Abruptly his health failed. Lack of vitality, his inheritance from his mother, made itself felt. He went to California and there died.
James Grogan, Senior, brought home that library and installed it in the old ramshackle house with its addition here and lean-to there. And here, alone, he read each volume.
SIX
Monday, May 11th,
In the Mud.
SIX
Monday, May 11th. In the Mud.
To you, and you alone, little diary, will I confess a sense of deep discouragement. Mud! Mud! Seas of mud and oceans of rain!
We have been out eight full days and have covered but sixty-five miles. The appetite that I have developed is truly amazing. As I sit by a fence, waiting for Dan to investigate those streaks of ooze and slush called roads, I’m hungry enough to eat Limburger cheese, which is saying a good deal for me. Yet I finished a hearty breakfast but an hour or so ago. I am ravenous, morning, noon and night, and Dan is nearly as bad. When I compare the size of our appetites with the cost of bread and eggs at farmhouses, the dollar and a half that Dan sweat like a stevedore to earn, looks woefully inadequate.
Saturday afternoon we cycled through the town of Morris, stopping long enough to purchase a few supplies. Two miles from town we passed a neat farmhouse, and just beyond found a most beautiful meadow surrounded by trees. The long shadows of late afternoon lay across the thick green sward which rose in a gentle slope.