Classic Audiobook Collection - October Vagabonds by Richard le Gallienne ~ Full Audiobook [poetry]

Episode Date: March 28, 2023

October Vagabonds by Richard le Gallienne audiobook. Genre: poetry Richard and his friend Colin must sadly return from their distant hermitage to New York City at summer's end. However, rather than take the train on the 430 mile trip to the city, the two decide to walk the route, for as Richard stated: 'Don't you hate the idea of being hurled along in a train, and suddenly shot into the city again, like a package through a tube?' Certainly a lengthy walk it would be, but the two decide that the trip itself can be the most rewarding, and their trek begins. Along the way, they meet people they never would have met; they witness landscape, nature and habitat which they wouldn't have otherwise seen; and they learn about themselves and their place in the world which they may not have otherwise comprehended. A clever travelogue of two artistic types from first person point of view. For ad-free listening try our premium subscription Chapters (Approximate) (00:00:00) Chapter 1 (00:21:00) Chapter 2 (00:48:12) Chapter 3 (01:26:05) Chapter 4 (02:13:08) Chapter 5 (02:44:50) Chapter 6 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

october vagabonds chapter i the epitaph of summer as i started out from the farm with a basket of potatoes for our supper in the shack half a mile up the hillside where we had made our summer camp my eye fell on a notice affixed to a gate-post and as i read it my heart sank sank as the sun was sinking yonder with a wistful glory behind the purple ridge i tore the paper from the gate-post and put it in my pocket with a sigh it is true then i said to myself we have got to admit it i must show this to colin then i continued my way across the empty close gleaned cornfield across the railway track and plunging into the orchard on the other side where here and there among the trees the torrents of apples were being already caught in boxes by the thrifty husbandman began to breast the hill intersected with thickly wooded watercourses high up somewhere amid the cloud of beeches and buttonwood trees our log-treece our log-traked with thickly wooded watercourses high up somewhere amid the cloud of beeches and buttonwood trees our log cabin lay hid in a gully made by the little stream that filled our pails with a silver trickle over a staircase of shelving rock and up there colin was already busy with his skilled french cookery preparing our evening meal the woods still made a pompous show of leaves but i knew it to be a hollow sham a mask of foliage soon to be stripped off by equinoctial fury a precarious state setting, ready to be blown down at the first gusts from the north.

A forlorn bird here and there made a thin piping as it flitted homelessly amid the bleached long grasses, and the frail silk of the milkweed pods came floating along ghost-like on the evening breeze. Yes, it was true. Summer was beginning to pack up. The great stage carpenter was about to change the scene. And the great theater was full of echoes and sighs and sounds of farewell. Of course, we had known it for some time, but had not had the heart to admit it to each other, could not find the courage to say that one more golden summer was at an end. But the paper I had torn from the roadside left us no further shred of illusion.

There was an authoritative announcement. There was no blinking. A notice to quit there was no gainsaying. As I came to the crest of the hill and inside of the shack, shining with early lamplight deep down among the trees of the gully, I could see Colin innocently at work on a salad and hear him humming to himself, his eternal, Vival le Capitan.

It was too pathetic. I believe the tears came to my eyes. "'Colon,' I said, as I at length arrived and set down my basket of potatoes. "'Read this.' He took the paper from my hand and read, "'Son up Baseball Club, September 19, 1908. Last match of the season.' He knew what I meant.

"'Yes,' he said. "'It is the epitaph of summer.' chapter two at evening i came to the wood my solitude had been kindly lent to me for the summer by a friend the prophet proprietor of a certain famous well of truth some four miles away whither souls flocked from all parts of america to drink of the living waters i had been feeling downworn and world weary and my friend had written me saying at eelim are twelve wells and seventy palm trees and so to elm i had betaken myself after a brief sojourn there drinking of the waters and building up of the strong diet of the sage's living words he had given me the key to some green woods and streams of his and bade me take them from my hermitage i had a great making up to arrange with nature and i half wondered how she would receive me after all this long time but when did that mother ever turn her face from her child however truant from her care it had been with a beating heart that i had passed up the hillside on an evening in early june and approached the hushed green temple,

wherein I was to take summer sanctuary from a wicked world. But if, as I hope, the reader has no objection to an occasional interlude of verse in all this prose, I will copy for him here the poem I wrote next morning, it being always easier to tell the strict truth in poetry rather than in prose. At evening I came to the wood, and threw myself on the breast of the green mother weeping and the arms of a thousand trees waved and rustled in welcome and murmured rest rest rest the leaves thy brothers shall heal thee thy sisters the flowers bring peace at length i stayed from my weeping and lifted my face from the grass the moon was walking the wood with feet of

mysterious pearl and the great trees held their breath trance-like watching her pass and a bird called out from the shadows with voice as sweet as a girl and then in the holy silence to the great green mother i prayed take me again to thy bosom thy son who so close to thee a foretime filial clung then to the city strayed the painted face of the town the wine and the harlotry. Bave me in lustral dawns, and the morning star and the dew. Make pure my heart as a bird, and innocent as a flower. Make sweet my thoughts as the meadow mint,

oh, make me all anew. And in the strength of beech and oak, gird up my wall with power. I have wandered far, oh my mother, but here I return at last. never again to stray in pilgrimage wanton and wild a broken heart and a contrite here at thy feet i cast oh take me back to thy bosom and the mother answered child it was a wonderful reconciliation a wonderful home-coming and how i luxuriated in the great green forgiveness yes the giant maples had forgiven me and the multitudinous beeches had taken me to their arms the flowers and i were friends again the grass was my brother and the shy nymph-like stream dropping silver vowels into the silence was my sweetly

heart. Chapter 3. Traspers will be For those who value it, there is no form of property that inspires a sense of ownership so jealous as solitude. Rob my orchard, if you will, but beware how you despoil me of my silence. The average noisy person can have no conception what a brutal form of trespass his coarsely cheerful voice may be in the exquisite spiritual hush of the woods, or what shattering discomfort his irrelevant present in the landscape. One day, to my horror, a picnic ruthlessly invaded my sanctuary.

With a roar of beocean hilarity, it tore up the hillside as if it were a storming party, and half a day the sacred woods were vocal with silly cat calls and snatches of profane song i locked up my hermitage and taking my stick sought refuge in flight like the other woodland creatures only coming back at evening with cautious step and peering glance half afraid lest it should still be there no it was gone but its voices seemed to have left gaping wounds across the violated air and the trees to wear a look of desecration but presently the moon arose and washed the solitude clean again and the wounds of silence were healed in the still night next morning i amused myself by writing the following notice which i nailed up on a great elm tree standing guard at the beginning of the woods. Silence. Speaking above a whisper in these woods is forbidden by law.

This notice seems to have had its effect, for from this time on no more hands of marauders invaded my peace. But I had one other case of trespass, of which it is now time to speak. Some short distance from the shack was a clearing in the woods, a thriving wilderness of bramble bushes, pokeberries, myrtleberries, mandrakes, milkweed, mullin, daisies, and whatnot,

a paradise of every sauntering vine and splendid saucy weed. In the center stood a sycamore tree, beneath which it was my custom to smoke a morning pipe and revolve my profound after-breakfast thoughts. judge then of my indignant shock one morning at finding a stranger calmly occupying my place i stood for a moment rooted to the spot in the shadow of the encircling woods and he had not yet seen me as i stood pondering on the best way of dealing with the intruder a sudden revulsion of kindness stole over me for here indeed was a very different figure from what in my first shock of surprise i had expected to see no common intruder this in fact who could have dreamed of coming upon so incongruous an apparition as this in an american woodland how on earth did this picturesque way from the cartier latin come to stray so far away from the boul mish for the little boyish figure of a man that sat sketching in my place was the frenchiest looking frenchman you ever saw

with his dark smoke-dried skin his long straight blue-black hair his fine rather ferocious brown eyes his long delicate french nose his bristling black mustache and short sting-shaped imperial he wore on his head a soft white felt hat somewhat of the shape affected by circus clowns and too small for him his coat was of green velveteen corduroy and he wore knickerbockers of an eloquent plaid he was intently absorbed in sketching a prosperous group of weeds a crazy quilt of white wildly jostling color that had grown up around the decay of a fallen tree and made a fine blazon of contrast against the masked foliage of the background there was no mistake how the stranger loved this patch of colored weeds here was a man whose whole soul was evidently color there was a look in his face as if he could just eat those oranges and purples and soft greens and there was a sort of passionate assurance in the way in which he handled his brushes and delicately plunged them here and there in his color box that spoke a master so intent was he upon his work that when i came up behind him he seemed unaware of my presence though his oblivion was actually the conscious indifference of a landscape painter accustomed to the ambling cow and the awestruck peasant looking over his shoulder as he worked great bunch of weeds he said presently without looking up and still painting drawing the while at a quaint pipe about an inch long

oh you are not the boole mish after all i exclaimed in disappointment aren't i though he said at last looking up in interested surprise everat mention the name of a well-known cafe, one of the many rally points of the Cartier. I should say, I answered. Well! And thereupon we both plunged into delighted reminiscence of that city, which, as none other, makes immediate friends of all her lovers. For a while the woods faded away, and in that tangled clearing rows of the towers of Notre Dame,

and the sin glittered on under its great bridges and again the world smelled of absinthe and picturesque madmen gesticulated in clouds of tobacco smoke and propounded fantastic philosophies amid the rattle of dominoes and afar off in the street a voice was crying adico verre my new friend's talk had the pathos of spiritual exile for as a French in blood as a man could be, born in Bordeaux, of provincial parentage, he had lived most of his life in America. The decoration of a rich man's house in the neighborhood had brought him thus into my solitude, and, that work completed, he would return to his home in New York. Meanwhile, the morning was going by as we talked, and, putting up his sketchbox, he accepted my invitation to join me at lunch. Such was the manner of my meeting, in the guise of a trespasser, with the dear friend to whom

I had brought the decisive news of the death of summer, as he was innocently making a salad in Antiquam, Sylvan, on that sad September evening. Chapter 4. Salad and Moonshine Do you remember that first salad you made us, Colin? I said, as we sat over a while. our coffee, and Colin was filling his little pipe. A daring work of art, a fantastic tour-to-force of apples and lettuce and wild strawberries,

and I don't know what else. I believe I mixed in some May apples, too. It was a great stunt. Well, no more May apples and strawberries this year, he finished with a sigh, and we both sat silently smoking, thinking over the good summer that was gone. After our first meeting, Colin had dropped in to see me again from time to time, and when his work at the great house was finished, I had asked him to come and share my solitude. A veritable child of nature himself, he fitted into my quiet days as silently as a squirrel.

So much of his life had been passed out of doors with trees and skies, long dreamlike days, all alone sketching in solitary places, that he seemed as much a part of the woods as though he were a fawn, and the lores of the elements, and all natural things, bugs and birds, all wildwood creatures, had passed into him with unconscious absorption. A sort of boyish unconsciousness indeed was the keynote and charm of his nature. A less sophisticated creature never followed the mystic calling of art. Fortunately for me, he was not one of those painters who understand and expound their own work. On the contrary, he was a perfect child about it, and painted for no more mysterious reasons than that his eye delighted in beautiful natural effects and that he loved to play with paint and brushes

though he was undoubtedly sensitive somewhere to the mystic side of nature her wordsworthy in intimations you would hardly have guessed it from his talk a bully bit of color would be his craftsmanlike way of describing a twilight full of a of sibling suggestiveness to the literary mind. But, strangely enough, when he brought you his sketch, all your sibling suggestiveness was there, which of course means, after all, that painting was his way of seeing and saying it. The moon rose as we smoked on and began to lattice with silver the darkness of the glen

and flood the hillside with misty radiance. colin made for his sketch-box i must make good use of this moon he said before we go and so must i said i laughing as we both went out into the night he one way and i another to make our different uses of the moon an hour later colin turned in with a panel that seemed made of moonlight how on earth did you do it i said it is as though you had drawn up the moon in a silver bucket from the bottom of a fairy well no no he protested i know better but where is your claire de loon nothing doing i answered well then say those lines you wrote a week or two ago instead berries already do you mean yes here are the lines he meant berries already september soon the shortening day and ike early moon the year is busy with next year's flowers the seeds are ready for next year's showers though a thousand tossing trees there swells, the sigh of the summer's sad farewells. Too soon those leaves in the sunset sky, low down on the wintry ground, will lie,

and grim November and December, leave not of summer to remember. Saving some flower in a book put by, secure from the soft effacing snow, though all the rest of the summer go. End of chapters 1 through 4. Chapters 5 through 8 of October Vagabonds by Richard Legallien. This Librevox recording is in the public domain. Chapter 5. The Green Friend Though we had received such unmistakable notice to quit,

we still lingered on in our solitude, after the manner of defiant tenants whom nothing short of corporal ejection can dislodge. The north wind began to roar in the treetops and shake the doors and windows of the shack, like an angry landlord, but we paid no heed to him. Yet all the time, both of us, in our several ways, were saying our farewells

and packing up our memories for departure. There was an old elm tree which Colin had taken for his summer god, and which he was never tired of painting. He must make the one perfect study of that before we pulled up states, so each day, after our morning adoration of the sun, we would separate about our different ways and business.

The woods were already beginning to wear a wistful, dejected look. There was a feeling of departure everywhere, a sense that the year's excitements were over. The procession had gone by, and there was an empty, purposeless air of waiting about upon things, a sort of despairing longing for something else to happen, and a sure sense that nothing more could happen till next year. Every event in the floral calendar had taken place

with immemorial punctuality and tragic rapidity. all the full-blooded flowers of summer had long since come and gone with their magic faces and their souls of perfume gone were the banners of blossom from the great trees the locust and the chestnut those spendthrifts of the woods that went the pace so gorgeously in june are now sober-coated enough and growing even threadbare all the hum and the honey and breathless bosom beat of things is over the birds sing no more but only chatter about timetables the bee keeps to his hive and the bewildered butterfly in tattered ball dress wonders what has become of his flowery partners the great cricket factory has shut down not a wheel is heard whirring the squirrel has lost his playful air and has an anxious manner as though there were no time to waste before stocking his granary everywhere berries have taken the place of buds and bearded grasses the place of flowers even the golden rod has fallen to rust and the stars of the astor are already tarnished only along the edges of the wood the dry little paper immortelles spread long shrouds crowds and wreaths in the shade.

