wn for the night, and often, if near a
village, the distant, slumbrous sound of a church bell, or even the
rumble of a train--how good all these sounds are! They have all come
to me again this week with renewed freshness and impressiveness. I am
living deep again!

It was not, indeed, until last Wednesday that I began to get my fill,
temporarily, of the outward satisfaction of the Road--the primeval
takings of the senses--the mere joys of seeing, hearing, smelling,
touching. But on that day I began to wake up; I began to have a desire
to know something of all the strange and interesting people who are
working in their fields, or standing invitingly in their doorways, or so
busily afoot in the country roads. Let me add, also, for this is one of
the most important parts of my present experience, that this new desire
was far from being wholly esoteric. I had also begun to have cravings
which would not in the least be satisfied by landscapes or dulled by the
sights and sounds of the road. A whiff here and there from a doorway
at mealtime had made me long for my own home, for the sight of Harriet
calling from the steps:

"Dinner, David."

But I had covenanted with myself long before starting that I would
literally "live light in spring." It was the one and primary condition I
made with myself--and made with serious purpose--and when I came away I
had only enough money in my pocket and sandwiches in my pack to see me
through the first three or four days. Any man may brutally pay his way
anywhere, but it is quite another thing to be accepted by your humankind
not as a paid lodger but as a friend. Always, it seems to me, I have
wanted to submit myself, and indeed submit the stranger, to that test.
Moreover, how can any man look for true adventure in life if he always
knows to a certainty where his next meal is coming from? In a world so
completely dominated by goods, by things, by possessions, and smothered
by security, what fine adventure is left to a man of spirit save the
adventure of poverty?

I do not mean by this the adventure of involuntary poverty, for I
maintain that involuntary poverty, like involuntary riches, is a credit
to no man. It is only as we dominate life that we really live. What I
mean here, if I may so express it, is an adventure in achieved poverty.
In the lives of such true men as Francis of Assisi and Tolstoi, that
which draws the world to them in secret sympathy is not that they lived
lives of pov