under such circumstances it could not have been long--nor
was it long--before I came plump upon the first of a series of odd
adventures.


A great many people, I know, abominate the roadside sign. It seems to
them a desecration of nature, the intrusion of rude commercialism upon
the perfection of natural beauty. But not I. I have no such feeling.
Oh, the signs in themselves are often rude and unbeautiful, and I
never wished my own barn or fences to sing the praises of swamp root or
sarsaparilla--and yet there is something wonderfully human about these
painted and pasted vociferations of the roadside signs; and I don't
know why they are less “natural” in their way than a house or barn or
a planted field of corn. They also tell us about life. How eagerly they
cry out at us, “Buy me, buy me!” What enthusiasm they have in their
own concerns, what boundless faith in themselves! How they speak of the
enormous energy, activity, resourcefulness of human kind!

Indeed, I like all kinds of signs. The autocratic warnings of the road,
the musts and the must-nots of traffic, I observe in passing; and I
often stand long at the crossings and look up at the finger-posts, and
consider my limitless wealth as a traveller. By this road I may, at my
own pleasure, reach the Great City; by that--who knows?--the far wonders
of Cathay. And I respond always to the appeal which the devoted pilgrim
paints on the rocks at the roadside: “Repent ye, for the kingdom of God
is at hand,” and though I am certain that the kingdom of God is already
here, I stop always and repent--just a little--knowing that there is
always room for it. At the entrance of the little towns, also, or in
the squares of the villages, I stop often to read the signs of taxes
assessed, or of political meetings; I see the evidences of homes broken
up in the notices of auction sales, and of families bereaved in the dry
and formal publications of the probate court. I pause, too, before
the signs of amusements flaming red and yellow on the barns (boys, the
circus is coming to town!), and I pause also, but no longer, to read
the silent signs carved in stone in the little cemeteries as I pass.
Symbols, you say? Why, they're the very stuff of life. If you cannot see
life here in the wide road, you will never see it at all.

Well, I saw a sign yesterday at the roadside that I never saw anywhere
before. It was not a large sign--indeed rather inconspicuous--consisting
of a single word rather crudely painted in black (as by an amateur) upon
a white board. It was nailed to a tree where those in swift passing cars
could not avoid seeing it:

[ REST ]

I cannot describe the odd sense of enlivenment, of pleasure I had when I
saw this new sign.

“Rest!” I exclaimed aloud. “Indeed I will,” and I sat down on a stone
not far away.

“Rest!”

What a sign for this very spot! Here in the midst of the haste and
hurry of the Great Road a quiet voice was saying, “Rest.” Some one with
imagination, I thought, evidently put that up; some quietist offering
this mild protest against the breathless progress of the age. How often
I have felt the same way myself--as though I were being swept onward
through life faster than I could well enjoy it. For nature passes the
dishes far more rapidly than we can help ourselves.

Or perhaps, thought I, eagerly speculating, this may be only some
cunning advertiser with rest for sale (in these days even rest has its
price), thus piquing the curiosity of the traveller for the disclosure
which he will make a mile or so farther on. Or else some humourist
wasting his wit upon the Fraternity of the Road, too willing (like me,
perhaps) to accept his ironical advice. But it would be well worth while
should I find him, to see him chuckle behind his hand.

So I sat there very much interested, for a long time, even framing a
rather amusing picture in my own mind of the sort of person who painted
these signs, deciding finally that he must be a zealot rather than a
trader or humourist. (Confidentially, I could not make a picture of
him in which he was not endowed with plentiful long hair). As I walked
onward again, I decided that in any guise I should like to see him, and
I enjoyed thinking what I should say if I met him. A mile farther up the
road I saw another sign exactly like the first.

“Here he is again,” I said exultantly, and that sign being somewhat
nearer the ground I was able to examine it carefully front and back, but
it bore no evidence of its origin.

In the next few miles I saw two other signs with nothing on them but the
word “Rest.”

Now this excellent admonition--like much of the excellent admonitions in
this world--affected me perversely: it made me more restless than ever.
I felt that I could not rest properly until I found out who wanted me to
rest, and why. It opened indeed a limitless vista for new adventure.


Presently, away ahead of me in the road, I saw a man standing near
a one-horse wagon. He seemed to be engaged in some activity near the
roadside, but I could not tell exactly what. As I hastened nearer I
discovered that he was a short, strongly built, sun-bronzed man in
working-clothes--and with the shortest of short hair. I saw him take a
shovel from the wagon and begin digging. He was the road-worker.

I asked the road-worker if he had seen the curious signs. He looked up
at me with a broad smile (he had good-humoured, very bright blue eyes).

“Yes,” he said, “but they ain't for me.”

“Then you don't follow the advice they give?”

“Not with a section like mine,” said he, and he straightened up and
looked first one way of the road and then the other. “I have from Grabow
Brook, but not the bridge, to the top o' Sullivan Hill, and all the
culverts between, though two of 'em are by rights bridges. And I claim
that's a job for any full-grown man.”

He began shovelling again in the road as if to prove how busy he was.
There had been a small landslide from an open cut on one side and a
mass of gravel and small boulders lay scattered on the smooth macadam. I
watched him for a moment. I love to watch the motions of vigorous men
at work, the easy play of the muscles, the swing of the shoulders, the
vigour of stoutly planted legs. He evidently considered the conversation
closed, and I, as--well, as a dusty man of the road--easily dismissed.
(You have no idea, until you try it, what a weight of prejudice the man
of the road has to surmount before he is accepted on easy terms by the
ordinary members of the human race.)

A few other well-intentioned observations on my part having elicited
nothing but monosyllabic replies, I put my bag down by the roadside
and, going up to the wagon, got out a shovel, and without a word took
my place at the other end of the landslide and began to shovel for all I
was worth.

I said not a word to the husky road-worker and pretended not to look
at him, but I saw him well enough out of the corner of my eye. He was
evidently astonished and interested, as I knew he would be: it was
something entirely new on the road. He didn't quite know whether to be
angry, or amused, or sociable. I caught him looking over at me several
times, but I offered no response; then he cleared his throat and said:

“Where you from?”

I answered with a monosyllable which I knew he could not quite catch.
Silence again for some time, during which I shovelled valiantly and with
great inward amusement. Oh, there is nothing like cracking a hard human
nut! I decided at that moment, to have him invite me to supper.

Finally, when I showed no signs of stopping my work, he himself paused
and leaned on his shovel. I kept right on.

“Say, partner,” said he, finally, “did YOU read those signs as you come
up the road?”

“Yes,” I said, “but they weren't for me, either. My section's a long
one, too.”

“Say, you ain't a road-worker, are you?” he asked eagerly.

“Yes,” said I, with a sudden inspiration, “that's exactly what I am--a
road-worker.”

“Put her there, then, partner,” he said, with a broad smile on his
bronzed face.

He and I struck hands, rested on our shovels (like old hands at it), and
looked with understanding into each other's eyes. We both knew the trade
and the tricks of the trade; all bars were down between us. The fact is,
we had both seen and profited by the peculiar signs at the roadside.

“Where's your section?” he asked easily.

“Well,” I responded after considering the question, “I have a very long
and hard section. It begins at a place called Prosy Common--do you know
it?--and reaches to the top of Clear Hill. There are several bad spots
on the way, I can tell you.”

“Don't know it,” said the husky road-worker; “'tain't round here, is it?
In the town of Sheldon, maybe?”

Just at this moment, perhaps fortunately, for there is nothing so
difficult to satisfy as the appetite of people for specific information,
a motor-car whizzed past, the driver holding up his hand in greeting,
and the road-worker and I responding in accordance with the etiquette of
the Great Road.

“There he goes in the ruts again,” said the husky road-worker. “Why is
it, I'd like to know, that every one wants to run in the same identical
track when they've got the whole wide road before 'em?”

“That's what has long puzzled me, too,” I said. “Why WILL people
continue to run in ruts?”

“It don't seem to do no good to put up signs,” said the road-worker.

“Very little indeed,” said I. “The fact is, people have got to be bumped
out of the ruts they get into.”

“You're right,” said he enthusiastically, and his voice dropped into the
tone of one speaking to a member of the inner guild. “I know how to get
'em.”

“How?” I asked in an equally mysterious voice.

“I put a stone or two in the ruts!”

“Do you?” I exclaimed. “I've done that very thing myself--many a time!
Just place a good hard tru--I mean stone, with a bit of common dust
sprinkled over it, in the middle of the rut, and they'll look out for
THAT rut for some time to come.”

“Ain't it gorgeous,” said the husky road-worker, chuckling joyfully, “to
see 'em bump?”

“It is,” said I--“gorgeous.”

After that, shovelling part of the time in a leisurely way, and part of
the time responding to the urgent request of the signs by the roadside
(it pays to advertise!), the husky road-worker and I discussed many
great and important subjects, all, however, curiously related to roads.
Working all day long with his old horse, removing obstructions, draining
out the culverts, filling ruts and holes with new stone, and repairing
the damage of rain and storm, the road-worker was filled with a world of
practical information covering roads and road-making. And having learned
that I was of the same calling, we exchanged views with the greatest
enthusiasm. It was astonishing to see how nearly in agreement we were as
to what constituted an ideal road.

“Almost everything,” said he, “depends on depth. If you get a good solid
foundation, the' ain't anything that can break up your road.”

“Exactly what I have discovered,” I responded. “Get down to bedrock and
do an honest job of building.”

“And don't have too many sharp turns.”

“No,” said I, “long, leisurely curves are best--all through life. You
have observed that nearly all the accidents on the road are due to sharp
turnings.”

“Right you are!” he exclaimed.

“A man who tries to turn too sharply on his way nearly always skids.”

“Or else turns turtle in the ditch.”