Suddenly you feel lonely in the woods, which had seemed so companionable all summer. What is it? Who is it that has gone? Though quite alone, there was someone with you all summer. An invisible being filled the woods with his presence, and always at your side, or somewhere nearby.

But today, through all the green halls and chambers of the wood, You seek him in vain. You call, but there is no answer. You wait, but he does not come. He has gone. The wood is an empty palace. The prince went away secretly in the night. The wood is a deserted temple.

The god has betaken himself to some secret abode. Everywhere you come upon chill, abandoned altars, littered debris of summer sun. sacrifices. Maybe he is dead, and, perchance, deeper in the wood, you may come upon his marble form in a winding sheet of drifting leaves. Not a god, maybe you have pictured him, not a prince, but surely as a friend, the mysterious green friend of the green silence and the golden hush of summer noons. The mysterious green friend of the woods. So strangely by our side all summer, so strangely gone away. It is in vain to await him under our morning

sycamore, nor under the green maples shall we find him walking, nor amid the alder thickets discover him, nor yet in the little ravine beneath the pines. No, he has surely gone away, and his great house seems empty without him, desolate, filled with lamentation, all its doors and windows open to the winter snows. But the green friend had left a message. I found it at the roots of some violets. I shall be back again next year, he said. Chapter 6. In the wake of summer.

Yes, it was time to be going, and the thought was much on both our minds. We had as yet, however, made no plans, had not in indeed discussed any. But one afternoon, late in September, driven indoors by a sudden squall of rain, I came to Colin with an idea. The night before we had had the first real storm of the season. Ah, this will do their business, Colin had said, referring to the trees, as we heard the wind and rain tearing and splashing through the pitch-dark woods. It will be a different world in the morning. And indeed it was. Cruel was the work of dismantling that had gone on during the night. The roof of the wood had fallen in a score of places, letting in the sky through unfamiliar windows,

and the distant prospect showed through the iron tapestry of the trees with a startling sense of disclosure. The dishelled world wore the distressed look of a nymph, caught Desabille. the expression the naked woods occurred to one with almost a sense of impropriety at least there was a cynical and decorum in this violet disrobing of the landscape colin i said coming to him with my idea we've got to go of course but i've been thinking don't you hate the idea of being hurled along in a train and suddenly shot into the city again like a package through a tube. Hate it, don't ask me, said Colin. If only it could be more gradual, I went on. Suppose, for instance, instead of taking the train, we should walk it.

Walk to New York, said Colin with a surprised whistle. Yes, why not? Something of a walk, old man. All the better. We shall. be all the longer getting there. But listen, to go by train would be almost too sudden a shock. I don't believe we could stand it. To be here today, breathing this God's fresh air, living the lives of natural men in a natural world, and tomorrow, Broadway, the horrible crowds,

the hustle, the dirt, the smells, the uproar, for answer, Colin water. the clean rain fleeting through the trees and groaned aloud. But now, if we walked, we would, so to say, let ourselves down lightly, injure ourselves by gradual approach to the thought of life once more with our fellows. Besides, we should be walking in the wake of the summer. She has only moved a little east as yet. We might catch her up on her way to New York, and thus move with the moving season keeping in step with the zodiac then at last how much more fitting our entry into new york not by way of some sordid and clangorous depot but through the spacious corridors of the highlands and the lordly gates of the hudson

when i had thus attained my crescendo colin rose impressively and embraced me with true french effusion old man he said that's just great it's an inspiration from on high it makes me feel better already che but that's bully french as was his blood it will be observed that collins expletives were thoroughly american of course he should have said sacre mi cochon or non de dieu de non de dieu but though an appearance so to say an embodied sacra he seemed to find the american vernacular sufficiently expressive is it a go then said i it's a go said colin once more an american and we shook on it chapter seven maps and farewells it was wonderful what a change our new plan wrought in our spirits Our melancholy was immediately dispersed, and its place taken by active anticipations of our journey. The north wind in the trees, instead of blustering dismissal, sounded to our ears like the fluttering of the blue peter at the masthead of our voyage. Strange heart of man!

A day back we were in tears at the thought of going. Now we are all smiles to think of it, all. impatience to be gone. We quote Whitman a dozen times in the hour, and it is all a foot and light-hearted with us and the open road. But there were some farewells to make to people as well as to trees. There were friends at Eland to bid adieu, and also there were maps to be consulted, and knapsacks to be packed, exhilarating preparations. Our friends looked at us, when we had unfolded our project, with a mixture of surprise and pity. Amiable lunatics was the first comment of their countenances,

and, there never was any telling what the artistic temperament would do next. Had we announced an airship voyage to the moon, they would have regarded us as comparatively reasonable. But to walk, to walk some four or five hundred miles in America of all countries, a country of palace cars and lighting limited expresses, not to mention homicidal touring automobiles, seemed like, what shall I say,

well as though one should start out for New Zealand in a rowboat, or make the trip to St. Petersburg in a sedan chair. But there were others, especially the women, who understood, felt as we did, and longed to go with us. I have never met a woman yet, whose face did not light up at the thought of a walking tour, and in her heart long to don Rosalind clothes and set forth in search of adventures.

We thus had the advantage, in planning our route, of several prettily quaffed heads bending over our maps and guidebooks with us. "'Four hundred and thirty miles,' said one of these Rosalinds, whose pretty head was full of pictures of romantic European travel. think what one could do with four hundred and thirty miles in europe let us try for the fun of it and turning to a map of europe and measuring out four hundred and thirty miles by scale on a slip of paper she tried it up and down the map from point to point look at funny little england she said why you will practically be walking from one end of england to the other see and she fitted her scale to the other and she fitted her scale to the map.

It would bring you easily from Portsmouth to Aberdeen. And now let us try France. Why, see again? You will be walking from Calais to Marseille. Think of it, walking through France. All vineyards and beautiful names. Now Italy, see? You will be walking from Florence to Mount Edna,

Florence, Rome, Naples. Palermo. And so, in imagination, our fair friend sketched out fanciful pilgrimages for us. You could walk from Gibraltar to the Pyrenees, she went on. You could walk from Venice to Berlin, from Brussels to Copenhagen. You could walk from Munich to Budapest. You could walk right across Turkey, from Constantinople to the Adriatic Sea. And, Greece, see? You could walk from Sparta to the Danube. To think of the romantic use you could make out of your 400-odd miles, and how different it sounds, Buffalo to New York.

And again she repeated, luxuriating in the romantic sound of the words, Constantinople to the Adriatic, Sparta to the Danube, Buffalo to New York. There was not wanting to the party the whole-souled My Country Tis of the American, who somewhat resented these European comparisons, and declared that America was good enough for her, clearly intimating that a certain lack of patriotism, even a certain immorality,

attached to the admiration of foreign countries. She also told us somewhat severely that the same stars, if not, not better, shown over America as over any other country, and that American scenery was the finest in the world, not to speak of the American climate, to all of which we bowed our heads in silence. But the frivolous European-minded Rosalind, who had got us into this trouble, retorted with a grave face. Wouldn't you just love, dear Miss Blank, to walk from Hackensack to walk from Hackensack to Omaha?

another voice was kind enough to explain for our encouragement that the traveller found in a place exactly what he brought there and that romance was a personal gift all in the personal point of view a sort of cosmetic you apply to the face of nature footnoted our irrepressible friend still another reminded us that to travel hopefully is a better thing than to arrive and still another strongly advised us to carry revolvers so taking with us our maps and much good advice we bade farewell to our friends and walked back to our camp under the stars the same stars that were shining over constantinople the next day when all our preparations were complete the shack swept and garnished and our knapsacks bulging in readiness for the road colin took his brushes and in a few minutes had decorated one of the walls with an autumn sunset a sort of memorial tablet to our summer he explained can't you think up a verse to put underneath he asked then underneath he then underneath he lettered. Two lovers of the sun and of the moon, lovers of tree and grass and bug and bird, spent here the summer days, then all too soon, upon the homeward track reluctant fared.

Sun Up, October 1, 1908. Some apples remained over our larder. We carefully laid them outside for the squirrels, then slinging our knapsacks we took a last look around the little place and locked the door our way lay up the hill across the pasture and through the beaches toward the sky-line we stood still a moment gazing at the well-loved landscape then we turned and breasted the hill alon cried colin allon i answered allan to new york chapter eight the american bluebird and its song i wish i could convey the singular feeling of freedom and adventure us as colin and i grasped our sticks and struck up the Green Hill for New York. It was a feeling of exhilaration and romantic expectancy, blent with an absurd sense of our being entirely on our own resources, vagrants shifting for ourselves, independent of civilization, which, of course, the actual circumstances in no way warranted, A delightful boyish illusion of entering into untrodden paths and facing unknown dangers thrilled through us.

Well, we're off, we said simultaneously, smiling interrogatively at each other. Yes, we're in for it. So men start out manfully for the North Pole. Our little enterprise gave us an imaginative realization of the solidarity, the interdependence of the world. And we saw, as in a vision, its four corners knit together by a vast network of paths connecting one with the other, footpaths, byways, cart tracks, bride paths, lovers lanes, high roads, all sensitively linked in one vast nervous system of human communication. This field whose green sod we were treading connected with another field, that with another,

and that again with another, all the way to New York, all the way to Cape Horn. No break anywhere. All we had to do was go on putting one foot before the other, and we could arrive anywhere. So the worn-out phrase, all roads lead to Rome, lit up with a new meaning, the meaning that had originally made it. Yes, the loneliest of lovers' lanes, all silence and wildflowers, was on the way to the Metropolitan Opera House, or vice versa. The flat iron building was on the way to the depths of the forest. Suppose we stop here, Colin, I said, pointing to a solitary, forgotten-looking,

little farmhouse, surrounded by giant wind-worn poplars that looked older than America, and asked the way to Versailles. And I shouldn't be surprised, answered Colin, if we struck some bright little American schoolgirl who could tell us. Although we as yet knew every foot of the ground we were treading, it already began to wear an unfamiliar houseless and homeless look, an air of foreign travel, and though the shack was but a few yards behind us, it seemed already miles away, wrapped in lonely distance, wistfully forsaken. Everything we looked at seemed to have

gained a new importance and significance. Every tree and bush seemed to say, So many miles to New York. And we unconsciously looked at and remarked on the most trifling objects with the eye of explorers, and took as minute an interest in the usual bird and wayside weed as though we were engaged in some flora and fauna survey of untrodden regions. That's a bluebird, said Colin, as a faint pee-weeing came with a thin melancholy note from a telegraph wire, and we both listened attentively with a learned air, as though making a mental note, for some ornithological society in New York. Bluebird seen in Erie County, October 1, 1908.

So might Sir John Mandeville have noted the occurrence of birds of paradise in the domains of Prestor John. That's a silo, said Colin, pointing to a cylindrical tower at the end of a group of barns, from which came the sound of an engine surrounded by a group of men, occupied in feeding it with trusses of corn from a high-piled wagon. They are laying in fodder for the winter. Interesting agricultural observation. In the surrounding fields, the pumpkins, globes of golden orange,

lay scattered among the wintry-looking corn stalks. Bullie subject for a picture, said column. Before we had gone very far, did stop at a cottage standing at a puzzling corner of crossroads and asked the way not to versailles indeed but to dutch hollow we were answered by a good-humored german voice belonging to an old dame who seemed glad to have the lonely afternoon silence broken by human speech and we were then as often afterward reminded that we were not so far away from europe after all but that indeed in no small degree the american continent was the map of europe bodily transported across the sea for the present our way lay through germany dutch hollow the name told its own story and it had appealed to our imaginations as we had come upon it on the map we had thought we should like to see how it looked written in trees and rocks and human habitations on the page of the landscape.

And I may say that it was such fanciful considerations as this, rather than any more business-like manner of travel, that frequently determined the route of our essentially sentimental journey. If our way admitted of a choice of direction, we usually decided by the sound of the name of village or town. Thus the sound of Wales Centre had taken us, we were told a mile or two out of our way. But what of that? We were not walking for a record, nor were we road surveying, or following the automobile route to New York. In fact,

we had deliberately avoided the gasoline route, choosing to be led by more rustic odors, and thus our wayward wherefaring cannot be offered in any sense as a guide for pedestrians who may come after us. anyone following our guidance would be as liable to arrive at the moon as at New York. In fact, we not infrequently inquired our way of a bird, or some friendly little dog that would come out to bark a companionable good day to us from a wayside porch. As a matter of fact, I had inquired the way of the bluebird mentioned a little while back, and it may be of interest to ornithological societies to transcribe his answer. The way of dreams the bluebird sang is never hard to find

so soon as you have really left the grown-up world behind, so soon as you have come to see what the others call realities, for such as you are never real at all. So soon as you have ceased to care what others say or do, and understand that they are they and you, thank God, are you. Then is your foot upon the path, your journey well begun, and safe the road for you to tread moonlight or morning sun. Peace of this world you shall not take, yea, no provision heed.

