happened in cities and among crowds. I like to forget
them. They smack of that slavery of the spirit which is so much worse
than any mere slavery of the body.

One day--it was in April, I remember, and the soft maples in the city
park were just beginning to blossom--I stopped suddenly. I did not
intend to stop. I confess in humiliation that it was no courage, no will
of my own. I intended to go on toward Success: but Fate stopped me. It
was as if I had been thrown violently from a moving planet: all the
universe streamed around me and past me. It seemed to me that of all
animate creation, I was the only thing that was still or silent. Until I
stopped I had not known the pace I ran; and I had a vague sympathy and
understanding, never felt before, for those who left the running. I lay
prostrate with fever and close to death for weeks and watched the world
go by: the dust, the noise, the very colour of haste. The only sharp
pang that I suffered was the feeling that I should be broken-hearted and
that I was not; that I should care and that I did not. It was as though
I had died and escaped all further responsibility. I even watched with
dim equanimity my friends racing past me, panting as they ran. Some of
them paused an instant to comfort me where I lay, but I could see that
their minds were still upon the running and I was glad when they went
away. I cannot tell with what weariness their haste oppressed me. As for
them, they somehow blamed me for dropping out. I knew. Until we
ourselves understand, we accept no excuse from the man who stops. While
I felt it all, I was not bitter. I did not seem to care. I said to
myself: "This is Unfitness. I survive no longer. So be it."

Thus I lay, and presently I began to hunger and thirst. Desire rose
within me: the indescribable longing of the convalescent for the food of
recovery. So I lay, questioning wearily what it was that I required. One
morning I wakened with a strange, new joy in my soul. It came to me at
that moment with indescribable poignancy, the thought of walking
barefoot in cool, fresh plow furrows as I had once done when a boy. So
vividly the memory came to me--the high airy world as it was at that
moment, and the boy I was walking free in the furrows--that the weak
tears filled my eyes, the first I had shed in many years. Then I thought
of sitting in quiet thickets in old fence corners, the wood behind me
rising still, cool, mysterious, and the fields in front stret