But it was not until we reached the subject of oiling that we mounted to
the real summit of enthusiastic agreement. Of all things on the road, or
above the road, or in the waters under the road, there is nothing that
the road-worker dislikes more than oil.

“It's all right,” said he, “to use oil for surfacin' and to keep down
the dust. You don't need much and it ain't messy. But sometimes when you
see oil pumped on a road, you know that either the contractor has been
jobbin', or else the road's worn out and ought to be rebuilt.”

“That's exactly what I've found,” said I. “Let a road become almost
impassable with ruts and rocks and dust, and immediately some man says,
'Oh, it's all right--put on a little oil--'”

“That's what our supervisor is always sayin',” said the road-worker.

“Yes,” I responded, “it usually is the supervisor. He lives by it. He
wants to smooth over the defects, he wants to lay the dust that every
passerby kicks up, he tries to smear over the truth regarding conditions
with messy and ill-smelling oil. Above everything, he doesn't want the
road dug up and rebuilt--says it will interfere with traffic, injure
business, and even set people to talking about changing the route
entirely! Oh, haven't I seen it in religion, where they are doing their
best to oil up roads that are entirely worn out--and as for politics, is
not the cry of the party-roadster and the harmony-oilers abroad in the
land?”

In the excited interest with which this idea now bore me along I had
entirely forgotten the existence of my companion, and as I now glanced
at him I saw him standing with a curious look of astonishment and
suspicion on his face. I saw that I had unintentionally gone a little
too far. So I said abruptly:

“Partner, let's get a drink. I'm thirsty.”

He followed me, I thought a bit reluctantly, to a little brook not
far up the road where we had been once before. As we were drinking,
silently, I looked at the stout young fellow standing there, and I
thought to myself:

What a good, straightforward young fellow he is anyway, and how
thoroughly he knows his job. I thought how well he was equipped with
unilluminated knowledge, and it came to me whimsically, that here was a
fine bit of road-mending for me to do.

Most people have sight, but few have insight; and as I looked into
the clear blue eyes of my friend I had a sudden swift inspiration, and
before I could repent of it I had said to him in the most serious voice
that I could command:

“Friend, I am in reality a spectacle-peddler--”

His glance shifted uncomfortably to my gray bag.

“And I want to sell you a pair of spectacles,” I said. “I see that you
are nearly blind.”

“Me blind!”

It would be utterly impossible to describe the expression on his
face. His hand went involuntarily to his eyes, and he glanced quickly,
somewhat fearfully, about.

“Yes, nearly blind,” said I. “I saw it when I first met you. You don't
know it yourself yet, but I can assure you it is a bad case.”

I paused, and shook my head slowly. If I had not been so much in
earnest, I think I should have been tempted to laugh outright. I had
begun my talk with him half jestingly, with the amusing idea of breaking
through his shell, but I now found myself tremendously engrossed, and
desired nothing in the world (at that moment) so much as to make him see
what I saw. I felt as though I held a live human soul in my hand.

“Say, partner,” said the road-worker, “are you sure you aren't--” He
tapped his forehead and began to edge away.

I did not answer his question at all, but continued, with my eyes fixed
on him:

“It is a peculiar sort of blindness. Apparently, as you look about, you
see everything there is to see, but as a matter of fact you see nothing
in the world but this road--”

“It's time that I was seein' it again then,” said he, making as if to
turn back to work, but remaining with a disturbed expression on his
countenance.

“The Spectacles I have to sell,” said I, “are powerful magnifiers”--he
glanced again at the gray bag. “When you put them on you will see a
thousand wonderful things besides the road--”

“Then you ain't road-worker after all!” he said, evidently trying to be
bluff and outright with me.


Now your substantial, sober, practical American will stand only about
so much verbal foolery; and there is nothing in the world that makes him
more uncomfortable--yes, downright mad!--than to feel that he is being
played with. I could see that I had nearly reached the limit with him,
and that if I held him now it must be by driving the truth straight
home. So I stepped over toward him and said very earnestly:

“My friend, don't think I am merely joking you. I was never more in
earnest in all my life. When I told you I was a road-worker I meant it,
but I had in mind the mending of other kinds of roads than this.”

I laid my hand on his arm, and explained to him as directly and simply
as English words could do it, how, when he had spoken of oil for his
roads, I thought of another sort of oil for another sort of roads, and
when he spoke of curves in his roads I was thinking of curves in the
roads I dealt with, and I explained to him what my roads were. I have
never seen a man more intensely interested: he neither moved nor took
his eyes from my face.

“And when I spoke of selling you a pair of spectacles,” said I, “it was
only a way of telling you how much I wanted to make you see my kinds of
roads as well as your own.”

I paused, wondering if, after all, he could be made to see. I know now
how the surgeon must feel at the crucial moment of his accomplished
operation. Will the patient live or die?

The road-worker drew a long breath as he came out from under the
anesthetic.

“I guess, partner,” said he, “you're trying to put a stone or two in my
ruts!”

I had him!

“Exactly,” I exclaimed eagerly.

We both paused. He was the first to speak--with some embarrassment:

“Say, you're just like a preacher I used to know when I was a kid. He
was always sayin' things that meant something else and when you found
out what he was drivin' at you always felt kind of queer in your
insides.”

I laughed.

“It's a mighty good sign,” I said, “when a man begins to feel queer in
the insides. It shows that something is happening to him.”

With that we walked back to the road, feeling very close and
friendly--and shovelling again, not saying much. After quite a
time, when we had nearly cleaned up the landslide, I heard the husky
road-worker chuckling to himself; finally, straightening up, he said:

“Say, there's more things in a road than ever I dreamt of.”

“I see,” said I, “that the new spectacles are a good fit.”

The road-worker laughed long and loud.

“You're a good one, all right,” he said. “I see what YOU mean. I catch
your point.”

“And now that you've got them on,” said I, “and they are serving you
so well, I'm not going to sell them to you at all. I'm going to present
them to you--for I haven't seen anybody in a long time that I've enjoyed
meeting more than I have you.”

We nurse a fiction that people love to cover up their feelings; but I
have learned that if the feeling is real and deep they love far better
to find a way to uncover it.

“Same here,” said the road-worker simply, but with a world of genuine
feeling in his voice.

Well, when it came time to stop work the road-worker insisted that I get
in and go home with him.

“I want you to see my wife and kids,” said he.

The upshot of it was that I not only remained for supper--and a good
supper it was--but I spent the night in his little home, close at the
side of the road near the foot of a fine hill. And from time to time all
night long, it seemed to me, I could hear the rush of cars going by in
the smooth road outside, and sometimes their lights flashed in at my
window, and sometimes I heard them sound their brassy horns.

I wish I could tell more of what I saw there, of the garden back of the
house, and of all the road-worker and his wife told me of their simple
history--but, the road calls!

When I set forth early this morning the road-worker followed me out
to the smooth macadam (his wife standing in the doorway with her hands
rolled in her apron) and said to me, a bit shyly:

“I'll be more sort o'--sort o' interested in roads since I've seen you.”

“I'll be along again some of these days,” said I, laughing, “and I'll
stop in and show you my new stock of spectacles. Maybe I can sell you
another pair!”

“Maybe you kin,” and he smiled a broad, understanding smile.

Nothing brings men together like having a joke in common.

So I walked off down the road--in the best of spirits--ready for the
events of another day.

It will surely be a great adventure, one of these days, to come this way
again--and to visit the Stanleys, and the Vedders, and the Minister, and
drop in and sell another pair of specs to the Road-worker. It seems to
me I have a wonderfully rosy future ahead of me!


P. S.--I have not yet found out who painted the curious signs; but I am
not as uneasy about it as I was. I have seen two more of them already
this morning--and find they exert quite a psychological influence.



CHAPTER VI. AN EXPERIMENT IN HUMAN NATURE

In the early morning after I left the husky road-mender (wearing his new
spectacles), I remained steadfastly on the Great Road or near it. It was
a prime spring day, just a little hazy, as though promising rain, but
soft and warm.

“They will be working in the garden at home,” I thought, “and there will
be worlds of rhubarb and asparagus.” Then I remembered how the morning
sunshine would look on the little vine-clad back porch (reaching halfway
up the weathered door) of my own house among the hills.

It was the first time since my pilgrimage began that I had thought with
any emotion of my farm--or of Harriet.

And then the road claimed me again, and I began to look out for some
further explanation of the curious sign, the single word “Rest,” which
had interested me so keenly on the preceding day. It may seem absurd to
some who read these lines--some practical people!--but I cannot convey
the pleasure I had in the very elusiveness and mystery of the sign,
nor how I wished I might at the next turn come upon the poet himself. I
decided that no one but a poet could have contented himself with a lyric
in one word, unless it might have been a humourist, to whom sometimes a
single small word is more blessed than all the verbal riches of Webster
himself. For it is nothing short of genius that uses one word when
twenty will say the same thing!

Or, would he, after all, turn out to be only a more than ordinarily
alluring advertiser? I confess my heart went into my throat that
morning, when I first saw the sign, lest it read:

[ RESTaurant 2 miles east ]

nor should I have been surprised if it had.

I caught a vicarious glimpse of the sign-man to-day, through the eyes
of a young farmer. Yes, he s'posed he'd seen him, he said; wore a slouch
hat, couldn't tell whether he was young or old. Drove into the bushes
(just down there beyond the brook) and, standin' on the seat of his
buggy, nailed something to a tree. A day or two later--the dull wonder
of mankind!--the young farmer, passing that way to town, had seen the
odd sign “Rest” on the tree: he s'posed the fellow put it there.

“What does it mean?”

“Well, naow, I hadn't thought,” said the young farmer.

“Did the fellow by any chance have long hair?”

