--but I am going to write as
long as ever I am happy at it, and when I am no longer happy at it, why,
here at my very hand lies the pleasant country road, stretching away
toward newer hills and richer scenes.

Until to-day I have not really been quite clear in my own mind as to the
step I have taken. My sober friend, have you ever tried to do anything
that the world at large considers not quite sensible, not quite sane?
Try it! It is easier to commit a thundering crime. A friend of mine
delights in walking to town bareheaded, and I fully believe the
neighbourhood is more disquieted thereby than it would be if my friend
came home drunken or failed to pay his debts.

Here I am then, a farmer, forty miles from home in planting time, taking
his ease under a maple tree and writing in a little book held on his
knee! Is not that the height of absurdity? Of all my friends the Scotch
Preacher was the only one who seemed to understand why it was that I
must go away for a time. Oh, I am a sinful and revolutionary person!

When I left home last week, if you could have had a truthful picture of
me--for is there not a photography so delicate that it will catch the
dim thought-shapes which attend upon our lives?--if you could have had
such a truthful picture of me, you would have seen, besides a farmer
named Grayson with a gray bag hanging from his shoulder, a strange
company following close upon his steps. Among this crew you would have
made out easily:

Two fine cows. Four Berkshire pigs. One team of gray horses, the
old mare a little lame in her right foreleg. About fifty hens, four
cockerels, and a number of ducks and geese.

More than this--I shall offer no explanation in these writings of any
miracles that may appear--you would have seen an entirely respectable
old farmhouse bumping and hobbling along as best it might in the rear.
And in the doorway, Harriet Grayson, in her immaculate white apron, with
the veritable look in her eyes which she wears when I am not comporting
myself with quite the proper decorum.

Oh, they would not let me go! How they all followed clamoring after me.
My thoughts coursed backward faster than ever I could run away. If you
could have heard that motley crew of the barnyard as I did--the hens
all cackling, the ducks quacking, the pigs grunting, and the old mare
neighing and stamping, you would have thought it a miracle that I
escaped at all.

So often we think in a superior and lordly manner of