A wild rose gathered in the wood would buy you all you need. Hungry, the birds, shall bring you food, the bees, their hushes, their hushabird. honey bring and thirsty you the crystal drink of an immortal spring for sleep behold how deep and soft with moss the earth had spread and all the trees of all the world shall curtain round your bed enchanted journey that begins nowhere and nowhere ends seeking an ever-changing goal no whither winds and wends for destination yonder flower for business yonder bird. O'd better worth the traveling to I never saw or heard. Oh, long dream travel of the soul, first the green earth to tread,

and still yon other starry track to travel when you're dead. End of chapters five through eight. Chapters nine through twelve of October vagabonds by Richard Legallien. this librivox recording is in the public domain chapter nine dutch hollow the day had opened with a restless picturesque morning of gusty sunshine and rolling clouds there was something rich and stormy and ominous in the air and a soft rainy sense of solemn impending change at once brilliant and mournful a curious sense of intermingled death and birth as of a very gentle withered leaves and dreaming seeds being blown about together on their errands of decay and resurrection by the same breath of the unseen creative spirit. Incidentally, it meant a rainstorm by evening, and its mysterious presage had prompted

Colin to the furnishing of our knapsacks with waterproof cloaks, which, as the afternoon wore on, seemed more and more a wise provision. But the rain still held off, contenting itself with threatening phantasmagoria of cloud, molding and massing like visible thunder in our wake. It seemed leisurely certain, however, of catching us before nightfall, and, sure enough, as the light began to thicken, and we stood admiring its mountainous magnificence, vast billows of plum-colored gloom, hanging like doomsday,

over a stretch of haunted orchard, the great drops began to patter down. Surely the sky is the greatest of all melodramatists. Nothing short of the cataclysmal end of the world could have provided drama to match the stupendous stage-setting of that stormy sky. All doom and destiny and wrath of avenging deities and days of judgment seemed concentrated in that frown of gigantic darkness. Beneath it, the landscape seemed to grow livid as a corpse, and terror to fill with trembling the very trees and grasses. Etypus and Orestes and King Lear rolled into one could hardly have accounted for that angry sky.

Such a sky it must have been that carried doom to the cities of the plain, and, after all, it was only Colin and I innocently making haste to Dutch Hollow. that teutonic spot seemed hopelessly far away as the rain began to drive down and the horizon to open here and there in lurid slashings of stormy sunset and when the road for which some time had been one long descent suddenly confronted us with a rough perpendicular lane overgrown with bushes that seemed more like a cart-track to the stars than a sensible thoroughfare we realized with a certain indignant self-pity that we were walking in real earnest out in the night and the storm far from human habitation nature cannot be so absurd said i as to expect us to climb such a road on such an evening she must surely have placed a comfortable inn in such a place as this with ruddy windows of welcome and a roaring fire and a hissing roast but alas our eyes scanned the streaming copses in vain nothing in sight but trees rain and a solitary saw-mill where an old man on a ladder assured us in a broken sing-song like the scandinavian of the middle west that indeed nature did mean us to climb that hill and by that road only could we reach the promised land of supper and bed

and the rain fell and the wind blew and colin and i trudged on through the murk and the mire i silently recalling and commenting on certain passages in certain modern writers in praise of walking in the rain at last the hill came to an end we learned afterward that it was a good mile high and we stumbled out on to some upland wilderness unlit by star or window Then we found ourselves descending again, and at last dim shapes of clustered houses began to appear, and the white phantom of a church. We could rather feel than see the houses, for the night was so dark, and, though here was evidently a village, there was no sign of a light anywhere, not so much as a bright keyhole. Nothing but hushed, shuttered shapes of deeper black in the general general

darkness. So English villages must have looked, muffled up in the darkness, at the sound of the conqueror's curfew. Surely they can't all be in bed by seven o'clock, I said. There doesn't seem much to stay up for, laughed Colin. At length we suspected, rather than saw, a gleam of light at the rear of one of the shrouded shapes we took for houses, and, and And, stumbling toward it, we heard cheerful voices, German voices, and, knocking at a back door, received a friendly summons to enter. Then, out of the night that covered us, suddenly sprang a kitchen full of light and a family at supper, kind German folk, the old people, the younger married couple, and the grandchildren, and a big dog vociferously taking care of them. a lighted glimpse a few hardy words of direction and we were out in the night again for though indeed this was dutch hollow its simple microcosm did not include a hotel for that we must walk on another half mile or so oh those country half miles so on we went again and soon a lighted stoop flashed on our right

at last i mounted the steps of a verandah and before knocking looked in at the window then i didn't knock but softly called colin who was waiting in the road and together we looked in at a table in the centre of a barely furnished brightly lit room an old woman and a young man were kneeling in prayer colin and i stood a moment looking at them and then softly took the road again. But the inn, or rather the hotel, did come at last. Alas, however, for dreams of ruddy welcome, Rubicund host and Capon turning on the spit. In spite of German accents, we were walking in America, after all. A shabbily lit glass door admitted us into a dreary saloon bar, where a hard-featured, gruff-mannered young countrymen, after serving beer to two farm laborers,

admitted with apparent reluctance that beds were to be had by such as had the price. But that as to supper, well, supper was over. Supper time was six-thirty, it was now seven-thirty. The young man seemed no little surprised, even indignant, that anyone should be ignorant of the fact that suppertime at Sheldon's center was half-past six. And this, by the way, was a surprise we encountered more than once on our journey. Supper time in the American Roadhouse is an hour severely observed,

and you disregard it at the peril of your empty stomach, for no larders seem so hermetically sealed as the larders of American country hotel after the appointed hour, and no favor so impossible to grant as even a ham sandwich, if you should be so much a stranger to local ordinances as to expect it after the striking of the hour. Indeed, you are looked on with suspicion for asking, as something of a tramp or dangerous character. Not to know that supper-time at Sheldon Corner was half-past six seemed to argue a sinister disregard of the usages of civilization.

As we ruefully contemplated a supperless couch, a comely young woman who had been looking us over from a room in the rear of the bar, came smilingly forward and volunteered to do the best she could for us. She was evidently the rough fellow's wife, goddess of the kitchen, and final court of appeal. What a difference a good-natured, good-looking woman makes in a place? Tis a glimpse into the obvious, but there are occasions on which such commonplaces shine with a blessed radiance, and the moment when our attractive hostess flowered out upon us from her forbidding background was one of them.

With her on our side, we forgot our fears, and with an assured air asked her husband. husband to show us to our rooms. Lamp in hand, he led us up staircases and along corridors, for the hotel was quite a barracks, thawing out into conversation on the way. The place, he explained, was a little out of order, owing to the ball, an event he referred to as a matter of national knowledge, and being, we understood, the annual ball of harvesting. The fact of the lamps not burning properly, and there being no water or towels in our rooms, was due, he explained, to this disorganizing festival, as also the circumstance of our doors having

no knobs to them. The young fellows at the ball did carry on so, he said, chuckling with reminiscence of that orgiastic occasion. The Sheldon Center gallants were evidently. the very devil, and those vanished door-nobes provoked pictures in our minds of lupacalian rivals, which, alas, we had come too late to share. We should have found anything good that our hostess cared to set before us, so potent a charm is amiability, and I am sure no man need wish for a better supper

than the fried eggs and fried potatoes which copiously awaited us downstairs. as colin washed his down with coffee like a true franco-american and i washed down mine with english breakfast tea we pulled out our pipes and smiled contentment at each other shall we have a chapter of the wisdom of paragot before bed i said and going to our small carefully selected knapsack library i found the gay-hearted fantastical book we had promised to read together on our wayfaring and so the day grew to a good end over the head of my bed hung a highly-colored reproduction of leonardo's last supper and stuck in its frame was a leaf of blessed palm, by which tokens I realized it that my slumbers were to be under the wing of the ancient mother. As I closed my eyes, the musical chime of a great bell high up somewhere in the outer night fell in benediction upon the darkness. So I fell asleep in Europe after all.

Chapter 10, where they sing from morning till night I awoke to the same silvery salutation, and the sound of country boots echoing across farmyard cobblestones. A lantern flashing in and out among barns lit up my ceiling for a moment. A rough country voice hailed another rough country voice somewhere outside, and the day slowly coughed and sneezed itself awake in the six o'clock grayness. I heard Colin moving in the next room, and presently we were downstairs, alertly hungry. Our hostess, with morning smile, asked if we would mind waiting breakfast for the boarders. Meanwhile, we stepped out into the unfolding day, and the village that had been a mystery to us in the darkness was revealed.

A handful of farmhouses on the brow of a solitary-looking upland, and looming overall, a great cathedral-like church that seemed to have been transported bodily from France. Stepping out to say good morning to some young pigs that were sociably grunting in a neighboring sty, we beheld the vast landscape of our preceding day stretched out beneath us, mistily emerging into the widening sunrise. With pride, our eyes traced the steep white road we had so arduously traveled,

and, for remembrance, Colin made a swift sketch of Dutch Hollow huddled down there in the valley, with its white church steeple catching the morning sun. And by this the boarders had assembled, and we found ourselves at breakfast in a cheery company of three weeks. workmen, who were as bright and full of fun as boys out for a holiday. They were presently joined by a fourth, a hearty middle-aged man, who, as he sat down, greeted us with, I feel just like singing this morning. Good for you, said one of us. That's the way to begin the day.

His good nature was magnetic. Yes, he laughed. We sing in Sheldon from morning till night. Sheldon's evidently a good place to know, I said. I will make a note of that for New Yorkers. So, reader, sometimes when the world seems all wrong and life of very doubtful speculation, you may care to know of a place where the days go so blithely

that men actually sing from morning till night. Sheldon Center is that place. You can find it on any map, and I can testify that the news is true. And the men that thus sang from morning till night, what was the trade they worked and sang at? We gathered from a few dropped words that they were engaged on some work over at the church, masonry, no doubt.

And as they left the breakfast table, in a laughing knot, to begin the day's work they suggested our giving a look in at them on our way this we promised to do for a merrier better-hearted lot of fellows it would be hard to find to meet them was to feel a warm glow of human comradeship healthy normal happy fellows enjoying their work as men should and taking life as it came with sane unconscious gusto it was a tonic encounter to be in their company they were grave-diggers engaged in renovating the village churchyard yes and said our hostess they were making it like a garden it had been long neglected and become disgracefully overgrown with weeds and bushes but now they were trimming it up in fine style they were cemetery experts from batavia way and the job was to cost $1,600. But it was worth it, for indeed, they were making it look like a garden. Presently, we stepped over to the churchyard.

We should not have been human if we had not advanced with a Hamlet Horatio heir. Has this fellow no feeling of his business that he sings at grave-making? We found our four friends in a space of the day. churchyard from which the tombstone had been temporarily removed, engaged not with Maddock and death's head, but with spirit level and measuring cord. They were leveling a stretch of newly turned and smoothed ground, and they pointed with pride to the portion of the work already accomplished, serried rows of spick and span headstones, all plumb, as they explained, and freshly scraped.

not a sign of caressing moss or a tendril of vine to be seen a neat job if there ever was one we should have seen the yard before they had taken it in hand there wasn't a stone that was straight and the weeds and the brambles well look at it now we looked could anything be more refined or in more perfect taste the churchyard was as smooth and correct as a newly barbered head not a hair out of place we looked and kept our thoughts to ourselves but we wondered if the dead were really as grateful as they should be for this drastic house-cleaning did they appreciate this mathematical uniformity this spruce and spotless residential air of their numbered rectangular rest or was not the old way nearer to their desire with soft mosses tucking them in from the garish sun and spring winds spreading coverlets of wild flowers above their sleep but who knows perhaps the dead prefer to be up to date and to follow the fashion and funeral furnishings and surely such expert necropolitans as our four friends ought to know no doubt the sheldon centre dead would have the same tastes as the sheldon centre living for after all we forget in our idealization of them that the dead like the living are a vast bourgeoisie yes it is a depressing thought the bourgeoisie of the dead as we stood talking the young priest of the parish joined our group

he was a german from duceldorf and his worn face lit up when he found that colin had been at duceldorf and could talk with him about it as he stood with us there on that bleak upland he seemed a pathetic symbolic figure lonely standard bearer of the spirit in one of the dreary colonies of that indomitable church that carries her mystic sacraments even into the waste place and borders of the world the romance of Rome was far away beyond that horizon on which he turned his wistful look here was its hard work its daily prose but he turned proudly to the great pile that loomed over us we had commented on its size in so remote a parish yes i am proud of our people he said it is greatly to their crest credit. One could not help silently wondering that their spiritual needs of this handful of lonely houses should demand so ambitious a structure, but the symbols of the soul can never be too impressive.

Then we said good-bye to our friends, and struck out into the morning sunshine, leaving the village of song behind. Yes, in Sheldon Center they sing from morning till night. at grave-making. Chapter 11. Apple Land It was a spacious morning of wind-swept sunshine, with a wintry bite in the keen air.

Meadow larks and song-sparrows kept up a faint warbling about us, but the crickets, which yesterday had been here and there, made a thin music as of straggling bands of survivors of the summer, were numbed into silence again. Once or twice we caught sight of the dainty snipe in the meadows, and high over the woods a birdhawk floated as by some invisible anchorage in the sky. It was an austere landscape, grave with elm and ash and pine.

For space, a field of buckwheat standing in ricks struck a smudged negroid note, but there was warmth in the apple orchards which clustered about the scattered houses with piles of golden pumpkins and red apples under the trees, and is there any form of piled-up wealth, bins of species at the bank, or mountains of precious stones,

rubies and sapphires and carbuncles, as we picture them in the subterranean treasures of kings that thrills the imagination with so dreamlike a sense of uncounted riches, untold gold as such natural bullion of the earth, pyramids of apples lighting up dark orchards, great plums lying in heaps of careless purple, corridors hung with fabulous bunches of grapes, or billowy mounds of yellow grain,

the treasuries of Pomona and Verdimus, such treasuries in the markets of this world are worth only a modest so much a bushel yet i think i should actually feel myself richer with a barrel of apples than with a barrel of money from a corn-growing country we were evidently passing into a country whose beautiful business was apples orchards began more or less to line the road and wagons with those same apple barrels became a feature of the highway. Another of its features was the number of old ruined farmhouses we came on, standing side by side with the new, more ambitious homesteads. We seldom came on a prosperous-looking house, but a few yards away was to be seen its aged and abandoned parent,

smothered up with bushes, roof fallen in, timbers ready to collapse. The deserted hearth choked with debris and overgrown with weeds. The very picture of a haunted house. Here had been the original home, always small, seldom more than four rooms, and when things had begun to prosper, a more spacious and often, to our eyes, a less attractive structure had been built, and the old home left to the bats and owls, with a complete abandonment that seemed to us, sentimental travelers as we were, as cynical as it was curiously wasteful.

