, I had a life by the way in communion
with every common sight and sound. I lived in communion with sunny and
rainy days, with the form of mountain and valley, with the cornfield
and the forest and the meadow. Not only was man hospitable to the
tramp, but Nature also. The stars spoke of my pilgrimage, the sea
murmured to me; wild fruit was my food. I slept with the bare world as
my house, the sky as my roof, and God as host.

I saw strange happenings in obscure little villages. Wherever I went
I saw little pictures, and not only great pageants; I knelt in little
wooden churches as well as in the great cathedrals. And I brought all
that I met and all that I had experienced to Jerusalem, so that when
the chorus of thanksgiving went up in the monastery on the day when we
arrived, all my world was singing in it.

Sometimes I met pilgrims, especially at monasteries, and sometimes
sojourned with one along the road, but it was not until we reached
the pilgrim-boat that we found ourselves many and together. For the
greater part of the pilgrim life is necessarily in solitude. A great
number of pilgrims starting together and marching along the road is
almost unthinkable. The true desire to start takes one by oneself.
The pilgrim life is born like a river, far away apart, up in the
mountains. It is only when it is reaching its goal that it joins
itself to others. When we reached the port of embarkation we were a
great band of pilgrims, but the paths by which we had come together
were many and diverse, ramifying all over Russia.

We thought, but for the haunting fear of storms, that when we reached
the boat the arduous part of our journey would have been accomplished.
We should cease our plodding over earth, and should rest on the sea
in the sun. We would sing hymns together. Hymns are, of course,
principally designed for pilgrims, for man as a pilgrim, who needs to
console himself with music on the road. We would talk among ourselves
of our life on the way; the days would go past in pleasant converse
and the nights in happy slumber. But that was a mistake. The sea
journey was worse than any of our tramping; it was the very crown of
our suffering.

There were 560 of us packed into the holds of that hulk, the
_Lazarus_, on which we sailed, and there were besides, many Turks,
Arabs, and Syrians; of cattle, two score cows and a show bull with two
mouths; of beasts, a cage of apes; and, as if to complete pandemonium
in storm, ther