“Well, naow, I didn't notice,” said he.

“Are you sure he wore a slouch hat?”

“Ye-es--or it may a-been straw,” replied the observant young farmer.


So I tramped that morning; and as I tramped I let my mind go out warmly
to the people living all about on the farms or in the hills. It is
pleasant at times to feel life, as it were, in general terms: no
specific Mr. Smith or concrete Mr. Jones, but just human life. I love to
think of people all around going out busily in the morning to their work
and returning at night, weary, to rest. I like to think of them growing
up, growing old, loving, achieving, sinning, failing--in short, living.

In such a live-minded mood as this it often happens that the most
ordinary things appear charged with new significance. I suppose I had
seen a thousand rural-mail boxes along country roads before that day,
but I had seen them as the young farmer saw the sign-man. They were mere
inert objects of iron and wood.

But as I tramped, thinking of the people in the hills, I came quite
unexpectedly upon a sandy by-road that came out through a thicket
of scrub oaks and hazel-brush, like some shy countryman, to join
the turn-pike. As I stood looking into it--for it seemed peculiarly
inviting--I saw at the entrance a familiar group of rural-mail boxes.
And I saw them not as dead things, but for the moment--the illusion was
over-powering--they were living, eager hands outstretched to the
passing throng I could feel, hear, see the farmers up there in the
hills reaching out to me, to all the world, for a thousand inexpressible
things, for more life, more companionship, more comforts, more money.

It occurred to me at that moment, whimsically and yet somehow seriously,
that I might respond to the appeal of the shy country road and the
outstretched hands. At first I did not think of anything I could
do--save to go up and eat dinner with one of the hill farmers, which
might not be an unmixed blessing!--and then it came to me.

“I will write a letter!”

Straightway and with the liveliest amusement I began to formulate in my
mind what I should say:

Dear Friend: You do not know me. I am a passerby in the road. My name is
David Grayson. You do not know me, and it may seem odd to you to receive
a letter from an entire stranger. But I am something of a farmer myself,
and as I went by I could not help thinking of you and your family and
your farm. The fact is, I should like to look you up, and talk with you
about many things. I myself cultivate a number of curious fields, and
raise many kinds of crops--

At this interesting point my inspiration suddenly collapsed, for I had
a vision, at once amusing and disconcerting, of my hill farmer (and his
practical wife!) receiving such a letter (along with the country paper,
a circular advertising a cure for catarrh, and the most recent catalogue
of the largest mail-order house in creation). I could see them standing
there in their doorway, the man with his coat off, doubtfully scratching
his head as he read my letter, the woman wiping her hands on her apron
and looking over his shoulder, and a youngster squeezing between the two
and demanding, “What is it, Paw?”

I found myself wondering how they would receive such an unusual letter,
what they would take it to mean. And in spite of all I could do, I
could imagine no expression on their faces save one of incredulity and
suspicion. I could fairly see the shrewd worldly wise look come into the
farmer's face; I could hear him say:

“Ha, guess he thinks we ain't cut our eye-teeth!” And he would instantly
begin speculating as to whether this was a new scheme for selling
him second-rate nursery stock, or the smooth introduction of another
sewing-machine agent.

Strange world, strange world! Sometimes it seems to me that the hardest
thing of all to believe in is simple friendship. Is it not a comment
upon our civilization that it is so often easier to believe that a
man is a friend-for-profit, or even a cheat, than that he is frankly a
well-wisher of his neighbours?


These reflections put such a damper upon my enthusiasm that I was on the
point of taking again to the road, when it came to me powerfully: Why
not try the experiment? Why not?

“Friendship,” I said aloud, “is the greatest thing in the world. There
is no door it will not unlock, no problem it will not solve. It is,
after all, the only real thing in this world.”

The sound of my own voice brought me suddenly to myself, and I found
that I was standing there in the middle of the public road, one clenched
fist absurdly raised in air, delivering an oration to a congregation of
rural-mail boxes!

And yet, in spite of the humorous aspects of the idea, it still appeared
to me that such an experiment would not only fit in with the true object
of my journeying, but that it might be full of amusing and interesting
adventures. Straightway I got my notebook out of my bag and, sitting
down near the roadside, wrote my letter. I wrote it as though my life
depended upon it, with the intent of making some one household there in
the hills feel at least a little wave of warmth and sympathy from the
great world that was passing in the road below. I tried to prove the
validity of a kindly thought with no selling device attached to it; I
tried to make it such a word of frank companionship as I myself, working
in my own fields, would like to receive.

Among the letter-boxes in the group was one that stood a little detached
and behind the others, as though shrinking from such prosperous company.
It was made of unpainted wood, with leather hinges, and looked shabby
in comparison with the jaunty red, green, and gray paint of some of the
other boxes (with their cocky little metallic flags upraised). It bore
the good American name of Clark--T. N. Clark--and it seemed to me that I
could tell something of the Clarks by the box at the crossing.

“I think they need a friendly word,” I said to myself.

So I wrote the name T. N. Clark on my envelope and put the letter in his
box.

It was with a sense of joyous adventure that I now turned aside into the
sandy road and climbed the hill. My mind busied itself with thinking how
I should carry out my experiment, how I should approach these Clarks,
and how and what they were. A thousand ways I pictured to myself the
receipt of the letter: it would at least be something new for them,
something just a little disturbing, and I was curious to see whether
it might open the rift of wonder wide enough to let me slip into their
lives.

I have often wondered why it is that men should be so fearful of new
ventures in social relationships, when I have found them so fertile,
so enjoyable. Most of us fear (actually fear) people who differ from
ourselves, either up or down the scale. Your Edison pries fearlessly
into the intimate secrets of matter; your Marconi employs the mysterious
properties of the “jellied ether,” but let a man seek to experiment with
the laws of that singular electricity which connects you and me (though
you be a millionaire and I a ditch-digger), and we think him a wild
visionary, an academic person. I think sometimes that the science of
humanity to-day is in about the state of darkness that the natural
sciences were when Linneus and Cuvier and Lamarck began groping for the
great laws of natural unity. Most of the human race is still groaning
under the belief that each of us is a special and unrelated creation,
just as men for ages saw no relationships between the fowls of the air,
the beasts of the field, and the fish of the sea. But, thank God, we
are beginning to learn that unity is as much a law of life as selfish
struggle, and love a more vital force than avarice or lust of power or
place. A Wandering Carpenter knew it, and taught it, twenty centuries
ago.

“The next house beyond the ridge,” said the toothless old woman,
pointing with a long finger, “is the Clarks'. You can't miss it,” and I
thought she looked at me oddly.

I had been walking briskly for some three miles, and it was with keen
expectation that I now mounted the ridge and saw the farm for which I
was looking, lying there in the valley before me. It was altogether a
wild and beautiful bit of country--stunted cedars on the knolls of the
rolling hills, a brook trailing its way among alders and willows down a
long valley, and shaggy old fields smiling in the sun. As I came nearer
I could see that the only disharmony in the valley was the work (or
idleness) of men. A broken mowing-machine stood in the field where
it had been left the summer before, rusty and forlorn, and dead weeds
marked the edges of a field wherein the spring ploughing was now only
half done. The whole farmstead, indeed, looked tired. As for the house
and barn, they had reached that final stage of decay in which the
best thing that could be said of them was that they were picturesque.
Everything was as different from the farm of the energetic and joyous
Stanleys, whose work I had shared only a few days before, as anything
that could be imagined.

Now, my usual way of getting into step with people is simplicity itself.
I take off my coat and go to work with them and the first thing I
know we have become first-rate friends. One doesn't dream of the
possibilities of companionship in labour until he has tried it.

But how shall one get into step with a man who is not stepping?

On the porch of the farmhouse, there in the mid-afternoon, a man sat
idly; and children were at play in the yard. I went in at the gate, not
knowing in the least what I should say or do, but determined to get hold
of the problem somewhere. As I approached the step, I swung my bag from
my shoulder.

“Don't want to buy nothin',” said the man.

“Well,” said I, “that is fortunate, for I have nothing to sell. But
you've got something I want.”

He looked at me dully.

“What's that?”

“A drink of water.”

Scarcely moving his head, he called to a shy older girl who had just
appeared in the doorway.

“Mandy, bring a dipper of water.”

As I stood there the children gathered curiously around me, and the man
continued to sit in his chair, saying absolutely nothing, a picture of
dull discouragement.

“How they need something to stir them up,” I thought.

When I had emptied the dipper, I sat down on the top step of the porch,
and, without saying a word to the man, placed my bag beside me and began
to open it. The shy girl paused, dipper in hand, the children stood
on tiptoe, and even the man showed signs of curiosity. With studied
deliberation I took out two books I had with me and put them on the
porch; then I proceeded to rummage for a long time in the bottom of the
bag as though I could not find what I wanted. Every eye was glued upon
me, and I even heard the step of Mrs. Clark as she came to the but I did
not look up or speak. Finally I pulled out my tin whistle and, leaning
back against the porch column, placed it to my lips, and began playing
in Tom Madison's best style (eyes half closed, one toe tapping to
the music, head nodding, fingers lifted high from the stops), I began
playing “Money Musk,” and “Old Dan Tucker.” Oh, I put vim into it, I can
tell you! And bad as my playing was, I had from the start an absorption
of attention from my audience that Paderewski himself might have envied.
I wound up with a lively trill in the high notes and took my whistle
from my lips with a hearty laugh, for the whole thing had been downright
good fun, the playing itself, the make-believe which went with it, the
surprise and interest in the children's faces, the slow-breaking smile
of the little girl with the dipper.

“I'll warrant you, madam,” I said to the woman who now stood frankly
in the doorway with her hands wrapped in her apron, “you haven't heard
those tunes since you were a girl and danced to 'em.”