Putting sentiment out of the question, we had to leave unexplained why the American farmer should thus allow so much good building material to go to waste. Besides, as we also noted much farm machinery rusting unhoused in the grass, we wondered why he did not make use of these old buildings for storage purposes. But the American farmer has puzzled wiserheads than ours, so we gave it up and turned our attention once more to our own fanciful business, one highly useful branch of which was the observation of the names on the tin letterboxes, thrusting themselves out at intervals along the road.

The history of American settlement could, I suppose, be read in those wayside letter boxes, in such names, for instance, as Theo Leveck and Paul Fugel, which, like wind-blown exotics from other lands, we found within a few yards of each other. One name, that of Silvernail, we decided could only lawfully belong to a princess in a fairy tale. Such childishness as this, I may say, is of the essence of a walking trip, in which, from moment to moment, you take quite infantile interest in all manner of idle observation and quite useless lore. That is a part of the game you are playing, and the main thing is that you are out in the open air, on the open road,

with a simple heart and a romantic appetite. Here is a little picture of a wayfaring day, which I made while Colin was sketching one of those ruined farms. Apples along the highway strewn, and morning opening all her doors. The cawing rook, the distant train, the valley with its misty floors. The hillside hung with woods and dreams, soft gleams of gossamer and dew, From Cock Crow to the Rising Moon, the Rainbow Road for Me and You. Along the high road all the day, the wagons filled with apples go, and golden pumpkins and ripe corn, and all the ruddy overflow.

From autumn's apron as she goes about her orchards and her fields, and gathers into stack and barn, the treasure that the summer yield. A singing heart, a laughing road, With salutations all the way, The gossip dog, the hidden bird, The pig that grunts, a gruff good day. The apple ladder in the trees, A friendly voice amid the boughs,

The farmer driving home his team, The ducks, the geese, the uttered cows, The silver babble of the creek, The willow whisper, the day's end. with murmur of the village street a called good night an unseen friend chapter twelve orchards and a line from virgil orchards we were walking to new york through orchards and we might have gone by train a country of orchards and gold-dust sunshine falling through the quaint tapestry trees falling dreamily on heaped up gold-up gold-up and the grave backs of little pigs joyously at large in the apple twilight. A drowsy, murmuring spell was on the land,

the spell of fabled orchards and of old enchanted gardens. In the afternoon they came into a land in which it seemed always afternoon. The country of King Alcinous At intervals, as we walked on through the cider-dreamy-afternoon, afternoon, thinking apples, smelling apples, munching apples, there came a mellow sound like soft thunder through the trees. It was the thunder of apples being poured into barrels, and, as in asleep, the fragrant wagons passed and repassed along the road, the slow-moving wagons of Our Lady of Elyus. That line of Virgil came to me, as lines will sometimes come

unfortunate moments, with the satisfaction of perfect fitness to the hour and the mood, gathering into one sacred tear-filled phrase the deep sense that had been possessing me, as we passed the husbandman, busy with the various harvest, of the long antiquity of these haunted industries of the earth. So long, so long has man pursued these ancient tasks, So long ago was he urging the plowshare through the furrow. So long ago the sower went forth to sow. So long ago have there been barns and buyers, granaries and threshing floors, mills and vineyards.

So long has there been milking of cows and herding of sheep and swine. Can one see a field of wheat gathered into sheaves without thinking of the dream of Joseph, or be around a farm at lambing time, without smiling to recall the cunning of Jacob? Already were all these things weary and old and romantic when Virgil wrote and admonished the husbandman of times and seasons,

of plows and harrows, of mattocks and turtles, and the mystical winnowing fan of Iacchus, To the meditative romantic mind, the farmer and plowman, standing thus in the foreground of the infinite perspective of time, take on a sacred significance as of traditional ministers of the ancient mysteries of the earth. Perhaps it is one's involuntary sense of this haunted antiquity that gives its peculiar expressiveness to the solemn, almost religious quiet of barns and stables, the so to say prehistoric hush of brooding sun-steeped rick yards and gives too a homely sacerdotal look to the implements and vessels of the farm a churn or a cheese press gives one the same deep uncanny thrill of the terrible vista of time as stonehenge itself and from such implements too there seems to breathe a sigh a sigh a sigh of the long travail and unbearable pathos of the race of men. You will thus see the satisfaction in moods of such meditation

of carrying in one's knapsack a line from Virgil, the slow-moving wagons of Our Lady of Elyus, and I congratulated myself on my forethought in having included in our itinerant library a copy of Mr. McAil's beautiful translation of the Georgics. Walt Whitman, talking to one of his friends about his habit of carrying a book with him on his nature rambles, said that nine times out of ten he would never open the book, but that the tenth time he would need it very badly. So I needed the Georgics very badly that afternoon,

and the hour would have lost much of its perfection had I not been able to take the book from my knapsack and corroborate my mood, while Colin was sketching an old barn, by reading aloud from its consecrated pages. I can repeat to thee many a counsel of them of old, if thou shrink not back, nor weary to learn of lowly cares. Above all must be the threshing floor be leveled with the ponderous roller, and rot by hand and cemented with clinging potter's clay. that it may not gather weeds nor crack in the rain of dust and be playground withal for manifold destroyers often the tiny mouse builds his house and makes his granaries underground or the eyeless mole scoops his cell and in chunks is found the toad and all the swarming vermin that are bred on earth and the weevil and the ant that fears a destitute old age plunder the great pile of spelt.

Perhaps some reader had been disposed hastily to say, What did you want with books out of doors? Was not nature enough? No one who loves both books and nature would ask that question, or need to have explained why a knapsack library is a necessary adjunct of a walking tour, for nature and books react so intimately on each other, and, far more than one realizes without thought, our enjoyment of nature is a creation of literature.

For example, can anyone sensitive to such considerations deny that the meadows of the world are greener for the 23rd Psalm, or the starry sky the gainer in our imagination by the solemn cadences of the Book of Job? All our experiences, new and personal as they may see, seem to us, oh, incalculably, their depth and thrill to the ancestral sentiment in our blood, and joy and sorrow are for us what they are, no little because so many old, far-away generations of men and women have joyed and sorrowed in the same way before us.

Literature but represents that concentrated sentiment, and satisfied through expression our human need for some sympathetic participation with us in our human experience. That a long-dead poet walking in the spring was moved as I am by the unfolding leaf and the returning bird imparts an added significance to my own feelings, and that some wise and beautiful old book knew and said it all long ago makes my life seem all the more mysteriously romantic for me today. Besides, books are not only such good companions for what they say, but for what they are. As with any other friend, you may go a whole day with them and not have a word to say to each other, yet be happily conscious of a perfect companionship. The book we know and love, and of course,

one would never risk taking a book we didn't know for a companion, has long since become a symbol for us, a symbol of certain moods and ways of feeling, a key to certain kingdoms of the spirit, of which it is often sufficient just to hold the key in our hands. So, a single flower in the hand is a key to summer, a floating perfume, the key to the hidden gardens of remembrance. The wrong book in the hand, whether opened or not, is as distracting a presence as an irrelevant person, and, therefore, it was with great care that I chose my knapsack library. It consisted of these nine books. Macales, Georgics, Hans Anderson's fairy tales, Shakespeare's sonnets,

Locke's beloved vagabond, selections from r l s painters marius the epicurean alfred du moucet's premier poises beadecker's united states road map of new york state and though my knapsack already weighed eighteen pounds i could not resist the call of a cheap edition of wordsworth and a drug store at warsaw a charming little town embosomed among hills and orchard, where we arrived, dreamy with country air at the end of the day. End of chapters 9 through 12. Chapters 13 through 16 of October Vagabonds by Richard Legallien. This Libervox recording is in the public domain. Chapter 13.

Fellow Wayfarers With the Mourn, Our Wayfarers. with the morn our way still lay among apples and honey hives and orchards a land of prosperous farms sumptuous rolling downs rich woodland sheep more pigs more apple barrels and velvety sunshine the old ruined houses had ceased and the country had taken on a more generous broad-shouldered deep bosomed aspect nature was preparing for one of her big promised land effects we were coming to the valley of the genesee river we made a comparison of two kinds of prosperity in the look of a landscape some villages and farms suggest smugness in their prosperity they have a model farm business-like well-regulated up-to-date company financed air suggesting such modern agricultural terms as ensilage, irrigation, and fertilizer. Other villages and farms,

while just as well kept and well-to-do, have, so to say, a something romantic about their prosperity, a bounteous ruddy golden age look about them, as though nature herself had been the farmer, and they had ruddyed and ripened out of her own unconscious abundance, the difference between a row of modern box-bees, and the old-fetched cottage kind.

The countryside of the Genesee Valley has the romantic prosperous look. Its farms and villages look like farms and villages in picture books, and the country folk we met seem happy and gay and kind, such as those one reads of in William Morris's romances of the Golden Age. As from time to time we exchanged greetings with them, we were struck with their comely health and blithe ways, particularly with their fine teeth as they laughed us the time of day, or stopped their wagons to gossip a moment with a two outlandish packmen,

the very teeth one would expect in an apple country. Perhaps they came of so much sweet commerce with apples. The possessor of a particularly fine display hailed us, as he drove by in an empty wagon, at the tail of which trailed a long orchard ladder, and asked us if we would care for a lift. Now, it happened that his suggestion came like a voice from heaven for poor Colin, one of whose shoes had been casting a gloom over our spirits for several miles. So we accepted with alacrity, and really, riding felt quite good for a change.

our benefactor was a bronzed handsome young fellow just through cornell he told us and proud of his brave college as all cornell men are he had chosen apple farming for his career and naturally seemed quite happy about it lived on his farm near by with his mother and sister and was at the moment out on the quest of four apple packers for his harvesting these experts being at a premium at this season we rattled along gaily in the broad afternoon sunshine exchanging various human information from apple packing to new york theatres after the manner of the companionable soul of man and i hope he liked us as well as we liked him one piece of information was of particular interest to collin the whereabouts of one billy the cobbler a character of the neighborhood, who would fix Colin's shoe for him, and, incidentally, if he was in the mood, give us a musical and dramatic entertainment into the bargain. At length our ways parted, and with cheery goodbyes and good wishes, our young friend went rattling along, leaving in our hearts a warm feeling of the brotherhood of man, sometimes.

He had let us down close by the high band. the rumor of which had been in our ears for some miles and presently the great effect nature had been preparing burst on our gaze with a startling surprise the peaceful pastoral country was suddenly cloven in twain by a gigantic chasm the genesee river dizzy depths below picturesquely flowing between grand canyon rock effects shaggy woods clothing the precipitous lines stone and small forests growing far down in the broad bed of the river, with here and there checkerboard spaces of cultivated land, gleaming, smoothened green, amid all the spectacular savageness, soft, cozy spots of verdur nestling dreamily in the hollow of the giant rocky hand. The road ran close to the edge of the chasm, and the sublimity was with us.

laying its hush upon us for the rest of the afternoon. Appropriate to her jove-like mood, nature had planted stern thickets of oak trees along the rocky edge, and, the acorns of our lord of Konya, crunched beneath our feet as we walked on. After a while, sure enough, we came upon Billy the cobbler, seated at his bench in a little shop at the beginning of a strangle of houses, alone, say for his cat, at the sleepy end of afternoon.

We had understood that he had been crippled in some cruel accident of machinery and was hampered in the use of his legs. But, unless in a certain philosophic sweetness in his big happy face, there was no sign of the cripple about his burly, broad-shouldered personality. He was evidently meant to be a giant, and was what one might call him, the bosun type, bluff, big-voiced and merry, with a boyish laugh, large, twinkling eyes, a trifle wistful, and the fine teeth of the district. "'Well, boys,' said he, looking up from his work with a smile,

"'and what can I do for you? Walking, eh, to New York?' And he whistled, as everyone did when they learned our mysterious business. Then, taking Colin's shoe in his hand, he commenced to pound upon that instrument of torture, talking gaily the while. Presently he asked, Do you care about music? And on our eagerly agreeing that we did,

All right, he said, We'll close the shop for a few minutes and have some. Then, moving around on his seat, like some heroic half-figure bust on its pedestal, he rummaged among the litter of leather and tools at his side and produced a guitar from its bays bag, also a mouth organ, which by some ingenious wire arrangement he fastened around his neck

so that he might press his lips upon it, leaving his hands free for the guitar. Then, ready? said he, and applying himself simultaneously to the guitar and the harmonica, off he started with a quite electrical gusto into a spirited fandango that made the little shop dance and rattle with merriment. You would have said that a whole orchestra was there, such a volume and variety of musical sound did Billy contrive to evoke from his two instruments?

