Journeys to Bagdad | Page 4

where one's feet have the ugly habit of foregathering in the end of the shoes.
Worse still than the athletic walker is he who takes Dame Care out for a stroll. He forever runs his machinery, plans his business ventures and introduces his warehouse to the countryside.
Nor must walking be conceived as merely a means of resting. One should set out refreshed and for this reason morning is the best time. Yours must be an exultant mood. "Full many a glorious morning have I seen flatter the mountain-tops with sovereign eye." Your brain is off at a speed that was impossible in your lack-luster days. You have a flow of thoughts instead of the miserable trickle that ordinarily serves your business purposes and keeps you from under the trolley cars.
But all truantry is not in the open air. I know a man who while it is yet winter will get out his rods and fit them together as he sits before the fire. Then he will swing his arm forward from the elbow. The table has become his covert and the rug beyond is his pool. And sometimes even when the rod is not in his hand he will make the motion forward from the elbow and will drop his thumb. It will show that he has jumped the seasons and that he stands to his knees in an August stream.
It was but yesterday on my return from work that I witnessed a sight that moved me pleasantly to thoughts of truantry. Now, in all points a grocer's wagon is staid and respectable. Indeed, in its adherence to the business of the hour we might use it as a pattern. For six days in the week it concerns itself solely with its errands of mercy--such "whoas" and running up the kitchen steps with baskets of potatoes--such poundings on the door--such golden wealth of melons as it dispenses. Though there may be a kind of gayety in this, yet I'll hazard that in the whole range of quadricycle life no vehicle is more free from any taint of riotous conduct. Mark how it keeps its Sabbath in the shed! Yet here was this sturdy Puritan tied by a rope to a motor-car and fairly bounding down the street. It was a worse breach than when Noah was drunk within his tent. Was it an instance of falling into bad company? It was Nym, you remember, who set Master Slender on to drinking. "And I be drunk again," quoth he, "I'll be drunk with those that have the fear of God, and not with drunken knaves." Or rather did not every separate squeak of the grocer's wagon cry out a truant disposition? After years of repression here was its chance at last. And with what a joyous rollic, with what a lively clatter, with what a hilarious reeling, as though in gay defiance of the law of gravity, was it using its liberty! Had it been a hearse in a runaway, the comedy would not have been better. If I had been younger I would have pelted after and climbed in over the tailboard to share the reckless pitch of its enfranchisement.
Then there is a truantry that I mention with hesitation, for it comes close to the heart of my desire, and in such matter particularly I would not wish to appear a fool to my fellows. The child has this truantry when he plays at Indian, for he fashions the universe to his desires. But some men too can lift themselves, though theirs is an intellectual bootstrap, into a life that moves above these denser airs. Theirs is an intensity that goes deeper than daydreaming, although it admits distant kinship. Through what twilight and shadows do such men climb until night and star-dust are about them! Theirs is the dizzy exaltation of him who mounts above the world. Alas, in me is no such unfathomable mystery. I but trick myself. Yet I have my moments. These stones that I carry on the mountain, what of them? On what windy ridge do I build my castle? It is shrill and bleak, they say, on the topmost peaks of the Delectable Mountains, so lower down I have reared its walls. There is no storm in these upland valleys and the sun sits pleasantly on their southern slopes. But even if there be unfolded no broad prospect from the devil to the sunrise, there are pleasant cottages in sight and the smoke of many suppers curling up.
If you happened to have been a freshman at Yale some eighteen years ago and were at all addicted to canoeing on Lake Whitney, and if, moreover, on coming off the lake there burned in you a thirst for ginger-beer--as is common in the gullet of a freshman--doubtless you