“You're right,” she responded heartily.

“I'll give you another jolly one,” I said, and, replacing my whistle, I
began with even greater zest to play “Yankee Doodle.”

When I had gone through it half a dozen times with such added variations
and trills as I could command, and had two of the children hopping about
in the yard, and the forlorn man tapping his toe to the tune, and a
smile on the face of the forlorn woman, I wound up with a rush and
then, as if I could hold myself in no longer (and I couldn't either!), I
suddenly burst out:

     Yankee doodle dandy!
     Yankee doodle dandy!
     Mind the music and the step,
     And with the girls be handy.

It may seem surprising, but I think I can understand why it was--when I
looked up at the woman in the doorway there were tears in her eyes!

“Do you know 'John Brown's Body'?” eagerly inquired the little girl
with the dipper, and then, as if she had done something quite bold and
improper, she blushed and edged toward the doorway.

“How does it go?” I asked, and one of the bold lads in the yard
instantly puckered his lips to show me, and immediately they were all
trying it.

“Here goes,” said I, and for the next few minutes, and in my very best
style, I hung Jeff Davis on the sour apple-tree, and I sent the soul
of John Brown marching onward with an altogether unnecessary number of
hallelujahs.

I think sometimes that people--whole families of 'em--literally
perish for want of a good, hearty, whole-souled, mouth-opening,
throat-stretching, side-aching laugh. They begin to think themselves the
abused of creation, they begin to advise with their livers and to hate
their neighbours, and the whole world becomes a miserable dark blue
place quite unfit for human habitation. Well, all this is often only the
result of a neglect to exercise properly those muscles of the body (and
of the soul) which have to do with honest laughter.

I've never supposed I was an especially amusing person, but before I got
through with it I had the Clark family well loosened up with laughter,
although I wasn't quite sure some of the time whether Mrs. Clark
was laughing or crying. I had them all laughing and talking, asking
questions and answering them as though I were an old and valued
neighbour.

Isn't it odd how unconvinced we often are by the crises in the lives of
other people? They seem to us trivial or unimportant; but the fact is,
the crises in the life of a boy, for example, or of a poor man, are
as commanding as the crises in the life of the greatest statesman or
millionaire, for they involve equally the whole personality, the entire
prospects.

The Clark family, I soon learned, had lost its pig. A trivial matter,
you say? I wonder if anything is ever trivial. A year of poor crops,
sickness, low prices, discouragement and, at the end of it, on top of it
all, the cherished pig had died!

From all accounts (and the man on the porch quite lost his apathy in
telling me about it) it must have been a pig of remarkable virtues
and attainments, a paragon of pigs--in whom had been bound up the many
possibilities of new shoes for the children, a hat for the lady, a new
pair of overalls for the gentleman, and I know not what other kindred
luxuries. I do not think, indeed, I ever had the portrait of a pig
drawn for me with quite such ardent enthusiasm of detail, and the more
questions I asked the more eager the story, until finally it became
necessary for me to go to the barn, the cattle-pen, the pig-pen and
the chicken-house, that I might visualize more clearly the scene of the
tragedy. The whole family trooped after us like a classic chorus, but
Mr. Clark himself kept the centre of the stage.

How plainly I could read upon the face of the land the story of this
hill farmer and his meagre existence--his ill-directed effort to wring
a poor living for his family from these upland fields, his poverty, and,
above all, his evident lack of knowledge of his own calling. Added to
these things, and perhaps the most depressing of all his difficulties,
was the utter loneliness of the task, the feeling that it mattered
little to any one whether the Clark family worked or not, or indeed
whether they lived or died. A perfectly good American family was here
being wasted, with the precious land they lived on, because no one had
taken the trouble to make them feel that they were a part of this Great
American Job.


As we went back to the house, a freckled-nosed neighbour's boy came in
at the gate.

“A letter for you, Mr. Clark,” said he. “I brought it up with our mail.”

“A letter!” exclaimed Mrs. Clark.

“A letter!” echoed at least three of the children in unison.

“Probably a dun from Brewster,” said Mr. Clark discouragingly.

I felt a curious sensation about the heart, and an eagerness of interest
I have rarely experienced. I had no idea what a mere letter--a mere
unopened unread letter--would mean to a family like this.

“It has no stamp on it!” exclaimed the older girl.

Mrs. Clark turned it over wonderingly in her hands. Mr. Clark hastily
put on a pair of steel-bowed spectacles.

“Let me see it,” he said, and when he also had inspected it minutely he
solemnly tore open the envelope and drew forth my letter.

'I assure you I never awaited the reading of any writing of mine with
such breathless interest. How would they take it? Would they catch the
meaning that I meant to convey? And would they suspect me of having
written it?

Mr. Clark sat on the porch and read the letter slowly through to the
end, turned the sheet over and examined it carefully, and then began
reading it again to himself, Mrs. Clark leaning over his shoulder.

“What does it mean?” asked Mr. Clark.

“It's too good to be true,” said Mrs. Clark with a sigh.

I don't know how long the discussion might have continued--probably for
days or weeks--had not the older girl, now flushed of face and rather
pretty, looked at me and said breathlessly (she was as sharp as a
briar):

“You wrote it.”

I stood the battery of all their eyes for a moment, smiling and rather
excited.

“Yes,” I said earnestly, “I wrote it, and I mean every word of it.”

I had anticipated some shock of suspicion and inquiry, but to my
surprise it was accepted as simply as a neighbourly good morning. I
suppose the mystery of it was eclipsed by my astonishing presence there
upon the scene with my tin whistle.

At any rate, it was a changed, eager, interested family which now
occupied the porch of that dilapidated farmhouse. And immediately we
fell into a lively discussion of crops and farming, and indeed the whole
farm question, in which I found both the man and his wife singularly
acute--sharpened upon the stone of hard experience.

Indeed, I found right here, as I have many times found among our
American farmers, an intelligence (a literacy growing out of what I
believe to be improper education) which was better able to discuss the
problems of rural life than to grapple with and solve them. A dull,
illiterate Polish farmer, I have found, will sometimes succeed much
better at the job of life than his American neighbour.

Talk with almost any man for half an hour, and you will find that his
conversation, like an old-fashioned song, has a regularly recurrent
chorus. I soon discovered Mr. Clark's chorus.

“Now, if only I had a little cash,” he sang, or, “If I had a few
dollars, I could do so and so.”

Why, he was as helplessly, dependent upon money as any soft-handed
millionairess. He considered himself poor and helpless because he lacked
dollars, whereas people are really poor and helpless only when they lack
courage and faith.

We were so much absorbed in our talk that I was greatly surprised to
hear Mrs. Clark's voice at the doorway.

“Won't you come in to supper?”

After we had eaten, there was a great demand for more of my tin whistle
(oh, I know how Caruso must feel!), and I played over every blessed tune
I knew, and some I didn't, four or five times, and after that we
told stories and cracked jokes in a way that must have been utterly
astonishing in that household. After the children had been, yes, driven
to bed, Mr. Clark seemed about to drop back into his lamentations over
his condition (which I have no doubt had come to give him a sort of
pleasure), but I turned to Mrs. Clark, whom I had come to respect very
highly, and began to talk about the little garden she had started, which
was about the most enterprising thing about the place.

“Isn't it one of the finest things in this world,” said I, “to go out
into a good garden in the summer days and bring in loaded baskets filled
with beets and cabbages and potatoes, just for the gathering?”

I knew from the expression on Mrs. Clark's face that I had touched a
sounding note.

“Opening the green corn a little at the top to see if it is ready and
then stripping it off and tearing away the moist white husks--”

“And picking tomatoes?” said Mrs. Clark. “And knuckling the watermelons
to see if they are ripe? Oh, I tell you there are thousands of people in
this country who'd like to be able to pick their dinner in the garden!”

“It's fine!” said Mrs. Clark with amused enthusiasm, “but I like best
to hear the hens cackling in the barnyard in the morning after they've
laid, and to go and bring in the eggs.”

“Just like a daily present!” I said.

“Ye-es,” responded the soundly practical Mrs. Clark, thinking, no doubt,
that there were other aspects of the garden and chicken problem.

“I'll tell you another thing I like about a farmer's life,” said I,
“that's the smell in the house in the summer when there are preserves,
or sweet pickles, or jam, or whatever it is, simmering on the stove. No
matter where you are, up in the garret or down cellar, it's cinnamon,
and allspice, and cloves, and every sort of sugary odour. Now, that gets
me where I live!”

“It IS good!” said Mrs. Clark with a laugh that could certainly be
called nothing if not girlish.


All this time I had been keeping one eye on Mr. Clark. It was amusing
to see him struggling against a cheerful view of life. He now broke into
the conversation.

“Well, but--” he began.

Instantly I headed him off.

“And think,” said I, “of living a life in which you are beholden to
no man. It's a free life, the farmer's life. No one can discharge you
because you are sick, or tired, or old, or because you are a Democrat or
a Baptist!”

“Well, but--”

“And think of having to pay no rent, nor of having to live upstairs in a
tenement!”

“Well, but--”

“Or getting run over by a street-car, or having the children play in the
gutters.”

“I never did like to think of what my children would do if we went to
town,” said Mrs. Clark.

“I guess not!” I exclaimed.

The fact is, most people don't think half enough of themselves and of
their jobs; but before we went to bed that night I had the forlorn T. N.
Clark talking about the virtues of his farm in quite a surprising way.

I even saw him eying me two or three times with a shrewd look in his
eyes (your American is an irrepressible trader) as though I might
possibly be some would-be purchaser in disguise.

(I shall write some time a dissertation on the advantages, of wearing
shabby clothing.)

The farm really had many good points. One of them was a shaggy old
orchard of good and thriving but utterly neglected apple-trees.

