“And Walter is getting well. His arms are as brown as my own and he has gained eleven pounds,” she said, rolling up her sleeves and showing her heavy, muscular forearms.
She planned to take her husband, a machinist working in a bicycle factory in Buffalo, and her two grown daughters, clerks in a drygoods store, with her and return to the new country, and having a sense of her hearer’s interest in her story, she talked of the bigness of the west and the loneliness of the vast, silent plains, saying that they sometimes made her heart ache. Sam thought she had in some way achieved success, although he did not see how her experience could serve as a guide to him.
“You have got somewhere. You have got hold of a truth,” he said, taking her hand when he got off the train at Cleveland, at dawn.
At another time, in the late spring, when he was tramping through southern Ohio, a man drove up beside him, and pulling in his horse, asked, “Where are you going?” adding genially, “I may be able to give you a lift.”
Sam looked at him and smiled. Something in the man’s manner or in his dress suggesting the man of God, he assumed a bantering air.
“I am on my way to the New Jerusalem,” he said seriously. “I am one who seeks God.”
The young minister picked up his reins with a look of alarm, but when he saw a smile playing about the corners of Sam’s mouth, he turned the wheels of his buggy.
“Get in and come along with me and we will talk of the New Jerusalem,” he said.
On the impulse Sam got into the buggy, and driving along the dusty road, told the essential parts of his story and of his quest for an end toward which he might work.
“It would be simple enough if I were without money and driven by hard necessity, but I am not. I want work, not because it is work and will bring me bread and butter, but because I need to be doing something that will satisfy me when I am done. I do not want so much to serve men as to serve myself. I want to get at happiness and usefulness as for years I got at money making. There is a right way of life for such a man as me, and I want to find that way.”