The Friendly Road | Page 4

nor keep you from your
way.
As for those of us who remain, we will loiter as much as ever we please.
We'll take toll of these spring days, we'll stop wherever evening
overtakes us, we'll eat the food of hospitality--and make friends for life!
DAVID GRAYSON.

CONTENTS
Preface
I. I Leave My Farm
II. I Whistle
III. The House by the Side of the Road
IV. I Am the Spectator of a Mighty Battle, in which Christian Meets
Apollyon
V. I Play the Part of a Spectacle Peddler
VI. An Experiment in Human Nature
VII. The Undiscovered Country
VIII. The Hedge
IX. The Man Possessed
X. I Am Caught Up Into Life
XI. I Come to Grapple with the City
XII. The Return

CHAPTER I.
I LEAVE MY FARM
"Is it so small a thing To have enjoyed the sun, To have lived light in
spring?"
It is eight o'clock of a sunny spring morning. I have been on the road
for almost three hours. At five I left the town of Holt, before six I had

crossed the railroad at a place called Martin's Landing, and an hour ago,
at seven, I could see in the distance the spires of Nortontown. And all
the morning as I came tramping along the fine country roads with my
pack-strap resting warmly on my shoulder, and a song in my
throat--just nameless words to a nameless tune--and all the birds
singing, and all the brooks bright under their little bridges, I knew that I
must soon step aside and put down, if I could, some faint impression of
the feeling of this time and place. I cannot hope to convey any adequate
sense of it all--of the feeling of lightness, strength, clearness, I have as I
sit here under this maple tree--but I am going to write as long as ever I
am happy at it, and when I am no longer happy at it, why, here at my
very hand lies the pleasant country road, stretching away toward newer
hills and richer scenes.
Until to-day I have not really been quite clear in my own mind as to the
step I have taken. My sober friend, have you ever tried to do anything
that the world at large considers not quite sensible, not quite sane? Try
it! It is easier to commit a thundering crime. A friend of mine delights
in walking to town bareheaded, and I fully believe the neighbourhood
is more disquieted thereby than it would be if my friend came home
drunken or failed to pay his debts.
Here I am then, a farmer, forty miles from home in planting time,
taking his ease under a maple tree and writing in a little book held on
his knee! Is not that the height of absurdity? Of all my friends the
Scotch Preacher was the only one who seemed to understand why it
was that I must go away for a time. Oh, I am a sinful and revolutionary
person!
When I left home last week, if you could have had a truthful picture of
me--for is there not a photography so delicate that it will catch the dim
thought-shapes which attend upon our lives?--if you could have had
such a truthful picture of me, you would have seen, besides a farmer
named Grayson with a gray bag hanging from his shoulder, a strange
company following close upon his steps. Among this crew you would
have made out easily:
Two fine cows. Four Berkshire pigs. One team of gray horses, the old
mare a little lame in her right foreleg. About fifty hens, four cockerels,
and a number of ducks and geese.
More than this--I shall offer no explanation in these writings of any

miracles that may appear--you would have seen an entirely respectable
old farmhouse bumping and hobbling along as best it might in the rear.
And in the doorway, Harriet Grayson, in her immaculate white apron,
with the veritable look in her eyes which she wears when I am not
comporting myself with quite the proper decorum.
Oh, they would not let me go! How they all followed clamoring after
me. My thoughts coursed backward faster than ever I could run away.
If you could have heard that motley crew of the barnyard as I did-- the
hens all cackling, the ducks quacking, the pigs grunting, and the old
mare neighing and stamping, you would have thought it a miracle that I
escaped at all.
So often we think in a superior and lordly manner of our possessions,
when, as a matter of fact, we do not really possess them, they possess
us. For ten years I have been the humble servant, attending upon the
commonest daily needs of sundry hens, ducks, geese, pigs, bees, and