“Man alive,” I said, when we went out to see it in the morning, “you've
got a gold mine here!” And I told him how in our neighbourhood we were
renovating the old orchards, pruning them back, spraying, and bringing
them into bearing again.

He had never, since he owned the place, had a salable crop of fruit.
When we came in to breakfast I quite stirred the practical Mrs. Clark
with my enthusiasm, and she promised at once to send for a bulletin on
apple-tree renovation, published by the state experiment station. I am
sure I was no more earnest in my advice than the conditions warranted.

After breakfast we went into the field, and I suggested that instead of
ploughing any more land--for the season was already late--we get out all
the accumulations of rotted manure from around the barn and strew it on
the land already ploughed and harrow it in.

“A good job on a little piece of land,” I said, “is far more profitable
than a poor job on a big piece of land.”

Without more ado we got his old team hitched up and began loading, and
hauling out the manure, and spent all day long at it. Indeed, such was
the height of enthusiasm which T. N. Clark now reached (for his was a
temperament that must either soar in the clouds or grovel in the mire),
that he did not wish to stop when Mrs. Clark called us in to supper. In
that one day his crop of corn, in perspective, overflowed his crib, he
could not find boxes and barrels for his apples, his shed would not hold
all his tobacco, and his barn was already being enlarged to accommodate
a couple more cows! He was also keeping bees and growing ginseng.

But it was fine, that evening, to see Mrs. Clark's face, the renewed
hope and courage in it. I thought as I looked at her (for she was the
strong and steady one in that house):

“If you can keep the enthusiasm up, if you can make that husband of
yours grow corn, and cows, and apples as you raise chickens and make
garden, there is victory yet in this valley.”

That night it rained, but in spite of the moist earth we spent almost
all of the following day hard at work in the field, and all the time
talking over ways and means for the future, but the next morning, early,
I swung my bag on my back and left them.

I shall not attempt to describe the friendliness of our parting. Mrs.
Clark followed me wistfully to the gate.

“I can't tell you--” she began, with the tears starting in her eyes.

“Then don't try--” said I, smiling.

And so I swung off down the country road, without looking back.



CHAPTER VII. THE UNDISCOVERED COUNTRY

In some strange deep way there is no experience of my whole pilgrimage
that I look back upon with so much wistful affection as I do upon the
events of the day--the day and the wonderful night--which followed my
long visit with the forlorn Clark family upon their hill farm. At first
I hesitated about including an account of it here because it contains so
little of what may be called thrilling or amusing incident.

“They want only the lively stories of my adventures,” I said to myself,
and I was at the point of pushing my notes to the edge of the table
where (had I let go) they would have fallen into the convenient oblivion
of the waste-basket. But something held me back.

“No,” said I, “I'll tell it; if it means so much to me, it may mean
something to the friends who are following these lines.”

For, after all, it is not what goes on outside of a man, the clash and
clatter of superficial events, that arouses our deepest interest, but
what goes on inside. Consider then that in this narrative I shall open
a little door in my heart and let you look in, if you care to, upon the
experiences of a day and a night in which I was supremely happy.

If you had chanced to be passing, that crisp spring morning, you would
have seen a traveller on foot with a gray bag on his shoulder, swinging
along the country road; and you might have been astonished to see him
lift his hat at you and wish you a good morning. You might have turned
to look back at him, as you passed, and found him turning also to look
back at you--and wishing he might know you. But you would not have known
what he was chanting under his breath as he tramped (how little we know
of a man by the shabby coat he wears), nor how keenly he was enjoying
the light airs and the warm sunshine of that fine spring morning.

After leaving the hill farm he had walked five miles up the valley,
had crossed the ridge at a place called the Little Notch, where all the
world lay stretched before him like the open palm of his hand, and had
come thus to the boundaries of the Undiscovered Country. He had been for
days troubled with the deep problems of other people, and it seemed to
him this morning as though a great stone had been rolled from the door
of his heart, and that he was entering upon a new world--a wonderful,
high, free world. And, as he tramped, certain lines of a stanza long ago
caught up in his memory from some forgotten page came up to his lips,
and these were the words (you did not know as you passed) that he was
chanting under his breath as he tramped, for they seem charged with the
spirit of the hour:

I've bartered my sheets for a starlit bed; I've traded my meat for a
crust of bread; I've changed my book for a sapling cane, And I'm off to
the end of the world again.

In the Undiscovered Country that morning it was wonderful how fresh
the spring woods were, and how the birds sang in the trees, and how the
brook sparkled and murmured at the roadside. The recent rain had washed
the atmosphere until it was as clear and sparkling and heady as new
wine, and the footing was firm and hard. As one tramped he could
scarcely keep from singing or shouting aloud for the very joy of the
day.

“I think,” I said to myself, “I've never been in a better country,” and
it did not seem to me I cared to know where the gray road ran, nor how
far away the blue hills were.

“It is wonderful enough anywhere here,” I said.

And presently I turned from the road and climbed a gently sloping
hillside among oak and chestnut trees. The earth was well carpeted
for my feet, and here and there upon the hillside, where the sun came
through the green roof of foliage, were warm splashes Of yellow light,
and here and there, on shadier slopes, the new ferns were spread upon
the earth like some lacy coverlet. I finally sat down at the foot of
a tree where through a rift in the foliage in the valley below I could
catch a glimpse in the distance of the meadows and the misty blue hills.
I was glad to rest, just rest, for the two previous days of hard labour,
the labour and the tramping, had wearied me, and I sat for a long time
quietly looking about me, scarcely thinking at all, but seeing, hearing,
smelling--feeling the spring morning, and the woods and the hills, and
the patch of sky I could see.

For a long, long time I sat thus, but finally my mind began to flow
again, and I thought how fine it would be if I had some good friend
there with me to enjoy the perfect surroundings--some friend who would
understand. And I thought of the Vedders with whom I had so recently
spent a wonderful day; and I wished that they might be with me; there
were so many things to be said--to be left unsaid. Upon this it occurred
to me, suddenly, whimsically, and I exclaimed aloud:

“Why, I'll just call them up.”

Half turning to the trunk of the tree where I sat, I placed one hand to
my ear and the other to my lips and said:

“Hello, Central, give me Mr. Vedder.”

I waited a moment, smiling a little at my own absurdity and yet quite
captivated by the enterprise.

“Is this Mr. Vedder? Oh, Mrs. Vedder! Well, this is David Grayson.”....

“Yes, the very same. A bad penny, a rolling stone.”....

“Yes. I want you both to come here as quickly as you can. I have the
most important news for you. The mountain laurels are blooming, and
the wild strawberries are setting their fruit. Yes, yes, and in the
fields--all around here, to-day there are wonderful white patches of
daisies, and from where I sit I can see an old meadow as yellow as gold
with buttercups. And the bobolinks are hovering over the low spots. Oh,
but it is fine here--and we are not together!”....

“No; I cannot give exact directions. But take the Long Road and turn at
the turning by the tulip-tree, and you will find me at home. Come right
in without knocking.”


I hung up the receiver. For a single instant it had seemed almost true,
and indeed I believe--I wonder--

Some day, I thought, just a bit sadly, for I shall probably not be here
then--some day, we shall be able to call our friends through space and
time. Some day we shall discover that marvellously simple coherer by
which we may better utilize the mysterious ether of love.

For a time I was sad with thoughts of the unaccomplished future, and
then I reflected that if I could not call up the Vedders so informally
I could at least write down a few paragraphs which would give them some
faint impression of that time and place. But I had no sooner taken
out my note-book and put down a sentence or two than I stuck fast. How
foolish and feeble written words are anyway! With what glib facility
they describe, but how inadequately they convey. A thousand times I have
thought to myself, “If only I could WRITE!”

Not being able to write I turned, as I have so often turned before, to
some good old book, trusting that I might find in the writing of another
man what I lacked in my own. I took out my battered copy of Montaigne
and, opening it at random, as I love to do, came, as luck would have it,
upon a chapter devoted to coaches, in which there is much curious (and
worthless) information, darkened with Latin quotations. This reading had
an unexpected effect upon me.

I could not seem to keep my mind down upon the printed page; it kept
bounding away at the sight of the distant hills, at the sound of a
woodpecker on a dead stub which stood near me, and at the thousand and
one faint rustlings, creepings, murmurings, tappings, which animate
the mystery of the forest. How dull indeed appeared the printed page
in comparison with the book of life, how shut-in its atmosphere, how
tinkling and distant the sound of its voices. Suddenly I shut my book
with a snap.

“Musty coaches and Latin quotations!” I exclaimed. “Montaigne's no
writer for the open air. He belongs at a study fire on a quiet evening!”

I had anticipated, when I started out, many a pleasant hour by the
roadside or in the woods with my books, but this was almost the first
opportunity I had found for reading (as it was almost the last), so full
was the present world of stirring events. As for poor old Montaigne, I
have been out of harmony with him ever since, nor have I wanted him in
the intimate case at my elbow.

After a long time in the forest, and the sun having reached the high
heavens, I gathered up my pack and set forth again along the slope of
the hills--not hurrying, just drifting and enjoying every sight and
sound. And thus walking I came in sight, through the trees, of a
glistening pool of water and made my way straight toward it.


A more charming spot I have rarely seen. In some former time an old
mill had stood at the foot of the little valley, and a ruinous stone
dam still held the water in a deep, quiet pond between two round hills.
Above it a brook ran down through the woods, and below, with a pleasant
musical sound, the water dripped over the mossy stone lips of the dam
and fell into the rocky pool below. Nature had long ago healed the
wounds of men; she had half-covered the ruined mill with verdure, had
softened the stone walls of the dam with mosses and lichens, and had
crept down the steep hillside and was now leaning so far out over the
pool that she could see her reflection in the quiet water.

