way, it will
have to be on the way!"

"Of all the fools! Ain't the alleys muddy enough to be like the gumbo
you'll have to plough through?" he teased. But I wouldn't allow him to
take a fraudulent picture. He had to come with me, through the mud,
grumbling, to the edge of town.

There, on the country road that led in the direction of Osageville, my
feet rooted in gumbo, a sort of thick composite of clay and mud that
clings to the feet in huge lumps, I had my photograph taken ... actually
on the march toward my destination ... no hat on ... a copy of Keats in
my hand.

Travers waved me good-bye. "You'll see the story in the _Era_ Sunday
sure," he shouted, in a tone half affection, half irony. I was nettled
at the irony. I wanted it to be looked on as a quest entirely heroic.

* * * * *

It began to rain. Far off, like a high, great ship riding on the
horizon, rode the hill, with its cluster of university buildings.

My first impulse was to turn back, to quit. That is always my first
impulse. The instincts of my bourgeois ancestry against the unusual, the
impractical,--the safe-and-sane conservatism of the farmers and clerks
and small business men bred in my people for generations!...

I pushed on through the clinging, maddening gumbo, slithering and
sliding. Fortunately, I wore an overcoat, which, after it had reached
the saturation point, shed most of the steady, oblique-driving rain that
came for miles over the plains in a succession of grey, windy sheets.
But my wrists and hands were aching, wet, and my thin, plying legs, to
my knees. And the "squash-squish!" of my soaked feet in the mud plodded
a steady refrain of misery.

My Keats, at least, was dry. I kept the volume under my belt and against
my naked belly.

And I was happy and buoyed up by the thought, which lessened my
discomfiture, that Sunday morning thousands of readers in comfortable
homes would be reading about me, would gaze upon my photograph.

People looked out of their farmhouse windows at me as if an insane man
were stalking by.

It darkened rapidly.

My first night's shelter was in a leaky outhouse. The farmstead to which
it belonged had burned down. I might have been taken in at any number of
places, but my access of timidity was too great ... it might on the
following dawn be followed by as great an effrontery. My year in college
had disorganized me, pulled me out of my tramp character. It was no more
a