One night, despite a hard day's work, I could not sleep. So I went out on the hillside to enjoy the moonlight.
On my way back to the attic I observed a light in the barn. I stopped in to see who was there. It was Sowerby, cleaning out the stable, to the plain disgust of the horses and cows.
I asked him if anything was the matter. I learned that he had risen in the middle of the night and gone to work ... because that was his happiness, his only happiness.
Driven by an impulse of distaste for him and his house and market garden, I started to leave in secret. What money was coming to me for my two weeks' work I did not care about—in the face of the curious satisfaction it would give me just to quit, and to have the old man call up to me and find me missing....
I heard him pottering back to his bedroom again.... I waited till he was quiet and back to sleep—then I stole forth in the quiet moonlight near dawn.
It gave me a pleasure to vanish like smoke. I thought of the time when I had that job plowing in Southern California; that time I had driven the horses to the further end of the field, and left them standing there under the shade of a tree and then made off, wishing to shout and sing for the sheer happiness of freedom from responsibility and regular work.
Each time I have made off that way, from a multitude of varying employments, it has not been, surely, to the detriment of my successive employers. I have always decamped with wages still owing me.