There, he said, with a humorous chuckle, pushing the harmonica aside from his mouth. What do you think of that for an overture? He had completely hypnotized us with his infectious high spirits, and we were able to applaud him sincerely, for this lonely cobbler of shoes was evidently a natural well of music, and was, besides, no little of an executant. Now I'll give you an imitation of grand opera, he said,

and then he launched into the drollest burlesque of a fashionable tenor and a prima donna as clever as could be. He was evidently a born mime as well as a musician, and presently delighted us with some farmyard imitations, and one particularly quaint impersonation. An old lady singing with false teeth sent us into fits of laughter. You ought to go into vaudeville! we both said spontaneously with that vicious modern instinct to put private gifts to professional uses and then billy with shy pride admitted that he did do a little now and again in a professional way at harvest balls we thought of sheldon's centre and the like perhaps you might like one of my professional letterheads he said handing us one apiece

i think probably the reader would like one too you must imagine it in the original with fancy displayed professional type regular artiste style and a portrait of billy with his two instruments in one corner and see thou mock him not gentle reader king of them all billy williams the king of all imitators producing in rapid succession a grand repertoire of imituary and impersonations, consisting of minstrel bands, circus bands, killing pigs, cat greeting her kitten, barnyard of hens and roosters, opera singers with guitar,

whistling with guitar, old lady singing with false teeth, cow and calf, harmonica with the guitar, Arab song, trombone solo with a guitar, the guitar. Yes, see thou mock him not, gentle reader, for Billy is no subject for any man's condescension. We were in his company scarcely an hour, but we went away with a great feeling of

respect and tenderness for him, and we hope some day to drop in on him again, and hear his music and his quaint manly wisdom. All alone in the world, Billy? A shade of sadness passed over his face And was gone again as he smilingly answered Stroking the cat that purred and rubbed herself against his shoulder Just puss and me and the guitar he said The happiest of families

Ah music's a great thing of a lonely evening And a sense of the brave loneliness of Billy's days swept over me as we shook his strong hands and he gave us a cheery Godspeed on our way. I am convinced that Billy could earn quite a salary on the vaudeville stage, but no, he is better where he is, sitting there at his bench, with his black cat and his guitar and his singing manly soul. The twilight was rapidly thickening as we left Billy,

once more bent over his work, and the fear of suppertime in our hearts, we pushed on an extra speed toward our nights lodging at Mount Morris. The oak trees gloomed denser on our right as we plowed along a villainously sandy road. Laborers homing from the day's work greeted us now and again in the dimness, and presently one of these, plodding up behind us, broke forth into conversation. "'N I carry a packet like dat of forty-two months. "'Army, all the country,' said the voice out of the darkness.

"'It was an Italian labourer on his way to supper, "'interested in our knapsacks. "'You're an Italian? "'Me come from Palermo.' The little chap was evidently in a talkative mood, and I nudged Colin to do the honors of the conversation. palermo indeed said colin fine city i guess ben a palermo asked the italian eagerly colin couldn't say that he had great city palermo continued our friend great theatre cost sixteen million dollars there is nothing like a walking trip for gathering information of this kind

the italian went on to explain that this country was a poor substitute for the ol'a country this country rough country in this country me do rough a work he explained apologetically in palermo me do polite a work and he accentuated his statement by a vicious side spit upon the american soil it transpired that the polita work on which he had been engaged in palermo had been waiting in a restaurant and so the poor soul chattered on touching not unintelligently in his absurd english on american politics capital and labor the rich and the poor the hard lot of the poor man in america and palermo made the recurring burden of his talk through which a pathetic undertone came to us a sense of the native poetry of his race did he ever expect to return to palermo we asked him as we parted ah many a night me dream of palermo he called back as striking into a by-path he disappeared into the darkness And then we came to a great iron bridge, sternly silhouetted in the sunset. On either side rose cliffs of darkness, and beneath, like sheets of cold moonlight, flowed the Genesee, a danteous effect of jet and silver,

stygian in its intensity and indescribably mournful. The banks of Ackeron cannot be more wildly funeble, And it was companionable to hear Colin's voice mimicking out of the darkness. In this country, me do rough a work. In Palermo, me do polite a work. Poor chap, I said after a pause, thinking of our friend from Palermo. Do you know Hafiz, Colin? I continued. There is an ode of his that came back to me as our poor Italian was talking.

I think I will say it to you. It is just the time and place for it. Do, said Colin, and then I repeated, At sunset when the eyes of exiles fill, And distance makes a desert of the heart, And all the lonely world grows lonelier still, I with the other exiles go apart, And offer up the stranger's evening prayer,

My body shakes with weeping as I pray, thinking on all i love that are not there so desolately absent far away my love and friend and my own land and home o aching emptiness of evening skies o foolish heart that tempted thee to roam so far away from the beloved's eyes to the beloved's country i belong i am a stranger in this foreign place strange are its streets and so far away from the beloved's eyes-country i belong i am a stranger in this foreign place strange are its streets and strange to me its tongue. Strange to the stranger each familiar face. Tis not my city. Take me by the hand, divine protector of the lonely ones, and lead me back to the beloved's land. Back to my friends and my companions, oh wind that blows from Shira, bring to me a little dust from my beloved street. Send Haphiz something, love, that comes from thee, touched by thy hand, or trodden by thy feet.

My, but that makes one feel lonesome, was Collins' comment. I wonder if there will be any mail from the folks at Mount Morris. Chapter 14 The Old Lady of the Walnuts and Others What manner of men we were, and what our business was, thus wandering along the high roads with packs on our own. our backs and stout sticks in our hands, was matter for no little speculation and even suspicion to the rural mind. We did not seem to fit in with any familiar classification of vagabond.

We might be peddlers, or we might be hobos, but there was a disquieting uncertainty about us, and we felt it necessary occasionally to make reassuring explanations. Once or twice we found no opportunity to do this, as, for instance, one sinister darksome evening, we stood in hesitation at a puzzling crossroad, near Dansville, I think, and awaited the coming of an approaching buggy from which to ask the way. It was driven by two ladies, who, on our making a signal of distress to them, immediately whipped up with evident alarm and disappeared in a far. flash. Dear things, they evidently anticipated a hold-up, and no doubt arrived home with a breathless

tale of two suspicious-looking characters hanging about the neighborhood. On another occasion, we had been seated a while under a walnut tree growing near a farm, and scattering its fruitage half across the high road. Colin had been anointing his suffering foot, and, as I told him, looked strongly reminiscent of a certain famous corn-cure advertisement. Meanwhile, I had been once more quoting Virgil. The walnut in the woodland attires herself in wealth of blossom and bends with scented boughs. When they're approached with slow step an old white-haired lady, at once gentle and severe in appearance, accompanied by a younger lady.

When they had arrived in front of us, the old lady in measured tones of sorrow rather than anger, said, We rather needed those walnuts. Dear soul, she evidently thought that we had been filling our knapsacks with her nuts, and it took some little astonished expostulation on our part to convince her that we hadn't.

This affront seemed to sink no. little into Colin's sensitive Latin soul, and they were public enough walnuts, anyway, scattered as they were across the public road. But Colin couldn't get over it for some time, and I suspected that he was more sensitive from his recently, owing doubtless to his distinguished Gaelic appearance, having been profanely greeted by some irreverent boys with the word spaghetti. However, there was a bomb for our wounded feelings a little farther along the road when a companionable old farmer greeted us with, Well, boys, out for a walk, it's easy seeing you're no tramps.

Collins' expression was a study in gratitude. The farmer was a fine, soldierly old fellow, who told me that he was half English, too, on his father's side. But my mother, he added, was a good blue-bellied Yankee. We lured him on to using that delightfully quaint expression again before we left him, and we also learned from him valuable information as to the possibilities of lunch farther along the road, for we were in a lonely district with no inns, and it was Sunday. In regard to lunch, I suppose that in prosaical, paying our way for bed and board as we fared along, we fell short of the Arcadian theory of

walking tours in which the wayfarer, like a mendicant friar, takes toll of lunch and dinner from the hospitable farmer of sentimental legend, and sleeps for choice in barns, hayricks, or hedgesides. Now sleeping out of doors in October, if you have ever tried it, is a very different thing from sleeping out of doors in June, and as for rural hospitality, well, if you are of a sensitive constitution, you shrink from obtruding yourself, an alien apparition, upon the embarrassed and embarrassing rural domesticities. Besides, to be quite honest, rural table talk, except in Mr. Hardy's novels or pastoral poetry, is, to say the least, lacking in variety indeed if the truth must be told the conversation of country people generally speaking and an occasional very occasional character or oddity apart is undeniably dull

and i hope it will not be imputed to me for hardness of heart that after some long-winded colloquy or endless reminiscence sententious and trivial i have thought that grayed famous line should really have been written the long and tedious annals of the poor. But my heart smites me with ingratitude toward some kindly memories as I write that, memories of homely welcome, simple and touching and dignified. Surely I am not writing so of the genial farmer on whom we came one lunch hour as he was stripping corn in his yard. Mrs, he called to the house a few yards away. Can you find any lunch for two good-looking fellows here?

The housewife came to the door, scanned us for a second, and replied in the affirmative. As we sat down to table, our host bowed his head and said a simple grace for the bacon and cabbage, pumpkin pie, cheese and tea we were about to receive, and the unexpected old-fashioned right, too seldom encountered nowadays, came on me with a fresh beauty and impressiveness, which made me feel that its discontinuance is real loss of gracious ritual in our lives,

and perhaps even more. Thus this simple farmer's board seemed sensitively linked with the far-away beginnings of time. of all our religious symbolism the country gods and the gods of the hearth and the household seem actual approachable presences and the saying of grace before meat was a beautiful fitting reminder of that mysterious invisible care and sustenance of our lives which no longer find any recognition in our daily routine above all worship thou the gods and bring great series her yearly offerings another such wayside meal and another old couple lived touchingly in our memories we were still in the broad sun-swept valley of the genesee our road lying along the edge of the wide green-grown flats and water meadows bounded on the north by rolling hills on our left hand parallel with the road ran a sort of willowed moat banked by a grass-grown causeway a continuous narrow mound somewhat higher than the surrounding country and cut through here and there with grass-grown gullies the whole suggesting primeval earthworks and excavations so the old roman roads run grassy and haunted and choked with underbrush in the lonely

or country districts of England. We were curious as to the meaning of this causeway, and learned at length that here was all that remained of the old Genesee Canal. Thirty years ago, this moat had brimmed with water, and barges had plied their sleepy traffic between Dansville and Rochester. But the old order had changed, and a day had come when the dyke had been cut through, the lazy water led out into the surrounding flats and the old waterway left to the willows and the wildflowers the mink and the muskrat

only thirty years ago yet to-day nature has so completely taken it all back to herself that the hush of a long-vanished antiquity is upon it and the turfy burial mound of some hangist and horser could not be more silent this old foss seemed to strike the somewhat forgotten out of the world note of the surrounding country picturesque to the eye with bounteous green prospects and smooth smiling hills it was not we were told as prosperous as it looked for some vague reason the tides of agricultural prosperity had ebbed from that spacious sunlit veil a handsome old trapper who sat at his house door smoking his pipe and looking across the green flats set down the cause to the passing of the canal ah yes it was possible for him thirty years ago to make the trip to rochester and back by the canal and bring home a good ten dollars but now well every one in the valley was poor except the man whose beehives we had seen on the hillside half a mile back he had made no less than a thousand dollars out of his honey this last season He was an old bachelor, too, like himself. There were no less than five bachelors in the valley, five old men without a woman to look after them.

Or bother them, the old chap added humorously, relighting his pipe. Mrs. Mulligan, half a mile farther up the valley, was the only woman thereabouts, and she, by the way, would give us some lunch. we could say that he had sent us. So we left the old trapper to his pipe and his memories, and went in search of Mrs. Mulligan.

Presently, a poor little house high up on the hillside caught our eye, as we made toward it. As we were nearing the door, a dog, evidently not liking our packs, sprang out at us, and from down below in the marshy flats floated the voice of a man calling to us. Get out of that, hailed the voice.

There's nothing there for you. Poor Colin. We were evidently taken for tramps once more. However, undaunted by this reception, we reached the cottage door, and at our knock appeared a very old, but evidently vigorous woman. Is this Mrs. Mulligan's house?

her name on the lips of two strangers brought a surprised smile to her face a pleasant feeling of importance even notoriety no doubt and she speedily made us welcome and with many apologies set before us the cold remains of lunch which had been over an hour or two ago cold squash pumpkin pie cheese and milk it was too bad we were late for they had had a chicken for dinner and had sent the remains of it to a friend down the road our trapper no doubt and if the fire hadn't gone out she would have made us some tea now cold squash is not exactly an inflammatory diet but we liked the old lady so much she had such a pleasant motherly way with her and such an entertaining wise and even witty tongue, that we decided that cold squash, with her as hostess, was better than a stalled ox and hatred therewith. Presently the door opened, and the good man entered, he who had called us from the marsh. A tall, emaciated old man, piteously thin, and old, and work-wary to look on,

but with a keen bright eye in his head, and something of a proud air. about his ancient figure. It seemed cruel to think of his old bones having still to go on working, but our two old people, who seemed pathetically fond of each other, were evidently very poor, like the rest of the valley. The old man excused himself for his salutation of us, but there were so many dangerous characters about, and the old folk shook their heads and told of the daring operations of mysterious robbers in the neighborhood. In their estimation, the times were generally unsafe and lawless character rife in the land.

We looked around at the pathetic poverty of the place and wondered why they should disquiet themselves. Poor souls, there was little left to rob them of, save the fluttering remnants of their mortal breath. But, poor as they were, they had their telephone, a fact that struck us paradoxically in many a poor cabin as we went along. Yes, had they a mind, they could call up the White House that instant, or the Waldorf Astoria.

We spoke of our old trapper, and the old lady smiled. Those are his socks I've been darning for him, she said. So, the cynical old bachelor was taken care of. by the good angel woman after all trapping was about all there was to do now in the valley she said a mink brought seven dollars a muskrat thirty cents our old bachelor had made as much as eighteen dollars in two days one day several years ago the old man had told us this himself it was evidently quite a piece of history in the valley quite a local legend Chapter 15 The Man at Dansville At Dansville, we fell in with a man after our own hearts.

