ities that lay open before me, I
closed my eyes, turned slowly around several times and then stopped.
When I opened my eyes I was facing nearly southward: and that way I set
out, not knowing in the least what Fortune had presided at that turning.
If I had gone the other way--

I walked vigorously for two or three hours, meeting or passing many
people upon the busy road. Automobiles there were in plenty, and loaded
wagons, and jolly families off for town, and a herdsman driving sheep,
and small boys on their way to school with their dinner pails, and a
gypsy wagon with lean, led horses following behind, and even a Jewish
peddler with a crinkly black beard, whom I was on the very point of
stopping.

"I should like sometime to know a Jew," I said to myself.

As I travelled, feeling like one who possesses hidden riches, I came
quite without warning upon the beginning of my great adventure. I had
been looking for a certain thing all the morning, first on one side
of the road, then the other, and finally I was rewarded. There it was,
nailed high upon tree, the curious, familiar sign:

[ REST ]

I stopped instantly. It seemed like an old friend.

"Well," said I. "I'm not at all tired, but I want to be agreeable."

With that I sat down on a convenient stone, took off my hat, wiped my
forehead, and looked about me with satisfaction, for it was a pleasant
country.

I had not been sitting there above two minutes when my eyes fell upon
one of the oddest specimens of humanity (I thought then) that ever I
saw. He had been standing near the roadside, just under the tree upon
which I had seen the sign, "Rest." My heart dotted and carried one.

"The sign man himself!" I exclaimed.

I arose instantly and walked down the road toward him.

"A man has only to stop anywhere here," I said exultantly, "and things
happen."

The stranger's appearance was indeed extraordinary. He seemed at first
glimpse to be about twice as large around the hips as he was at
the shoulders, but this I soon discovered to be due to no natural
avoir-dupois but to the prodigious number of soiled newspapers and
magazines with which the low-hanging pockets of his overcoat were
stuffed. For he was still wearing an old shabby overcoat though the
weather was warm and bright--and on his head was an odd and outlandish
hat. It was of fur, flat at the top, flat as a pie tin, with the
moth-eaten earlaps turned up at the sides and looking exactly like small
furry