October Vagabonds | Page 7

love, dear Miss----, 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 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 from our larder. We carefully laid them outside for the squirrels; then, slinging our knapsacks, we took a last look round the little place, and locked the door.
Our way lay up the hill, across the pasture and through the beeches, toward the sky-line.
We stood still a moment, gazing at the well-loved landscape. Then we turned and breasted the hill.
"Allons!" cried Colin.
"Allons!" I answered. "Allons! To New York!"
CHAPTER VIII
THE AMERICAN BLUEBIRD AND ITS SONG
I wish I could convey the singular feeling of freedom and adventure that possessed 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 on 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, highroads, 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 to go on putting one foot before the other, and we could arrive anywhere. So the worn old 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 wild flowers, 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 ask 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 Prester John.
"That's a silo," said Colin, pointing