Fortunately for himself and his friends, he is unaware of the simple fact that he is a poet. We didn't tell him either, though we long to. He was standing outside his prosperous-looking planing mill at about half-past eight of a dreaming October morning. inside the saws were making that droning sweet-smelling sawdust noise that made colin think of adam bead the willows and buttonwood trees at the back of the workshops were still smoking with sunlit mist and the quiet massive pretty water looked like a sleepy mirror as it softly flooded along to its work on the big dripping wheels to our left a great hill all huge and damp glittering with gossamers and smelling of restless yellow leaves shouldered the morning sky

then turning away from talk with three or four workmen standing at his office door he saluted the two apparitional figures so oddly passing along the muddy morning road out for a walk boys he called he was a handsome man of about forty-three with a romantic scar slashed down his left cheek a startling scar that must have meant hideous agony to him and yet here in the end had made his face beautiful by the presence in it of a spiritual conquest how far are you walking you're not going so far as my little river here i'll bet and then we understood that we were in the presence of romantic conversation and we listened with a great gladness yes who would think that this little quiet mill-race is on her way to the gulf of mexico we looked at the little reeded river so demur in her morning mists so discreet and hushed among her willows and in our friend's eyes and by the magic of his fanciful tongue we saw her tripping along to dangerous conjunctions with the resounding rock-bedded streams, adventuously taking hands with swirling impulsive floods, fragrant with water-flowers, and laden with old forests,

and at length through the strange starlit hills, sweeping out into some moonlit estuary of the all-enfolding sea. Aren't you glad we walked, Colin, I said a mile or two after? you are of course a great artist but i don't remember you ever having a thought quite so fine and romantic as that do you how strange it must be said colin after a while to have beauty beautiful thoughts beautiful pictures merely as a recreation not as one's business i mean and the world is full of people who have no need to sell their beautiful thoughts chapter sixteen in which we catch up with summer some eminent wayfarers one peculiarly beloved have discoursed on the romantic charm of maps but they have dwelt chiefly on the suggestiveness of them before the journey these unknown names of unknown places in types of mysteriously graduated importance what do they stand for these mazy lines some faint and wayward as a hare and some straight and decided as a steel track whence and whither do they lead

i love the map best when the journey is done when i can pour on its lines as into the lined face of some dear friend with whom i have travelled the years and say here this happened here that befell this almost invisible dot is made of magic rocks and is filled with a song of rapids this infinitesimal fraction of scale five miles to the inch is a haunted valley of purple pine woods and the moon rising and the lonely cry of a sheep that has lost her little one somewhere in the folds of the hills here where is no name stands an old white church with a gilded cross among little white houses huddled together under a bluff in yonder garden the priest's cassock and trousers are hanging sacrilegiously on a clothes-line and you can just see a tiny graveyard away up in the hillside almost hidden in the trees even sacred vestments must be laundered by earthly laundresses yet somehow it gives one a shock to see sacred vestments out of the sanctuary profanely displayed on a clothes-line it is as though one should turn the sacred chalice into a teapot a priest's trousers on a clothes-line might well be the beginning of atheism but i hope there were no such fanciful deductive minds in that peaceful hamlet and that the faithful there can withstand even so profound a trial of faith if it had been my own creed that those vestments represented i should have been shaken i confess and as it was i felt a vague pain of disillusionment of an indignity done to the unseen as whatever the creed living or dead may be

i always feel in those rooms often affected by artistic people furnished with the bric-a-brac of religions indeed not their own but none the less once or even now the living religions of other people rooms in which forgotten or merely foreign deities are despitefully used for decoration and a crucifix and a buddha and an african idol alike parts of the artistic furniture but no doubt it is to consider too curiously to consider so and the good priest whose cassock and trousers have occasioned these reflections would smilingly prick my fancies after the dialectic manner of his calling and say that his trousers on the clothes-line were but a humble reminder to the faithful how near to the daily life of her children how human at once as well as divine is mother church a cross naturally marks the spot where we saw those priests trousers on the line but there are no crosses for a hundred places of memorable moments of our journey they must go without memorial even in this humble record and colin and i must be content to keep wayside shrines for them in our hearts how insignificant on the map looks the little stretch of some seventeen miles from danseville to cahawcton yet i feel that one would need to erect a cathedral to represent the perfect day of golden october wayfaring it stands for as on the weather-beaten map as on the weather-beaten map spread out before me on my writing-table as colin and i so often spread it out under a tree by some lonely roadside icon the place names that to us bring a perfume in the mention

it was a district of quaint romantic sounding names and it fully justified that fantastic method of choosing our route by the sound of the names of places which i confessed to the reader on an earlier page Weyland, Patchen's Mills, Bloods Depot, Cohocton, and to north and south of our route were names such as Oceon, Stony Brook Glen, Loon Lake, Rough and Ready, Doleys Corners, and Neal Creek. I confess that there was a Perkinsville to go through, a beautiful spot too, for which one felt that sort of aesthetic pity one's feels for a beautiful girl married to a man, say, of the name of Podgers. Perkinsville. It was as though you said, The beautiful Mrs. Podgers. But there was consolation in the sound of Wayland, with its far call to Wayland Smithy and Walter Scott,

and Cohocton, the name to me had a fine Cromwellian ring, and Blood's Depot. What a trucker. Suculent sound to that. If you haven't forgotten the plumed daredevil cavalier, who once made a dash to steal the king's regalia from the tower, Again, Loon Lake! Can you imagine two more lonesome wailing words to make a picture with? But, Kohokin!

How oddly right my absurd instinct had been about that! And shall we ever forget the unearthly beautiful, of the evening which brought us at dark to the quaint little operatic-looking village deep and snug among the solemn sleeping hills the day had been one of those days that come perhaps only in october days of rich languorous sunshine full of a mysterious contentment days when the heart says my cup runneth over and happy tears suddenly well to the eyes as though from a deep deep overflowing sense of the goodness of God. It was really summer with the fragrant mists of autumn in her hair. It had happened as we hoped on starting out. We had caught up with summer on her way to New York. Summer all her golden self, though garlanded with wreaths of autumn, and about her the swinging sensors and burning weeds. It was a

wonderful valley we had caught her in, all rolling purple hills softly folding and unfolding in one continuous causeway. A narrow valley, and the hills were high and close and gentle, suggesting protection and abundance and never-ending peace. Here and there, the vivid green of winter wheat struck a note of spring amid all the moves and ochres of dying things. It was a day on which you had no wish to talk. You were too happy, wanted only to wander on and on, as in a dream through the mellow veil. One of those days in which the world seems too good to be true, a day of which we feel

this day can never come again. It was like walking through the 23rd Psalm, and as it closed about us, as we came to our village at nightfall, and the sunshine, like a sinking lake of gold, grew softer and softer behind the uplands, the solid world of rock and tree and stubble-field and clustered barns, seemed to be growing pure thought.

Nothing seemed left of it but spirit. and the hills had become as the luminous veil of some ineffable temple of the mysterious dream of the world puvie de chavonne said colin to me in a whisper and later i tried to say better what i meant in this song strange at this still enchanted hour how things in daylight hard and rough iron and stone and cruel power turned to such airy starlit stuff. Yon mountains, vast as behemoth, seems but a veil of silver breath, and soundless as a flittering moth and gentle as the face of death.

Stands this stern world of rock and tree lost in some hushed sidereal dream. The only living thing a bird, the only moving thing, a stream. And strange to think, yon silent star, so soft and safe amid the spheres, could we but see and hear so far is made of thunder, too, and tears. End of chapters 13 through 16.

Chapter 17 through 20 of October Vagabonds by Richard Legallienne. This Librevox recording is in the public domain. Chapter 17. containing valuable statistics. And the morning was like unto the evening. Summer was still to be our companion, and, as the evening of our coming to Cohocton had been the most dreamlike of all the ends of our walking days,

had, so to say, been most evening spiritual, so the morning of our Cohocton seemed most morning spiritual of all our mornings, most filled with strange hope and thrill and glitter. We were afoot earlier than usual. The sun had hardly risen, and the shining mists still wreathed the great hill which overhangs the village. We were for calling it a mountain,

but we were told that it lacked fifty feet of being a mountain. You are not a mountain till you grow to a thousand feet. Our mountain was only some 950 feet, therefore it was only entitled to be called a hill. I love information, don't you, dear reader, though to us humble walking delegates of the ideal, it was all one. But I know for certain that it was a lane of young maples which made our avenue of light-hearted departure out of the village, though I cannot be sure of the names of all the trees of the thick woods which clothed the hillside beneath which our road lay, a huge endless hillside, all dripping and sparkling and alive with little rills, facing a broad plain, a sea of feathery grass almost unbearably beautiful, with soft glittering dew and opal mists,

out of which rose spectral elms, like the shadows of darkes of darkers. like the shadows of gigantic Shanghai roosters. All about was the sound of Brooks musically rippling from the hills, and there was a chaste chill in the air, as befitted the time of day, for maiden still the morn is, and strange she is, and secret, her cheeks are cold as cold seashells. It was all so beautiful that an old thought came back, to me that I often had as a child, when I used to be taken among mysterious mountains, for summer

holidays. Do people really live in such beautiful places all the year round? Do they live there just like ordinary people in towns, go about ordinary businesses, live ordinary lives? It seemed to me then, as it seems to me still, that such places should be careful. kept sacred, like fairyland, or should, at least, be the background of high and romantic action, like the scenery in operas. To think of a valley so beautiful as that through which we were walking, being put to any other use than that of beauty, seems preposterous. But do you know what that beautiful valley was doing, while Colin and I were thus poetizing it, adoring its outline, and reveling in its tints.

It was just quietly growing potatoes. Yes, we had mostly passed through the apple country. This Garden of Eden, this Vale of Enna, was a great potato country. And we learned, too, that its inhabitants were by no means so pleased with beautiful Coactore Valley as we were. here we gathered was another beautiful near-do-well of nature too occupied with her good looks to be fit for much else than prinking herself out with wild flowers and falling into graceful attitudes before her mirror and there were mirrors in plenty many streams and willows in cohocton valley everywhere for us the mysterious charm of running water once this idle daughter of ceres used to grow wheat wheat in great plenty but now she could be persuaded to grow nothing but potatoes

all this and much more we learned from a friend who drew up beside us in a buggy as i was drinking from a gleaming thread of water gliding down a mossed conduit of hollowed tree trunks into an old cauldron sunk into the hillside and long since turned in ferns and lichen. Colin was seated nearby, making a sketch as I drank. "'I wouldn't drink too much of that water, lads,' said the friendly voice of the dapper little intelligent-faced man in the buggy. "'What, not drink this fairy water?' "'Why, you country folk are as afraid of fresh water as you are of fresh air,' I answered, laughing.

All right, it's up to you, but it's been a dry summer, you know. And then the little man's attention was taken by Colin. Sketching, he asked. And then he said, half shyly, Would you mind my taking a look how you do it? And, climbing down from his buggy,

he came and looked over Colin's shoulder. I used to try my hand at it bit when i was a boy but those blamed trees always beat me don't bother you much seemingly though he added as he watched collins pencil with the curiosity of a child i've a little girl at home who does pretty well he continued after a moment but you've certainly got her skinned i wish she could see you doing it his delight in a form of skill which has always been as magical to me as it seemed to him was charmingly boyish and colin turned over his sketch-book and showed him the notes he had made as we went along one of a stump fence particularly delighted him those stump fences made out of the roots of pine trees set side by side which had been a feature of the country some miles back and which had been a feature of the country some miles back and which had been a feature of the country some miles back and which which make such a weird impression of the landscape, like rows of gigantic black antlers, or many armed Hindu idols, or a horde of Zulus in fantastic war gear drawn up in battle array,

or the blackened stumps of giant's teeth. Colin and I tried all those images, and many more, to express the curious, weird effect of coming upon them in the midst of a green and smiling, landscape. Well, lads, he said, after we had talked a while, I shall have to be going. But you've given me a great deal of pleasure. Can't I give you a lift in exchange?

I guess there is room for the three of us. Now, Colin and I, on the occasion of our ride with the apple farmer a while back, had held subtle, casuistical debate on the legitimacy of men ostensibly, not to say ostentatiously, on foot to New York, picking up chance rides in this way. The argument had gone into pursuit of very fine distinctions and almost rivaled in its casuistry the famous old Duns Scotus, or was it Thomas Aquinas, debate as to how many angels can dance on the point of a needle. Once we had come to a deadlock as to the kind of vehicle,

from which it was proper to accept such hospitality. Perhaps it was a Puritan scrupulousness in my blood that had made me take the stand that four-wheeled vehicles, such as wagons, hay-carts and the like, being slow-moving, were permissible, but that buggies, or any form of rapid two-wheeled vehicle, were not. To this Colin had retorted that, on that basis, a tally-ho would be all right,

or even an automobile. So the argument had wrestled from side to side, and finally we had compromised. We agreed that an occasional buggy would be within the vagabond law, and that any vehicle, other of course than an automobile, which was not plying for hire, such as a trolley or a local train, might on occasion be gratefully climbed into. Thus it was that we hesitated a moment at the offer of our friend, a hesitancy we amused him by explaining, as presently conscious clear, we rattled with him through the hills.

He was an interesting talker, a human-hearted, keen-minded man, and he had many more topics as well as potatoes. Besides, he was not in the potato business, but, as with our former friend, his beautiful business was apples. Still, he talked very entertainingly about potatoes, telling us, among other things, that so friendly was the soil toward that particular vegetable that it yielded as much as 100 to 150 bushels to the acre,

and that a fair-sized potato farm thereabouts, properly handled, would pay for itself in a year, i transcribe this information not merely because i think that among so many words the reader is fairly entitled to expect some little information but chiefly for the benefit of a friend of mine the like of whom no doubt the reader counts among his acquaintances the friend i mean has a mind so quaintly voracious of facts that often when we have been dining together at one of the great hotels he would speculate say looking around the room filled with eager diners on how many clams are nightly consumed in new york city or how many millions of fresh eggs new york requires each morning for breakfast so when next i dine with him i will say as he asks me about him about my trip do you know that in cohockon valley they raise as much as one hundred to one hundred and fifty bushels of potatoes to the acre and he will say you don't really mean to say so i have it in my private notebook much more such tabulated information which i picked up and hoarded for his entertainment just as whenever a letter comes to me from abroad i tear off the stamp and save it for for a little girl I love.

