Then came their real vacation—a week’s walking trip in Wisconsin.
The night-boat carried them from Chicago to Milwaukee; and from thence, early in the morning, dressed now in their oldest clothes, and with packs on their backs, they set out happily on foot. They stopped by the roadside to make themselves a breakfast of eggs and bacon, cooked in the ten-cent frying pan that dangled from one corner of Felix’s pack; pausing again at mid-day for a luncheon of blackberries and raspberries gathered in some bramble-patch. At night they reached, in a drizzling rain that had accompanied them for the last hour of their journey, a town with an ugly little hotel, where they could at least dry their clothes, eat a poor dinner with a good appetite, and sleep, dog-tired and happy, from ten o’clock till dawn.
And thus onward, in the general direction of “the dells.” Most of the time they did not know just where they were going next, nor care; they took the most promising road.
The “dells” at last—steep ravines, miniature canyons, up which they went in the guide’s leaky little gasoline launch, landing to explore the quaint caverns in the rocks, dim-lighted by the daylight that sifted through the openings above.... And so back, by new roads, glad they had no map to take the surprise out of their journey.
Felix had never realized how much robust strength and endurance Rose-Ann had until they tramped those Wisconsin roads. They were not above taking a lift in some farmer’s wagon or passing automobile, if it promised to get them to a town with a hotel before nightfall; but, having come in sight of the town, if the night promised to be clear, they hunted up some promising spot and encamped there: for what was the use of carrying two heavy woollen blankets, if they were not going to sleep out under the stars by a camp-fire?
Felix’s old corduroys, splashed with kalsomine in all colours, caused him to be taken for an “artist.” At first this displeased him—but he soon discovered that all the world envies the artist, loves him, and wishes to take care of him. Old farmers, burly truck-drivers, delivery-boys, tourists, wanted to give them a lift, and offered them their best counsel as to where to go next. Hotel-keepers, grocers at whose shops they replenished their food supplies, and farmers’ wives at houses where they stopped till a shower passed over, talked to them with friendly eagerness. Felix perceived that a pair of foot-loose vagabonds with enough money in their pockets to pay for their bread and eggs and bacon, are fortunate beings, the world’s darlings, beamed on and approved by those who sleep under roofs and hold steady jobs and stay day after day in the same place—approved because they are living life as all men and women know it should be lived: if everybody cannot live that way themselves, they are glad to see somebody else who can!
As they tramped, Felix’s mind went back to the songs of vagabondia which he used to cherish, and then had rejected as romantic and foolish; and at night, beside their dying camp-fire, when Rose-Ann demanded poetry before she went to sleep, he would say for her the little fragments that he remembered:
“Down the world with Marna,
That’s the life for me!
Wandering with the wandering rain