--which followed my
long visit with the forlorn Clark family upon their hill farm. At first
I hesitated about including an account of it here because it contains so
little of what may be called thrilling or amusing incident.

"They want only the lively stories of my adventures," I said to myself,
and I was at the point of pushing my notes to the edge of the table
where (had I let go) they would have fallen into the convenient oblivion
of the waste-basket. But something held me back.

"No," said I, "I'll tell it; if it means so much to me, it may mean
something to the friends who are following these lines."

For, after all, it is not what goes on outside of a man, the clash and
clatter of superficial events, that arouses our deepest interest, but
what goes on inside. Consider then that in this narrative I shall open
a little door in my heart and let you look in, if you care to, upon the
experiences of a day and a night in which I was supremely happy.

If you had chanced to be passing, that crisp spring morning, you would
have seen a traveller on foot with a gray bag on his shoulder, swinging
along the country road; and you might have been astonished to see him
lift his hat at you and wish you a good morning. You might have turned
to look back at him, as you passed, and found him turning also to look
back at you--and wishing he might know you. But you would not have known
what he was chanting under his breath as he tramped (how little we know
of a man by the shabby coat he wears), nor how keenly he was enjoying
the light airs and the warm sunshine of that fine spring morning.

After leaving the hill farm he had walked five miles up the valley,
had crossed the ridge at a place called the Little Notch, where all the
world lay stretched before him like the open palm of his hand, and had
come thus to the boundaries of the Undiscovered Country. He had been for
days troubled with the deep problems of other people, and it seemed to
him this morning as though a great stone had been rolled from the door
of his heart, and that he was entering upon a new world--a wonderful,
high, free world. And, as he tramped, certain lines of a stanza long ago
caught up in his memory from some forgotten page came up to his lips,
and these were the words (you did not know as you passed) that he was
chanting under his breath as he tramped, for they seem charged with the
spirit of the hour:

I've bartered my sheets for a starlit bed; I've traded