But, as I said, our friend in the buggy was by no means limited to potatoes for his conversation. He was learned in the geography of the valley and told us how once the Cahawton River, now merely a decorative stream among willows, was once a serviceable waterway, how it was once busy with mills, and how men used to raft down it as far as Elmira. but the springs were drying up i like the mysterious sound of that and still more his mysterious story of an undercurrent from the great lakes that runs beneath the valley i seem to hear the sound of its strange subterranean flow as he talked such is the fun of knowing so little about the world the simplest fact out of a child's geography thus comes to one new and more marvelous. Well, we had to say goodbye at last to our friend at a crossroad, and we left him

learnedly discussing the current prices of apples with the business acquaintance who had just driven up. Kings, Ramboes, Baldwin's, greenings, and spigs. And by the way, in packing apples into barrels, you must always pack them stems down. Be careful to remember that. chapter eighteen a dithyrambus of buttermilk one discovery of some importance you make in walking the roads is the comparative rarity and exceeding preciousness of buttermilk we had as i said caught up with summer summer need one say is a thirsty companion and the state seemed to suddenly have gone dry we looked in vain for magic mirrors by the road roadside, overhung with fairy grasses, littered with autumn leaves, and skated over by nimble waterbugs. As our friend had said, the springs seemed to have dried up. Now and again we would hail with a great cry, a friendly pump. Once we came upon a cider mill, but it was not working,

and time and again we knock and ask in vain for buttermilk. Sometimes, but we'd be a cider milk. Sometimes, not often, we found it. Once we met a genial old man, just leaving his farm door, and told him that we were literally dying for a drink of buttermilk. Our expression seemed to tickle him. Well, he said laughing, it shall never be said that two poor creatures passed my door and died for lack of a glass of buttermilk, and he brought out a huge jug, for which he would except nothing but our blessings. He seemed to take buttermilk lightly, but one evening we came upon another old farmer

to whom buttermilk seemed a species of the water of life to be hoarded jealously, and doled out in careful quantities at strictly market rates. In town one imagines that country people give their buttermilk to the pigs. At any rate, they didn't give it to us. We paid that. old man twenty cents, for we drank two glasses apiece. And first we had knocked at the farm door, and told our need to a pretty young woman, who answered, with some hesitancy, that she would

call father. She seemed to live in some awe of father, as we well understood when a tall, raw-boned, stern old man of the caricature Brother Jonathan type appeared grimly, making a iron sound with a great bunch of keys. On hearing our request, he said nothing, but motioning to us to follow, stocked across the farmyard to a small building under a great elm tree. There were two steps down to the door, and it had a mysterious appearance. It might have been a family vault, a dynamite magazine, or the well at the world's end. It was the strong room of the milk, and when the grim old guardian of the dairy unlocked the door, with the sound of rusty locks and falling bolts, there, cool and cloistral,

were the fragrant pans and bowls, the most sacred vessels of the farm. She bathed her body many a time in fountains filled with milk, I hummed to call him, but I took care that the old man didn't hear me, and we agreed. agreed, as we went on again along the road, that he did right to guard well and charge well for so noble and so innocent a drink. Indeed, the old fellow's buttermilk was so good that I think it must have gone to my head. In no other way can I account for the following Dithyrambic song. Let whoso will sing Bacchus's vine. We know a drink that's more divine. tis white and innocent as doves fragrant and bosom-white as love's white bosom on a summer day and fragrant as the hawthorn spray

let dionysus and his crew garlanded drain their fevered brew and in the orgiastic bowl drug and besought the sacred soul this simple country cup we drain knows not the ghosts of sin and pain no fares or furies follow him who sips from its cream-mantled rim yea all his thoughts are country sweet and safe the walking of his feet however hard and long the way with country sleep to end the day to drain this cup no man shall rue the innocent madness of the dew who shall repent or frenzy fine of morning star or the divine or the divine vine inebriation of the hours when may roofs and the world with flowers about this cup the swallows skim and the low milking-star hangs dim across the meadows and the moon is near in heaven the young moon and murmurs sweet of field and hill loiter awhile and all is still as in some chapel dear to pan the fair milk glimmers in the can and in the silence cool and white the cream mounts through the listening night and all around the sleeping house you hear the breathing of the cows and drowsy rattle of the chain till lo the blue-eyed morn again chapter nineteen a growl about american country hotels though colin and i had been walking but a very few days after the first day or two it seemed as though we had been out on the road for weeks as though indeed we had spent our lives in the open air and it needed no more than our brief experience for us to realize what one so often reads of those who do actually live their lives out of doors gypsies sailors cowboys and the like

how intolerable to them is a roof and how literally they gasped for air and space in the confined walls of cities bed in the bush with stars to see bread i dip in the river there's the life for a man like me there's the life forever the only time of the day when our spirits began to fail was toward its close when the shadows of supper and bed in some inclement inn began to fall over us and we confessed to each other a positive sense of fear in our evening approach to the abodes of men after a long safe carefree day in the company of liberating prospects and sweet-breathed winds there seemed a curious lurking menace in the most harmless village as well as an unspeakable irksomeness in its inharmonious interruption of our mood to emerge saturated body and soul with the sweet sense and sounds and sights of a day's tramp out of the meditative leafiness and spiritual temper of natural things, into the garrishly lit street of some little provincial town, animated with the clumsy mirth of silly young country folks, aping so drearily the rivalry, say, of Elmira, is a painful anti-climax to the spirit.

Had it only been real summer, instead of Indian summer, we should, of course, have been real gypsies and made our beds under the stars, but as it was, we had no choice. Or had we been walking in Europe? Yes, I am afraid the truth must out, and that our real dread at evening was the American Country Hotel. With the best wish in the world, it is impossible to be enthusiastic over the American Country Hotel. How ironically the kindly old words used to be.

to come floating to me out of Shakespeare each evening as the shadows fell, and the lights came out in the windows? To take mine ease at mine inn. And assuredly it was on another planet that Shenstone wrote, Whoever hath travelled life's dull round, Whate'er his fortunes may have been, Must sigh to think he still has found his warmest welcome at an inn. Had Shenstone been writing in an American country hotel, his tune would probably have been more after this fashion.

A wonderful day has come to a dreary end in the most sepulchral of hotels. A moldy, barn-like place, ill-lit, mildewed, and unspeakably dismal. A comfortless room with two beds and two low-power electric lights, two-scentry, stiff chairs, an uncompanionable sofa, and some ghastly picture of simpering naked women. We have bought some candles and made a candlestick out of a soap dish. Colin is making the best of it with the beloved vagabond, and I have drawn up one of the chairs to a table with a modelled marble top, and am writing this amid a gloom, which you could cut with a knife, and which is so perfect of its kind as to be almost laughable.

But for the mail, which we found with unutterable thankfulness at the post-office, I hardly dare think what would have happened to us, to what desperate extremities we might not have been driven, though even the possibilities of despair seem limited in this second-hand tomb of a town. Here Colin looks up with a wry smile, and ironically quotes the wisdom of paragot what does it matter where the body finds itself so long as the soul has its serene habitations this whale is too typical of most of our hotel experiences as a rule we found the humble cheaper hotels best and whenever we had a choice of two chose the less pretentious sometimes as on entering a town or village we asked some passer-by about the hotels we would be looked over and somewhat doubtfully asked do you want a two-dollar house and we soon learned to pocket our pride and ask if there was not a cheaper house strange that people whose business is hospitality should be so inhospitable and strange that the american traveling sales

a companionable creature not averse from comfort should not have created a better condition of things for the inn should be the natural harmonious clothes to the day as much a part of the day's music as the setting sun it should be the gratefully sought shelter from the homeless night the sympathetic friend of hungry stomachs and dusty feet the cozy jingle of social pipes and dreamy after-dinner talk, the abode of snowy beds for luxuriously aching limbs, lavender sheets, and pleasant dreams. But as people without any humor usually say, A sense of humor helps under all circumstances, and we managed to extract a great deal of fun out of the rigors of the American country hotel. In one particularly inhospitable home, of hospitality, for example, we found no little consolation from the directions printed over the very simple and familiar device for calling up the hotel desk. The device was nothing more

remarkable than the button of an ordinary electric bell, which you were, in the usual way, to push once for bell-boy, twice for ice water, three times for chambermaid, and so on. However, the hotel evidently regarded it as one of the marvels of advanced science, and referred to it, in solemnly printed rules for its use, as no less than the emergency drop enunciator. Angels of the Annunciation! What a heavenly phrase! But this is an ill-tempered chapter. Let us begin another. Chapter 20

onions, pigs, and hickory nuts. One feature of the countryside in which, from time to time, we found innocent amusement, was the blackboards placed outside farmhouses, on which are written, that is, enunciated, the various products the farmer has for sale, such as apples, potatoes, honey, and so forth. On one occasion we read, get your horse's teeth floated here. There was no one to ask about what this mysterious proclamation meant.

No doubt it was clear as daylight to the neighbors, but to us it still remains a mystery. Perhaps the reader knows what it meant. Then on another occasion we read, Onions and pigs for sale. Why this curious collocation of onions and pigs? colin suggested that of course the onions were to stuff the pigs with and here's an idea he continued suppose we go in and buy a little suckling pig and a string of onions then we will buy a yard or two of blue ribbon and tie it around the pig's neck and you shall lead it along the road weeping i will walk behind it with the onions grinning from ear to ear

and when any one meets us and asks the meaning of the strange procession you will say i am weeping because our little pig has to die and if any one says to me why are you grinning from ear to ear i shall answer because i am going to eat him we are going to stuff him with onions at the next inn and eat roast pig at the rising of the moon but we lacked courage to put our little joke into practice fearing an insufficient appreciation of the fantastic in that particular region we were now making for watkins and had spent the night at bradford a particularly charming village almost lost amid the wooded hills of another lovely and spacious valley through which we had lyrically walked the day before bradford is a real country village and was already in a darkness smelling of cows and apples when we groped for it among the wood the evening before at starting out next morning we inquired the way to watkins of a storekeeper standing at his shop door he was in conversation with an acquaintance and our questions occasioned a lively argument as to which was the better of two roads the acquaintance was for the road through pine creek and he added with a grim smile i guess i should know i've traveled it often enough with a heavy load behind and the recollection of the rough hills he had gone bumping over all evidently fresh in his mind seemed to give him a curious amusement it transpired that he was an undertaker

so we took the road to pine creek but at the threshold of the village our fancy was taken by the particularly quaint white wooden meeting-house surrounded on three sides with tie-up sheds for vehicles each still having a name affixed to it like a pew p yager a w gillam pastor and so on here the pious of the district tied up their buggies while they went within to prey and these sacred stalls made a quaint picture for the imagination of outlying farmers driving to meeting over the hills on sabbath mornings it was a beautiful morning of veiled sunshine so warm that some hardy crickets chirped faintest as we went along. Once a blue jay came and looked at us, and the squirrels whirred among the chestnuts and hickories, and the roadsides were so thickly strewn with fallen nuts that we made but slow progress, stopping all the time to fill our pockets. For a full hour we sat down with a couple of stones for nutcrackers, and forgot each other and everything else in the hypnotizing occupation of cracking hickory nuts.

And we told each other that thus do groan sad men become boys again by a woodside of an October morning, cracking hickory nuts, the world well lost. End of chapters 17 through 20. Chapters 21 through 24 of October Vagabonds by Richard. le gallien this librovoc's recording is in the public domain chapter twenty one october roses and a young girl's face the undertaker was certainly right about the road i think he must have had a flash of poetic insight into our taste in roads this was not as a rule understood by the friendly country folk their ideas and our as to what constituted a good road differed beyond the possibility of harmonizing. When they said that a road was good, they meant that it was straight, level, and business-like.

