“We'll go to town to-morrow and pick out that sewing-machine!”
I remained with them that night and part of the following day, taking a hand with them in the garden, but of the events of that day I shall speak in another chapter.
CHAPTER V. I PLAY THE PART OF A SPECTACLE PEDDLER
Yesterday was exactly the sort of a day I love best—a spicy, unexpected, amusing day—crowned with a droll adventure.
I cannot account for it, but it seems to me I take the road each morning with a livelier mind and keener curiosity. If you were to watch me narrowly these days you would see I am slowly shedding my years. I suspect that some one of the clear hill streams from which I have been drinking (lying prone on my face) was in reality the fountain of eternal youth. I shall not go back to see.
It seems to me, when I feel like this, that in every least thing upon the roadside, or upon the hill, lurks the stuff of adventure. What a world it is! A mile south of here I shall find all that Stanley found in the jungles of Africa; a mile north I am Peary at the Pole!
You there, brown-clad farmer on the tall seat of your wagon, driving townward with a red heifer for sale, I can show you that life—your life—is not all a gray smudge, as you think it is, but crammed, packed, loaded with miraculous things. I can show you wonders past belief in your own soul. I can easily convince you that you are in reality a poet, a hero, a true lover, a saint.
It is because we are not humble enough in the presence of the divine daily fact that adventure knocks so rarely at our door. A thousand times I have had to learn this truth (what lesson so hard to learn as the lesson of humility!) and I suppose I shall have to learn it a thousand times more. This very day, straining my eyes to see the distant wonders of the mountains, I nearly missed a miracle by the roadside.
Soon after leaving the minister and his family—I worked with them in their garden with great delight most of the forenoon—I came, within a mile—to the wide white turnpike—the Great Road.