Near the upper end of the pond I found a clear white sand-bank, where
no doubt a thousand fishermen had stood, half hidden by the willows, to
cast for trout in the pool below. I intended merely to drink and moisten
my face, but as I knelt by the pool and saw my reflection in the clear
water wanted something more than that! In a moment I had thrown aside my
bag and clothes and found myself wading naked into the water.

It was cold! I stood a moment there in the sunny air, the great world
open around me, shuddering, for I dreaded the plunge--and then with a
run, a shout and a splash I took the deep water. Oh, but it was fine!
With long, deep strokes I carried myself fairly to the middle of the
pond. The first chill was succeeded by a tingling glow, and I can convey
no idea whatever of the glorious sense of exhilaration I had. I swam
with the broad front stroke, I swam on my side, head half submerged,
with a deep under stroke, and I rolled over on my back and swam with the
water lapping my chin. Thus I came to the end of the pool near the old
dam, touched my feet on the bottom, gave a primeval whoop, and dove back
into the water again. I have rarely experienced keener physical joy.
After swimming thus boisterously for a time, I quieted down to long,
leisurely strokes, conscious of the water playing across my shoulders
and singing at my ears, and finally, reaching the centre of the pond, I
turned over on my back and, paddling lazily, watched the slow procession
of light clouds across the sunlit openings of the trees above me. Away
up in the sky I could see a hawk slowly swimming about (in his element
as I was in mine), and nearer at hand, indeed fairly in the thicket
about the pond, I could hear a wood-thrush singing.

And so, shaking the water out of my hair and swimming with long and
leisurely strokes, I returned to the sand-bank, and there, standing in a
spot of warm sunshine, I dried myself with the towel from my bag. And I
said to myself:

“Surely it is good to be alive at a time like this!”

Slowly I drew on my clothes, idling there in the sand, and afterward I
found an inviting spot in an old meadow where I threw myself down on the
grass under an apple-tree and looked up into the shadowy places in the
foliage above me. I felt a delicious sense of physical well-being, and I
was pleasantly tired.

So I lay there--and the next thing I knew, I turned over, feeling cold
and stiff, and opened my eyes upon the dusky shadows of late evening. I
had been sleeping for hours!


The next few minutes (or was it an hour or eternity?), I recall as
containing some of the most exciting and, when all is said, amusing
incidents in my whole life. And I got quite a new glimpse of that
sometimes bumptious person known as David Grayson.

The first sensation I had was one of complete panic. What was I to do?
Where was I to go?

Hastily seizing my bag--and before I was half awake--I started rapidly
across the meadow, in my excitement tripping and falling several times
in the first hundred yards. In daylight I have no doubt that I should
easily have seen a gateway or at least an opening from the old meadow,
but in the fast-gathering darkness it seemed to me that the open field
was surrounded on every side by impenetrable forests. Absurd as it
may seem, for no one knows what his mind will do at such a moment,
I recalled vividly a passage from Stanley's story of his search for
Livingstone, in which he relates how he escaped from a difficult place
in the jungle by KEEPING STRAIGHT AHEAD.

I print these words in capitals because they seemed written that night
upon the sky. KEEPING STRAIGHT AHEAD, I entered the forest on one side
of the meadow (with quite a heroic sense of adventure), but scraped my
shin on a fallen log and ran into a tree with bark on it that felt like
a gigantic currycomb--and stopped!

Up to this point I think I was still partly asleep. Now, however, I
waked up.

“All you need,” said I to myself in my most matter-of-fact tone, “is a
little cool sense. Be quiet now and reason it out.”

So I stood there for some moments reasoning it out, with the result that
I turned back and found the meadow again.

“What a fool I've been!” I said. “Isn't it perfectly plain that I should
have gone down to the pond, crossed over the inlet, and reached the road
by the way I came?”

Having thus settled my problem, and congratulating myself on my
perspicacity, I started straight for the mill-pond, but to my utter
amazement, in the few short hours while I had been asleep, that entire
body of water had evaporated, the dam had disappeared, and the stream
had dried up. I must certainly present the facts in this remarkable case
to some learned society.

I then decided to return to the old apple-tree where I had slept, which
now seemed quite like home, but, strange to relate, the apple-tree had
also completely vanished from the enchanted meadow. At that I began to
suspect that in coming out of the forest I had somehow got into another
and somewhat similar old field. I have never had a more confused or
eerie sensation; not fear, but a sort of helplessness in which for
an instant I actually began to doubt whether it was I myself, David
Grayson, who stood there in the dark meadow, or whether I was the victim
of a peculiarly bad dream. I suppose many other people have had these
sensations under similar conditions, but they were new to me.

I turned slowly around and looked for a light; I think I never wanted so
much to see some sign of human habitation as I did at that moment.

What a coddled world we live in, truly. That being out after dark in a
meadow should so disturb the very centre of our being! In all my life,
indeed, and I suppose the same is true of ninety-nine out of a hundred
of the people in America to-day, I had never before found myself where
nothing stood between nature and me, where I had no place to sleep, no
shelter for the night--nor any prospect of finding one. I was infinitely
less resourceful at that moment than a rabbit, or a partridge, or a gray
squirrel.



Presently I sat down on the ground where I had been standing, with a
vague fear (absurd to look back upon) that it, too, in some manner might
slip away from under me. And as I sat there I began to have familiar
gnawings at the pit of my stomach, and I remembered that, save for
a couple of Mrs. Clark's doughnuts eaten while I was sitting on the
hillside, ages ago, I had had nothing since my early breakfast.

With this thought of my predicament--and the glimpse I had of myself
“hungry and homeless”--the humour of the whole situation suddenly came
over me, and, beginning with a chuckle, I wound up, as my mind dwelt
upon my recent adventures, with a long, loud, hearty laugh.

As I laughed--and what a roar it made in that darkness!--I got up on my
feet and looked up at the sky. One bright star shone out over the woods,
and in high heavens I could see dimly the white path of the Milky Way.
And all at once I seemed again to be in command of myself and of the
world. I felt a sudden lift and thrill of the spirits, a warm sense that
this too was part of the great adventure--the Thing Itself.

“This is the light,” I said looking up again at the sky and the single
bright star, “which is set for me to-night. I will make my bed by it.”

I can hope to make no one understand (unless he understands already)
with what joy of adventure I now crept through the meadow toward the
wood. It was an unknown, unexplored world I was in, and I, the fortunate
discoverer, had here to shift for himself, make his home under the
stars! Marquette on the wild shores of the Mississippi, or Stanley in
Africa, had no joy that I did not know at that moment.

I crept along the meadow and came at last to the wood. Here I chose a
somewhat sheltered spot at the foot of a large tree--and yet a spot not
so obscured that I could not look out over the open spaces of the meadow
and see the sky. Here, groping in the darkness, like some primitive
creature, I raked together a pile of leaves with my fingers, and found
dead twigs and branches of trees; but in that moist forest (where the
rain had fallen only the day before) my efforts to kindle a fire were
unavailing. Upon this, I considered using some pages from my notebook,
but another alternative suggested itself:

“Why not Montaigne?”

With that I groped for the familiar volume, and with a curious sensation
of satisfaction I tore out a handful of pages from the back.

“Better Montaigne than Grayson,” I said, with a chuckle. It was amazing
how Montaigne sparkled and crackled when he was well lighted.

“There goes a bundle of quotations from Vergil,” I said, “and there's
his observations on the eating of fish. There are more uses than one for
the classics.”

So I ripped out a good part of another chapter, and thus, by coaxing,
got my fire to going. It was not difficult after that to find enough
fuel to make it blaze up warmly.

I opened my bag and took out the remnants of the luncheon which Mrs.
Clark had given me that morning; and I was surprised and delighted to
find, among the other things, a small bottle of coffee. This suggested
all sorts of pleasing possibilities and, the spirit of invention being
now awakened, I got out my tin cup, split a sapling stick so I could fit
it into the handle, and set the cup, full of coffee, on the coals at the
edge of the fire. It was soon heated, and although I spilled some of it
in getting it off, and although it was well spiced with ashes, I enjoyed
it, with Mrs. Clark's doughnuts and sandwiches (some of which I toasted
with a sapling fork) as thoroughly, I think, as ever I enjoyed any meal.

How little we know--we who dread life--how much there is in life!

My activities around the fire had warmed me to the bone, and after I
was well through with my meal I gathered a plentiful supply of wood and
placed it near at hand, I got out my waterproof cape and put it on, and,
finally piling more sticks on the fire, I sat down comfortably at the
foot of the tree.


I wish I could convey the mystery and the beauty of that night. Did you
ever sit by a campfire and watch the flames dance, and the sparks fly
upward into the cool dark air? Did you ever see the fitful light among
the tree-depths, at one moment opening vast shadowy vistas into the
forest, at the next dying downward and leaving it all in sombre mystery?
It came to me that night with the wonderful vividness of a fresh
experience.

And what a friendly and companionable thing a campfire is! How generous
and outright it is! It plays for you when you wish so be lively, and it
glows for you when you wish to be reflective.

After a while, for I did not feel in the least sleepy, I stepped out
of the woods to the edge of the pasture. All around me lay the dark and
silent earth, and above the blue bowl of the sky, all glorious with
the blaze of a million worlds. Sometimes I have been oppressed by this
spectacle of utter space, of infinite distance, of forces too great for
me to grasp or understand, but that night it came upon me with fresh
wonder and power, and with a sense of great humility that I belonged
here too, that I was a part of it all--and would not be neglected or
forgotten. It seemed to me I never had a moment of greater faith than
that.