When they said that a road was bad, they meant that it was rugged, rambling, and picturesque. So, to their bewilderment, whenever we had a choice of good or bad roads, we always chose the bad. and to get at what we really wanted, we learned to inquire which was the worst road to such and such a place. That we knew would be the road for us. From their point of view, the road we were on was as bad as could be. But, as I said, the undertaker evidently understood us, and had sent us into a region of whimsically sudden hills and rock and wooded wilderness, a swart country of lonely, rugged uplands,

with but a solitary house here and there for miles. It was resting at the top of one of these hand-won acclivities that we came upon, and remember that it was the middle of October, two wild roses blooming by the roadside. This seems a fact worthy the attention of botanical societies, and I still have the roses pressed for the insoled. of the learned between the pages of my traveling copy of hans anderson's fairy tales a fact additionally curious was that the bush in which the flowers grew seemed to be the only rose-bush in the region we looked about us in vain to find another how had that single rose-bush come to be an uncompanioned exotic in the rough society of pines and oaks and hickories on a rocky hill-top swept by the north wind

and how had those frail scented petals found strength and courage thus to bloom alone in the doorway of winter and why out of all the roses in the world had these two been chosen still so late in the year year to hold up the tattered standard of summer. Why in the empty autumn woods and all the loss and end of things does one leaf linger on the tree? Why is it only one bird sings? And why across the aching field does one lone cricket chirrup on? Why one surviving butterfly, with all its bright companions gone? And why, when fernic,

faces all about, whiten and whither hour by hour, does one old face bloom on so sweet as young as when it was a flower. The same mystery was again presented to us a little farther along the road, as we stopped at a lone schoolhouse among the hills, the only house to be seen, and asked our way of the young schoolmarm. The door had been left half open, and, knocking, we had stepped into the almost empty schoolroom, with its portrait of Lincoln and a map of the United States. Three scholars sat there with their kindly-faced teacher, studying geography amid the silence of the hills, which the little room seemed to concentrate, in a murmuring hush like a shell. A little boy sat by himself, a desk or two behind,

two young girls and as we entered and the studious faces looked up in surprise we saw only the pure brows and the great spiritual eyes of the older girl almost a woman and we thought of the lonely roses we had found up in the hillside here was another rose blooming in the wilderness a face lovely and beautiful as a spring reflecting the sky in the middle of a wood how had she come there that beautiful childwoman in the solitude by what caprice of the strange law of the distribution of fair faces had she come to flower in this particular waste place of the earth for her face had surely come a long way been blown blossom wise on some far-wandering wind from realms of old beauty and romance and it had the exile a look of all beautiful things could she be a plain farmer's daughter indigenous to that stubborn soil no surely she was not that and yet how had she come to be there but these were questions we could not put to the school marm we could only ask our road and the prosaic possibilities of lunch in the neighborhood and go on our way nor could i press that rose among the pages of my book but as i write i wonder if it is still making sweet that desolate spot and still studying irrelevant geography in the silence of the hills however we did learn something about our young human rows at a farmhouse a mile or so farther on while a motherly housewife prepared us some lunch

all a bustle with expectancy of an imminent inroad of harvesters due to thresh the corn and liable to eat all before them a sprightly young daughter who attended the same school and whom we had told about our call at the schoolhouse entertained us with girlish gossip of the neighborhood so we learned that our fancies had not been so far wrong but that our beautiful young face had indeed come from as far as france the orphan child of a french sailor and an english mother come over the seas for a home with a farmer uncle near by strange are the destinies of beautiful faces all the way from france to pine creek poor little world-wandered rose and while we ate our lunch the mother had a sad beautiful story of a dead son and a mother's tears to tell us too sacred to tell again how many beautiful faces there are hidden about the world and how many beautiful sad stories hidden in the broken hearts of mothers chapter twenty two concerning the popular taste in scenery and some happy people we had somewhat scorned the idea of watkins as being one of nature's show places in fact watkins glen is so to say so nationally beautiful as latterly to have received a pension from the government of the united states which now undertakes the conservation of its fantastic chasms and waterfalls someone, I am inclined to think it was myself,

once said that he never wished to go to Switzerland because he feared that the Alps would be greasy with being climbed. I think it is clear what he meant. To one who loves nature for himself, has his own discovering eyes for her multiform and many mooted beauty. It is distasteful to have some excursionist effect of spectacular scenery labeled and thrust upon him with a showman's raptures, and, in revulsion from the hypocritical admiration of the vulgar,

he turns to the less obvious and less melodramatic beauty of the natural world. The common eye can see nature's beauty only in such melodramatic and sentimental forms, dizzy chasms, foaming waterfalls, snow-capped mountains, and flagrant sunsets, just as it can realize nature's wildness of heart only in a menagerie that a squirrel or a meadow lark or even a guinea-pig is just as wild as the wild beasts in a travelling circus is outside the comprehension of the vulgar who really hunger after mere marvels whatever they may be and actually have no eyes for beauty at all thus really sublime and grandiose effects of nature are apt to lose their edge for us by over-popularization as many of her scenes and moods have come to seem platitude from being overpainted niagara has suffered far more from the sentimental tourist and the landscape artist than from all the power-houses and one has to make a strenuous effort of detachment from its excursionist association to appreciate its sublimity.

Thus Colin and I discussed, in a somewhat bored way, whether we should trouble to visit the famous Watkins Glen as we sat over supper in a Watkins hotel, one of the few really comfortable and cordial hotels we met in our wanderings, and we smiled to think what the natives would have made of our conversation. Two professional lovers of beauty, calmly discussing whether it was worthwhile, walking half a mile to see one of the natural and national wonders of America. Why, last season, more than half a million visitors co-dacted, and wrote their names on the face of the rocks. However, a great natural effect holds its own against so little vulgarization, and Watkins'

glen soon made us forget the trippers and the concrete footpaths and iron railings of the united states government and the fantasies of its weirdly channeled gorge and mysterious busy water watkins itself despite its name is sufficiently favored by nature to make an easy annual living situated as it is at the south end of the beautiful seneca lake and at the head of a nobly picturesque valley some 20 miles long with a pretty river spreading out into flashing reed-grown flats sheer cliffs and minor waterfalls here and there a vineyard on the hillside or the vivid green of celery trenches and the dark loam of the hollows all the way to Elmira the river and the trolley run side by side the whole charming way and as you near Elmira you come upon latticed barns that waft you the fragrance of drying tobacco leaves suspended longitudinally for the wind to play through on the morning of our leaving watkins we had been roused a little earlier than usual by mirthful sounds in the street beneath our hotel windows light-hearted voices joking each other floated up to us and someone out of the gladness of his heart

was executing a spirited shakedown on the sidewalk at six o'clock of a misty october morning looking out we caught an endearing glimpse of the life of the most lovable of all professions it was a theatrical company that had played a one-night stand at the local opera house the evening before and was now once more upon its wandering way they had certainly been up till past midnight but here they were at six o'clock of the morning merry as larks gay as children waiting for the elmira trolley presently the car came clanging up and alongside drew up a big float containing baggage and rolls of scenery all of which to our astonishment by some miracle of loading known only to baggage was, in a few moments, stowed away into the waiting car. When the last property was shipped, the conductor rang his bell by way of warning, and the whole group, like a flight of happy birds,

climbed chattering into the car. All aboard, called the conductor, once more ringing his bell, and off they went, leaving a trail of laughter in the morning air. beloved vagabonds said colin as we turned away lonely from our windows with i hardly know why a suspicion of tears in our eyes chapter twenty three the susquehanna here for a while a shadow seemed to fall over our trip no doubt it was the shadow of the great town we were approaching not that we have anything against elmira though possibly its embattled reformatory frowning from the hillside contributed its gloomy associations to our spirits it was against towns in general that our gorge rose did our vagabond ethics necessitate our conscientiously tramping every foot of these gritty paving stones we asked each other as we entered upon a region of depressing suburbs and we called a halt on the spot to discuss the point the discussion was not long and it was brought to a cheerful demoralized end by the approach of the trolley

into which, regardless of right or wrong, we climbed with alacrity, not to alight till not only Elmira was left behind, but more weary suburbs too on the other side. That night, as old travellers phrase it, we lay at Waverly on the frontier of Pennsylvania, a sad, dirty little town, grotesquely belying its romantic name,

and only surpassed in some way, squalor by the classically named Athens. Beware reader of American towns named out of classical dictionaries. Here, however, our wanderings in the brick and mortar wilderness were to end, for by a long, romantic, old-covered bridge, we crossed the Chemung River, and there, once more on the other side, was nature, lovelier than ever, awaiting us. Not Dante, when he emerged from Hades and again beheld the stars, drew deeper breaths of escape than we, thus escaping from Athens. And soon we were to meet the Susquehanna, beautiful, broad-bosomed name, that has always haunted my imagination, like the name of some beautiful savage princess. La Belle Sauvage!

Susquehanna! What a son. southern opulence in the soft seductive syllables? Yes, soon we were to meet the Susquehanna. Nor had we long to wait, and little did we suspect what our meeting with that beautiful river was to mean. The Chey Hmong, on whose east bank we were now walking, seemed a noble enough river,

very broad, and all the more picturesque for being shallow with the summer drought, and its shining reaches and wooded banks lifted up our hearts. She, like ourselves, was on her way to join the Susquehanna, a mile or two below, and we said to ourselves that, beautiful as the land had been through which we had already passed, we were now entering on a nature of more heroic mold, mightier contours, and larger aspects. We were henceforth to walk in the company of great rivers. The Susquehanna, like some epic goddess, was to lead us to the Lehigh. The Blue Mountains were to bring us to the Delaware,

and the uplands of the Sullivan County were to bring us to the lordly gates of the Hudson. Our chests expanded as imagination luxuriated in the pictures it made. Our walk was only just beginning. Chapter 24. And unexpectedly, the last. We had seen the two great rivers sweep into each other's arms in a broad glory of sunlit water, meeting at the bosky end of a wooded pommontory, and, yes, there was the Susquehanna glittering far beneath. The beautiful name I had so often seen and wondered about,

painted on the sides of giant freight cars. Yes, there was actually the great legendary river. It was a very warm, almost sultry noon day, more like mid-summer than mid-October, and the river was almost blinding in its flashing beauty. Loosening our knapsacks, we called a halt, and leaning over the railing, guarding the precipitous bank, luxuriated in the visionary scene.

So high was the bank and so broad the river that we seemed lifted up into space, and the river, dreamingly flowing beneath a gauze veil of heat mist, seemed miles below us and drowsily unreal. Its course in shore was dotted with boulders, in the shadows of which we could see long, ghostly fishes, lazily gliding, and a mud turtle with a trail of little ones, slowly moving from rock to rock.

Suddenly Colin put his hand to his head and swayed toward me as though he were about to faint. I don't know what's the matter, old man, he said, but I think I had better sit down a minute, and he sank by the roadside. Unlike himself, he had been complaining of fatigue, and had seemed out of sorts for a day or two, but we had thought nothing of it.

And after resting a few minutes, he announced himself ready for the road again, but he looked very pale and walked with evident weariness. As a roadside cottage came into sight, I wonder if they could give us a cup of tea, he said. That would fix me up, I'm sure. So we knocked, and the door was opened by a pathetic shadow of an old woman,

very poor and thin and weary-looking, who, although, as we presently learned, she was at the moment suffering from the recent loss of one eye, made us welcome and busied herself about tea with an unselfish kindness that touched our hearts and made us reflect on the angelic goodness of human nature sometimes. She looked anxiously, mother-like at Colin, and persuaded him to lie down and rest a while in her little parlor. And while he rested, she and I talked, and she told me how she had come by her blind eye,

an odd, harmless-sounding cause. She had been looking up into one of her apple trees one day a few weeks ago, and an apple had fallen and struck her in the eye. Such innocent means does nature sometimes use for her cruel accidents of disease and death? Just an apple falling from a tree and you are blind. A fly stings you on a summer day and you die. Colin rested and refreshed. We once more started on our way. But, bravely as he strode on, there was no disguising it.

my blithe happy-hearted companion was ill of course we both assured the other that it could be nothing but privately our hearts sank with a vague fear we did not speak at length after a weary four miles we reached to wanda i am afraid said poor colin i can walk no more to-day perhaps a good night's rest will make me all right. We found an inn, and while Colin threw himself wearied on his bed, I went out, not telling him, and sought a doctor. "'And you've been walking with this temperature?' said the learned man, when he had seated himself at Colin's bedside and felt his wrist. "'Have you been drinking much water as you went along?' "'It's been a very dry summer, you know.'

and the words of our friend in the buggy came back to us with sickening emphasis oh those innocent-looking fairy wells and magic mirrors by the roadside and i thought too of the poor old blinded woman and the falling apple was nature really like that and then the wise man's verdict fell on our ears like a doom take my advice and don't walk any more but catch the night train for new york poor colin but there was no appeal the end of our trip had come suddenly unreasonably stupidly like this so we've got to be shot into new york like a package through a tube after all said colin no lordly gates of the hudson for us what a fool i feel to be the one to spoil our trip like this and the tears glistened in our eyes as we pressed each other's hand in that dreary inn bedroom with a shadow of we knew not what for callin over us for our comradeship had been very good day by day together on the open road our train did not go till midnight so we had a long melancholy eve before us, but the doctor had given Colin some mysterious potion containing rest, and presently, as I sat by his side in the gray twilight, he fell into a deep sleep, a sleep, alas of fire,

and wandering talk. It was pitiful to hear him, poor fellow, living over again in dreams the road we had traveled, or making pictures of the road he still dreamed ahead of us, never before had I realized how entirely his soul was the soul of a painter, all pictures and color. Oh, my God, he would suddenly exclaim, did you ever see such blue in your life? And then again, evidently referring to some particularly attractive effect in the phantasmagoria of his fever. It's no use. You must let me stop and have a shot to get that before it goes.

One place that seemed particularly to haunt him was Mosh Chunk. He had been there before, and as we had walked along, had often talked enthusiastically of it. Wait till we get to Mosh Chunk, he said. Then the real fun of it. will begin. And now, over and over again, he kept making pictures of match-chunk till I could have cried. Dramatic black rocks, he would murmur, water rushing from the hills in every direction, clean-cut, vivid scenery, like theaters. The road runs by the side of a steel-blue river at the bottom of a chasm, and there is hardly room for it. The house, and the house is a house. The house is a

clings to the hillside like swallows nests. Here and there patches of fresh green grass gleam among the rocks, and high up in the air on some dizzy ledge, there is a wide apple tree in blossom. It is all black rocks and springs and moss and tumbling water. Then again, his soul was evidently walking in the blue mountains, and several times he repeated a phrase of mine that had taken his fancy. And now for the spacious corridors of the Highlands and the lordly gates of the Hudson.

Then he would suddenly half-awaken and turn to me, realizing the truth, and say, Oh, our beautiful journey to end like this, and fall asleep again. And once more I felt a thinking of fairy springs by the roadside, and apples falling innocently from the bough, and how the beautiful journey we call life might someday suddenly end like this, with half the beautiful road untravelled. The rest sleep and perchance dreams. But Colin did not die.

He is once more painting out in the sun, And next year we plan to stand again on that very spot by the Susquehanna and watch the shadows of great fishes gliding through the dreamy water, and the mud turtle with her trail of little ones moving from rock to rock. And then we shall strike out on the road again, just where we left off that October afternoon. But the reader need not be afraid. We shall not write a book about it. envoy and now the merry way we took is nothing but a printed book we would you had been really there out with us in the open air for after all the best of words are but a poor exchange for birds yet if perchance this book of ours should sometimes make you think of flowers orchards and barns and harvest wane it was not written all in vain so authors used to make their bow as gentle reader we do now end of chapters twenty one through twenty four end of october vagabonds by richard le gallien

Thank you.