since he had the right to choose,
he lingered over it like an epicure. Not the Highlands, for Spring
came late among their sour mosses. Some place where there were fields
and woods and inns, somewhere, too, within call of the sea. It must
not be too remote, for he had no time to waste on train journeys; nor
too near, for he wanted a countryside untainted. Presently he thought
of Carrick. A good green land, as he remembered it, with purposeful
white roads and public-houses sacred to the memory of Burns; near the
hills but yet lowland, and with a bright sea chafing on its shores. He
decided on Carrick, found a map, and planned his journey.

Then he routed out his knapsack, packed it with a modest change of
raiment, and sent out Tibby to buy chocolate and tobacco and to cash a
cheque at the Strathclyde Bank. Till Tibby returned he occupied
himself with delicious dreams.... He saw himself daily growing browner
and leaner, swinging along broad highways or wandering in bypaths. He
pictured his seasons of ease, when he unslung his pack and smoked in
some clump of lilacs by a burnside--he remembered a phrase of
Stevenson's somewhat like that. He would meet and talk with all sorts
of folk; an exhilarating prospect, for Mr. McCunn loved his kind.
There would be the evening hour before he reached his inn, when,
pleasantly tired, he would top some ridge and see the welcoming lights
of a little town. There would be the lamp-lit after-supper time when
he would read and reflect, and the start in the gay morning, when
tobacco tastes sweetest and even fifty-five seems young. It would be
holiday of the purest, for no business now tugged at his coat-tails.
He was beginning a new life, he told himself, when he could cultivate
the seedling interests which had withered beneath the far-reaching
shade of the shop. Was ever a man more fortunate or more free?

Tibby was told that he was going off for a week or two. No letters
need be forwarded, for he would be constantly moving, but Mrs. McCunn
at the Neuk Hydropathic would be kept informed of his whereabouts.
Presently he stood on his doorstep, a stocky figure in ancient tweeds,
with a bulging pack slung on his arm, and a stout hazel stick in his
hand. A passer-by would have remarked an elderly shopkeeper bent
apparently on a day in the country, a common little man on a prosaic
errand. But the passer-by would have been wrong, for he could not see
into the heart. The plump citiz