And so, with a sense of satisfaction and peace, I returned to my fire.
As I sat there I could hear the curious noises of the woods, the little
droppings, cracklings, rustlings which seemed to make all the world
alive. I even fancied I could see small bright eyes looking out at my
fire, and once or twice I was almost sure I heard voices--whispering--,
perhaps the voices of the woods.

Occasionally I added, with some amusement, a few dry pages of Montaigne
to the fire, and watched the cheerful blaze that followed.

“No,” said I, “Montaigne is not for the open spaces and the stars.
Without a roof over his head Montaigne would--well, die of sneezing.”

So I sat all night long there by the tree. Occasionally I dropped into a
light sleep, and then, as my fire died down, I grew chilly and awakened,
to build up the fire and doze again. I saw the first faint gray streaks
of dawn above the trees, I saw the pink glow in the east before the
sunrise, and I watched the sun himself rise upon a new day--

When I walked out into the meadow by daylight and looked about me
curiously, I saw, not forty rods away, the back of a barn.


“Be you the fellow that was daown in my cowpasture all night?” asked the
sturdy farmer.

“I'm that fellow,” I said.

“Why didn't you come right up to the house?”

“Well--” I said, and then paused.

“Well...” said I.



CHAPTER VIII. THE HEDGE

Strange, strange, how small the big world is!

“Why didn't you come right into the house?” the sturdy farmer had asked
me when I came out of the meadow where I had spent the night under the
stars.

“Well,” I said, turning the question as adroitly as I could, “I'll make
it up by going into the house now.”

So I went with him into his fine, comfortable house.

“This is my wife,” said he.

A woman stood there facing me. “Oh!” she exclaimed, “Mr. Grayson!”

I recalled swiftly a child--a child she seemed then--with braids down
her back, whom I had known when I first came to my farm. She had grown
up, married, and had borne three children, while I had been looking the
other way for a minute or two. She had not been in our neighborhood for
several years.

“And how is your sister and Doctor McAlway?”

Well, we had quite a wonderful visit, she made breakfast for me, asking
and talking eagerly as I ate.

“We've just had news that old Mr. Toombs is dead.”

“Dead!” I exclaimed, dropping my fork; “old Nathan Toombs!”

“Yes, he was my uncle. Did you know him?”

“I knew Nathan Toombs,” I said.

I spent two days there with the Ransomes, for they would not hear of my
leaving, and half of our spare time, I think, was spent in discussing
Nathan Toombs. I was not able to get him out of my mind for days, for
his death was one of those events which prove so much and leave so much
unproven.

I can recall vividly my astonishment at the first evidence I ever had of
the strange old man or of his work. It was not very long after I came
to my farm to live. I had taken to spending my spare evenings--the long
evenings of summer--in exploring the country roads for miles around,
getting acquainted with each farmstead, each bit of grove and meadow and
marsh, making my best bow to each unfamiliar hill, and taking everywhere
that toll of pleasure which comes of quiet discovery.

One evening, having walked farther than usual, I came quite suddenly
around a turn in the road and saw stretching away before me an
extraordinary sight.

I feel that I am conveying no adequate impression of what I beheld
by giving it any such prim and decorous name as--a Hedge. It was a
menagerie, a living, green menagerie! I had no sooner seen it than I
began puzzling my brain as to whether one of the curious ornaments into
which the upper part of the hedge had been clipped and trimmed was made
to represent the head of a horse, or a camel, or an Egyptian sphinx.

The hedge was of arbor vitae and as high as a man's waist. At more or
less regular intervals the trees in it had been allowed to grow much
taller and had been wonderfully pruned into the similitude of towers,
pinnacles, bells, and many other strange designs. Here and there the
hedge held up a spindling umbrella of greenery, sometimes a double
umbrella--a little one above the big one--and over the gateway at the
centre; as a sort of final triumph, rose a grandiose arch of interlaced
branches upon which the artist had outdone himself in marvels of
ornamentation.

I shall never forget the sensation of delight I had over this discovery,
or of how I walked, tiptoe, along the road in front, studying each of
the marvellous adornments. How eagerly, too, I looked over at the house
beyond--a rather bare, bleak house set on a slight knoll or elevation
and guarded at one corner by a dark spruce tree. At some distance
behind I saw a number of huge barns, a cattle yard and a silo--all the
evidences of prosperity--with well-nurtured fields, now yellowing with
the summer crops, spreading pleasantly away on every hand.

It was nearly dark before I left that bit of roadside, and I shall never
forget the eerie impression I had as I turned back to take a final look
at the hedge, the strange, grotesque aspect it presented there in the
half light with the bare, lonely house rising from the knoll behind.


It was not until some weeks later that I met the owner of the wonderful
hedge. By that time, however, having learned of my interest, I found
the whole countryside alive with stories about it and about Old Nathan
Toombs, its owner. It was as though I had struck the rock of refreshment
in a weary land.

I remember distinctly how puzzled was by the stories I heard. The
neighbourhood portrait--and ours is really a friendly neighbourhood--was
by no means flattering. Old Toombs was apparently of that type
of hard-shelled, grasping, self-reliant, old-fashioned farmer not
unfamiliar to many country neighbourhoods. He had come of tough old
American stock and he was a worker, a saver, and thus he had grown
rich, the richest farmer in the whole neighbourhood. He was a regular
individualistic American.

“A dour man,” said the Scotch Preacher, “but just--you must admit that
he is just.”

There was no man living about whom the Scotch Preacher could not find
something good to say.

“Yes, just,” replied Horace, “but hard--hard, and as mean as pusley.”

This portrait was true enough in itself, for I knew just the sort of an
aggressive, undoubtedly irritable old fellow it pictured, but somehow,
try as I would, I could not see any such old fellow wasting his moneyed
hours clipping bells, umbrellas, and camel's heads on his ornamental
greenery. It left just that incongruity which is at once the lure,
the humour, and the perplexity of human life. Instead of satisfying my
curiosity I was more anxious than ever to see Old Toombs with my own
eyes.

But the weeks passed and somehow I did not meet him. He was a lonely,
unneighbourly old fellow. He had apparently come to fit into the
community without ever really becoming a part of it. His neighbours
accepted him as they accepted a hard hill in the town road. From time
to time he would foreclose a mortgage where he had loaned money to some
less thrifty farmer, or he would extend his acres by purchase, hard cash
down, or he would build a bigger barn. When any of these things happened
the community would crowd over a little, as it were, to give him more
room. It is a curious thing, and tragic, too, when you come to think of
it, how the world lets alone those people who appear to want to be let
alone. “I can live to myself,” says the unneighbourly one. “Well, live
to yourself, then,” cheerfully responds the world, and it goes about its
more or less amusing affairs and lets the unneighbourly one cut himself
off.

So our small community had let Old Toombs go his way with all his money,
his acres, his hedge, and his reputation for being a just man.

Not meeting him, therefore, in the familiar and friendly life of the
neighbourhood, I took to walking out toward his farm, looking freshly
at the wonderful hedge and musing upon that most fascinating of all
subjects--how men come to be what they are. And at last I was rewarded.

One day I had scarcely reached the end of the hedge when I saw Old
Toombs himself, moving toward me down the country road. Though I had
never seen him before, I was at no loss to identify him. The first and
vital impression he gave me, if I can compress it into a single word,
was, I think, force--force. He came stubbing down the country road with
a brown hickory stick in his hand which at every step he set vigorously
into the soft earth. Though not tall, he gave the impression of being
enormously strong. He was thick, solid, firm--thick through the body,
thick through the thighs; and his shoulders--what shoulders they
were!--round like a maple log; and his great head with its thatching
of coarse iron-gray hair, though thrust slightly forward, seemed set
immovably upon them.

He presented such a forbidding appearance that I was of two minds about
addressing him. Dour he was indeed! Nor shall I ever forget how he
looked when I spoke to him. He stopped short there in the road. On his
big square nose he wore a pair of curious spring-bowed glasses with
black rims. For a moment he looked at me through these glasses, raising
his chin a little, and then, deliberately wrinkling his nose, they fell
off and dangled at the length of the faded cord by which they were hung.
There was something almost uncanny about this peculiar habit of his and
of the way in which, afterward, he looked at me from under his bushy
gray brows. This was in truth the very man of the neighbourhood
portrait.

“I am a new settler here,” I said, “and I've been interested in looking
at your wonderful hedge.”

The old man's eyes rested upon me a moment with a mingled look of
suspicion and hostility.

“So you've heard o' me,” he said in a high-pitched voice, “and you've
heard o' my hedge.”

Again he paused and looked me over. “Well,” he said, with an
indescribably harsh, cackling laugh, “I warrant you've heard nothing
good o' me down there. I'm a skinflint, ain't I? I'm a hard citizen,
ain't I? I grind the faces o' the poor, don't I?”

At first his words were marked by a sort of bitter humour, but as
he continued to speak his voice rose higher and higher until it was
positively menacing.

There were just two things I could do--haul down the flag and retreat
ingloriously, or face the music. With a sudden sense of rising
spirits--for such things do not often happen to a man in a quiet country
road--I paused a moment, looking him square in the eye.

“Yes,” I said, with great deliberation, “you've given me just about the
neighborhood picture of yourself as I have had it. They do say you are
a skinflint, yes, and a hard man. They say that you are rich and
friendless; they say that while you are a just man, you do not know
mercy. These are terrible things to say of any man if they are true.”

I paused. The old man looked for a moment as though he were going to
strike me with his stick, but he neither stirred nor spoke. It was
evidently a wholly new experience for him.

“Yes,” I said, “you are not popular in this community, but what do
you suppose I care about that? I'm interested in your hedge. What I'm
curious to know--and I might as well tell you frankly--is how such a
man as you are reputed to be could grow such an extraordinary hedge. You
must have been at it a very long time.”

