"Everyone," remarks Tristram Shandy, "will speak of the fair as his own market has gone in it."
It came near being a sorry fair for me on the afternoon following my parting with the amiable brush-peddler. The plain fact is, my success at the Stanleys', and the easy manner in which I had fallen in with Mr. Canfield, gave me so much confidence in myself as a sort of Master of the Road that I proceeded with altogether too much assurance.
I am firmly convinced that the prime quality to be cultivated by the pilgrim is humility of spirit; he must be willing to accept Adventure in whatever garb she chooses to present herself. He must be able to see the shining form of the unusual through the dull garments of the normal.
The fact is, I walked that afternoon with my head in air and passed many a pleasant farmstead where men were working in the fields, and many an open doorway, and a mill or two, and a town--always looking for some Great Adventure.
Somewhere upon this road, I thought to myself, I shall fall in with a Great Person, or become a part of a Great Incident. I recalled with keen pleasure the experience of that young Spanish student of Carlyle writes in one of his volumes, who, riding out from Madrid one day, came unexpectedly upon the greatest man in the world. This great man, of whom Carlyle observes (I have looked up the passage since I came home), "a kindlier, meeker, braver heart has seldom looked upon the sky in this world," had ridden out from the city for the last time in his life "to take one other look at the azure firmament and green mosaic pavements and the strange carpentry and arras work of this noble palace of a world."
As the old story has it, the young student "came pricking on hastily, complaining that they went at such a pace as gave him little chance of keeping up with them. One of the party made answer that the blame lay with the horse of Don Miguel de Cervantes, whose trot was of the speediest. He had hardly pronounced the name when the student dismounted and, touching the hem of Cervantes' left sleeve, said, 'Yes, yes, it is indeed the maimed perfection, the all-famous, the delightful writer, the joy and darling of the Muses! You are that brave Miguel.'"
It may seem absurd to some in this cool and calculating twentieth century that any one should indulge in such vain imaginings as I have described--and yet, why not? All things are as we see them.
I once heard a man--a modern man, living to-day--tell with a hush in his voice, and a peculiar light in his eye, how, walking in the outskirts of an unromantic town in New Jersey, he came suddenly upon a vigorous, bearded, rather rough-looking man swinging his stick as he walked, and stopping often at the roadside and often looking up at the sky. I shall never forget the curious thrill in his voice as he said:
"And THAT was Walt Whitman."
And thus quite absurdly intoxicated by the possibilities of the road, I let the big full afternoon slip by--I let slip the rich possibilities of half a hundred farms and scores of travelling people--and as evening began to fall I came to a stretch of wilder country with wooded hills and a dashing stream by the roadside. It was a fine and beautiful country--to look at--but the farms, and with them the chances of dinner, and a friendly place to sleep, grew momentarily scarcer. Upon the hills here and there, indeed, were to be seen the pretentious summer homes of rich dwellers from the cities, but I looked upon them with no great hopefulness.
"Of all places in the world," I said to myself, "surely none could be more unfriendly to a man like me."
But I amused myself with conjectures as to what might happen (until the adventure seemed almost worth trying) if a dusty man with a bag on his back should appear at the door of one of those well-groomed establishments. It came to me, indeed, with a sudden deep sense of understanding, that I should probably find there, as everywhere else, just men and women. And with that I fell into a sort of Socratic dialogue with myself:
ME: Having decided that the people in these houses are, after all, merely men and women, what is the best way of reaching them?
MYSELF: Undoubtedly by giving them something they want and have not.
ME: But these are rich people from the city; what can they want that they have not?
MYSELF: Believe me, of all people in the world those who want the most are those who have the most. These people are also consumed with desires.
ME: And what, pray, do you suppose they desire?
MYSELF: They want what they have not got; they want the unattainable: they want chiefly the rarest and most precious of all things--a little mystery in their lives.
"That's it!" I said aloud; "that's it! Mystery--the things of the spirit, the things above ordinary living--is not that the essential thing for which the world is sighing, and groaning, and longing--consciously, or unconsciously?"
I have always believed that men in their innermost souls desire the highest, bravest, finest things they can hear, or see, or feel in all the world. Tell a man how he can increase his income and he will be grateful to you and soon forget you; but show him the highest, most mysterious things in his own soul and give him the word which will convince him that the finest things are really attainable, and he will love and follow you always.
I now began to look with much excitement to a visit at one of the houses on the hill, but to my disappointment I found the next two that I approached still closed up, for the spring was not yet far enough advanced to attract the owners to the country. I walked rapidly onward through the gathering twilight, but with increasing uneasiness as to the prospects for the night, and thus came suddenly upon the scene of an odd adventure.