I was surprised at the effect of my words. The old man turned
partly aside and looked for a moment along the proud and flaunting
embattlements of the green marvel before us. Then he said in a moderate
voice:

“It's a putty good hedge, a putty good hedge.”

“I've got him,” I thought exultantly, “I've got him!”

“How long ago did you start it?” I pursued my advantage eagerly.

“Thirty-two years come spring,” said he.

“Thirty-two years!” I repeated; “you've been at it a long time.”

With that I plied him with questions in the liveliest manner, and in
five minutes I had the gruff old fellow stumping along at my side and
pointing out the various notable-features of his wonderful creation.
His suppressed excitement was quite wonderful to see. He would point his
hickory stick with a poking motion, and, when he looked up, instead of
throwing back his big, rough head, he bent at the hips, thus imparting
an impression of astonishing solidity.

“It took me all o' ten years to get that bell right,” he said, and,
“Take a look at that arch: now what is your opinion o' that?”

Once, in the midst of our conversation, he checked himself abruptly and
looked around at me with a sudden dark expression of suspicion. I saw
exactly what lay in his mind, but I continued my questioning as though
I perceived no change in him. It was only momentary, however, and he was
soon as much interested as before. He talked as though he had not had
such an opportunity before in years--and I doubt whether he had. It
was plain to see that if any one ever loved anything in this world, Old
Toombs loved that hedge of his. Think of it, indeed! He had lived with
it, nurtured it, clipped it, groomed it--for thirty-two years.

So we walked down the sloping field within the hedge, and it seemed
as though one of the deep mysteries of human nature was opening there
before me. What strange things men set their hearts upon!

Thus, presently, we came nearly to the farther end of the hedge. Here
the old man stopped and turned around, facing me.

“Do you see that valley?” he asked. “Do you see that slopin' valley up
through the meadow?”

His voice rose suddenly to a sort of high-pitched violence.

“That' passel o' hounds up there,” he said, “want to build a road down
my valley.”

He drew his breath fiercely.

“They want to build a road through my land. They want to ruin my
farm--they want to cut down my hedge. I'll fight 'em. I'll fight 'em.
I'll show 'em yet!”

It was appalling. His face grew purple, his eyes narrowed to pin points
and grew red and angry--like the eyes of an infuriated boar. His hands
shook. Suddenly he turned upon me, poising his stick in his hand, and
said violently.

“And who are you? Who are you? Are you one of these surveyor fellows?”

“My name,” I answered as quietly as I could, “is Grayson. I live on the
old Mather farm. I am not in the least interested in any of your road
troubles.”

He looked at me a moment more, and then seemed to shake himself or
shudder, his eyes dropped away and he began walking toward his house.
He had taken only a few steps, however, before he turned, and, without
looking at me, asked if I would like to see the tools he used for
trimming his hedge. When I hesitated, for I was decidedly uncomfortable,
he came up to me and laid his hand awkwardly on my arm.

“You'll see something, I warrant, you never see before.”

It was so evident that he regretted his outbreak that I followed him,
and he showed me an odd double ladder set on low wheels which he said he
used in trimming the higher parts of his hedge.

“It's my own invention,” he said with pride.

“And that”--he pointed as we came out of the tool shed--“is my house--a
good house. I planned it all myself. I never needed to take lessons of
any carpenter I ever see. And there's my barns. What do you think o' my
barns? Ever see any bigger ones? They ain't any bigger in this country
than Old Toombs's barns. They don't like Old Toombs, but they ain't any
of one of 'em can ekal his barns!”

He followed me down to the roadside now quite loquacious. Even after I
had thanked him and started to go he called after me.

When I stopped he came forward hesitatingly--and I had the impressions,
suddenly, and for the first time that he was an old man. It may have
been the result of his sudden fierce explosion of anger, but his hand
shook, his face was pale, and he seemed somehow broken.

“You--you like my hedge?” he asked.

“It is certainly wonderful hedge,” I said. “I never have seen anything
like it?”

“The' AIN'T nothing like it,” he responded, quickly. “The' ain't nothing
like it anywhere.”

In the twilight as I passed onward I saw the lonely figure of the old
man moving with his hickory stick up the pathway to his lonely house.
The poor rich old man!

“He thinks he can live wholly to himself,” I said aloud.

I thought, as I tramped homeward, of our friendly and kindly community,
of how we often come together of an evening with skylarking and
laughter, of how we weep with one another, of how we join in making
better roads and better schools, and building up the Scotch Preacher's
friendly little church. And in all these things Old Toombs has never had
a part. He is not even missed.


As a matter of fact, I reflected, and this is a strange, deep thing, no
man is in reality more dependent upon the community which he despises
and holds at arm's length than this same Old Nathan Toombs. Everything
he has, everything he does, gives evidence of it. And I don't mean this
in any mere material sense, though of course his wealth and his farm
would mean no more than the stones in his hills to him if he did not
have us here around him. Without our work, our buying, our selling, our
governing, his dollars would be dust. But we are still more necessary
to him in other ways: the unfriendly man is usually the one who
demands most from his neighbours. Thus, if he have not people's love or
confidence, then he will smite them until they fear him, or admire him,
or hate him. Oh, no man, however may try, can hold himself aloof!

I came home deeply stirred from my visit with Old Toombs and lost no
time in making further inquiries. I learned, speedily, that there was
indeed something in the old man's dread of a road being built through
his farm. The case was already in the courts. His farm was a very old
one and extensive, and of recent years a large settlement of small
farmers had been developing the rougher lands in the upper part of the
townships called the Swan Hill district. Their only way to reach the
railroad was by a rocky, winding road among the 'hills,' while their
outlet was down a gently sloping valley through Old Toombs's farm. They
were now so numerous and politically important that they had stirred up
the town authorities. A proposition had been made to Old Toombs for
a right-of-way; they argued with him that it was a good thing for the
whole country, that it would enhance the values of his own upper lands,
and that they would pay him far more for a right-of-way than the land
was actually worth, but he had spurned them--I can imagine with what
vehemence.

“Let 'em drive round,” he said. “Didn't they know what they'd have to do
when they settled up there? What a passel o' curs! They can keep off o'
my land, or I'll have the law on 'em.”

And thus the matter came to the courts with the town attempting to
condemn the land for a road through Old Toombs's farm.

“What can we do?” asked the Scotch Preacher, who was deeply distressed
by the bitterness of feeling displayed. “There is no getting to the man.
He will listen to no one.”

At one time I thought of going over and talking with Old Toombs myself,
for it seemed that I had been able to get nearer to him than any one
had in a long time. But I dreaded it. I kept dallying--for what, indeed,
could I have said to him? If he had been suspicious of me before,
how much more hostile he might be when I expressed an interest in his
difficulties. As to reaching the Swan Hill settlers, they were now
aroused to an implacable state of bitterness; and they had the people of
the whole community with them, for no one liked Old Toombs.

Thus while I hesitated time passed and my next meeting with Old Toombs,
instead of being premeditated, came about quite unexpectedly. I was
walking in the town road late one afternoon when I heard a wagon
rattling behind me, and then, quite suddenly, a shouted, “Whoa.”

Looking around, I saw Old Toombs, his great solid figure mounted high
on the wagon seat, the reins held fast in the fingers of one hand. I was
struck by the strange expression in his face--a sort of grim exaltation.
As I stepped aside he burst out in a loud, shrill, cackling laugh:

“He-he-he--he-he-he--”

I was too astonished to speak at once. Ordinarily when I meet any one in
the town road it is in my heart to cry out to him,

“Good morning, friend,” or, “How are you, brother?” but I had no such
prompting that day.

“Git in, Grayson,” he said; “git in, git in.”

I climbed up beside him, and he slapped me on the knee with another
burst of shrill laughter.

“They thought they had the old man,” he said, starting up his horses.
“They thought there weren't no law left in Israel. I showed 'em.”

I cannot convey the bitter triumphancy of his voice.

“You mean the road case?” I asked.

“Road case!” he exploded, “they wan't no road case; they didn't have no
road case. I beat 'em. I says to 'em, 'What right hev any o' you on
my property? Go round with you,' I says. Oh, I beat 'em. If they'd had
their way, they'd 'a' cut through my hedge--the hounds!”


When he set me down at my door, I had said hardly a word. There seemed
nothing that could be said. I remember I stood for some time watching
the old man as he rode away, his wagon jolting in the country road,
his stout figure perched firmly in the seat. I went in with a sense of
heaviness at the heart.

“Harriet,” I said, “there are some things in this world beyond human
remedy.”

Two evenings later I was surprised to see the Scotch Preacher drive up
to my gate and hastily tie his horse.

“David,” said he, “there's bad business afoot. A lot of the young
fellows in Swan Hill are planning a raid on Old Toombs's hedge. They are
coming down to-night.”

I got my hat and jumped in with him. We drove up the hilly road and out
around Old Toombs's farm and thus came, near to the settlement. I had no
conception of the bitterness that the lawsuit had engendered.

“Where once you start men hating one another,” said the Scotch Preacher,
“there's utterly no end of it.”

I have seen our Scotch Preacher in many difficult places, but never have
I seen him rise to greater heights than he did that night. It is not in
his preaching that Doctor McAlway excels, but what a power he is among
men! He was like some stern old giant, standing there and holding up the
portals of civilization. I saw men melt under his words like wax; I saw
wild young fellows subdued into quietude; I saw unwise old men set to
thinking.

“Man, man,” he'd say, lapsing in his earnestness into the broad Scotch
accent of his youth, “you canna' mean plunder, and destruction, and
riot! You canna! Not in this neighbourhood!”

“What about Old Toombs?” shouted one of the boys.

I never shall forget how Docto

Showing first 200,000 characters. Full text: gutenberg.org/ebooks/2479