THE 
 
 AGABOND Book 
 
 FARRINGTON 
 
 TH£ OQUAGA PRESS 
 

 Gop\TlghlX"^^5-Q^ 
 
 COl'YUKiUT DKPOSIT. 
 
THE VAGABOND BOOK 
 
THE 
 VAGABOND BOOK 
 
 BY 
 
 FRANK FARRINGTON 
 
 THE OQUAGA PRESS 
 
 DEPOSIT. N. Y. 
 
 1905 
 
• v.;, «Qp:es 
 
 rti^'iJive'J 
 
 rvUV 11 
 
 8ryi> 
 
 
 
 T^3^/' 
 
 .A7t 
 
 1/3 
 
 C) tf 
 
 r 
 
 Copyright, 1905, bv 
 THE OQUAGA PRESS 
 
NOTE 
 
 The Author is indebted to the following publications 
 
 for permission to reprint parts of the co7itents of The 
 
 Vagabond Book: 
 
 Leslie^ s Monthly Magazine 
 
 The Criterion 
 
 Lippincotf s Magazine 
 
 The Ladies' World 
 
 Outing 
 
 Birds and Nature 
 
 Recreation 
 
 Field and Stream 
 
 Doubledayy Page ^ Co, 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 Vagabond . 
 
 Vagabond Invitation 
 
 The Last Walk in Autumn 
 
 The Year's Twilight 
 
 Through October Woods 
 
 Vagabondia for Shut-ins 
 
 Life's Highway . 
 
 The Wanderlure 
 
 Rivers 
 
 The River Path 
 
 The Road . 
 
 Trail Song 
 
 The Land Sailor 
 
 Travelers . 
 
 Song for March 
 
 December Walking 
 
 Winter Song 
 
 The Winter Camp 
 
 There Is a Place 
 
 Rest Ye Here . 
 
 By Lotus Lake . 
 
 The Spirit . 
 
 Road Song 
 
 The Spirit . 
 
 The Trapper 
 
 When Autumn Calls 
 
 An Abdication 
 
 Gypsying 
 
 Gypsy Invitation 
 
 The Rover Heart 
 
 Fellowship 
 
 PAGE 
 
 I 
 
 3 
 
 4 
 
 lo 
 
 1 1 
 
 12 
 22 
 
 23 
 24 
 
 26 
 28 
 
 3» 
 32 
 33 
 35 
 37 
 44 
 46 
 
 47 
 50 
 51 
 53 
 55 
 56 
 57 
 64 
 
 65 
 66 
 
 69 
 
 70 
 
 7» 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 The Vagabonds . 
 
 The Art of Loafing . 
 
 The Hazy Days . 
 
 My Dream .... 
 
 Night .... 
 
 South Wind Blow 
 
 Show Places 
 
 Quebec .... 
 
 Hospitality 
 
 The Inn of the Golden Dream 
 
 The Covered Bridge . 
 
 Bonfire Days 
 
 The Marching Souls . 
 
 A Particular Walk . 
 
 The Hill Road . 
 
 Having Fun 
 
 Mistress Willow 
 
 Out in the Wind 
 
 The Four Winds 
 
 Being Lonely 
 
 Spring for Me . 
 
 Stone Walls 
 
 Along the Old Stone Wall 
 
 Cross Lots 
 
 June 
 
 October .... 
 At the Old Homestead 
 Old Home Hills 
 Going Fishing 
 A Good-Bye 
 
 72 
 
 73 
 78 
 79 
 80 
 82 
 
 83 
 86 
 
 89 
 92 
 
 93 
 95 
 97 
 98 
 
 lOI 
 
 103 
 105 
 106 
 108 
 109 
 III 
 112 
 
 115 
 117 
 120 
 123 
 124 
 130 
 132 
 »39 
 
VAGABOND 
 
 THIS call to Vagabondia is not an attempt 
 to induce the members of the world of 
 industry to abandon legitimate pursuits 
 and come out upon the highways to live an aim- 
 less, pauper existence. Vagabondia does not 
 mean trampdom. It means simply, get the love 
 of God's outdoors in your heart; get the high- 
 ways and the byways in your blood. Know no 
 restrictions of weather or of season. All year 
 round is the roving time for the true lover of 
 the star-set canopy and the woods and the fields, 
 come rain or shine. Get out of doors and be a 
 vagabond ! 
 
 When vacation offers opportunity, let not the 
 chance unimproved slip by. Vagabondia with all 
 her glories, her splendid beauties, her absorbing 
 freedom, is at hand. There is in Nature's heart 
 a love of mankind that bids her draw you to her 
 breast. Repulse her not. 
 
 If vacation is yet afar off or even if yours be 
 a life in which (though Heaven forbid!) vaca- 
 
 I 
 
THE VAGABOND BOOK 
 
 tions are unknown, yet there are portions of the 
 limitless realm of Vagabondia accessible at your 
 very door. There is no need of shutting out Na- 
 ture because perchance you cannot see her under 
 the most ideal conditions. 
 
 If available only in the stilted form of artificial 
 park, seek her there. Find some place from 
 which a vista looking across the water or into 
 the hills will take you out of your sordid self. 
 Be a Vagabond at heart. 
 
 If the times and seasons, the snows of winter, 
 April's showers and greenness, summer's fasci- 
 nating sweet idleness, and the ripened autumn, 
 please you only as one caring naught for art ad- 
 mires it as a clever trick of imitation ; if outdoors 
 does not grip your heart with a clutch that 
 threatens to drag you forth into the woods, away 
 from business however urgent, then these verses 
 and these little essays will be to you but words, 
 idle words. Pass them by, they're not for thee. 
 If you are a Vagabond — well, the Vagabond is a 
 law unto himself and what he may accept or re- 
 ject, no man can pre-determine, but of this the 
 writer is certain, you will understand. 
 
 2 
 
VAGABOND INVITATION 
 
 c 
 
 OME along, all vagabonds. 
 
 Here's the roving season. 
 Leave the humdrum, workaday 
 Life and let unreason 
 
 Be your guiding star a while. 
 
 Wander where the weather, 
 Frosty morns and early eves. 
 
 Eats away the tether 
 
 Bound around you by the cares 
 
 Of labor, labor, labor. 
 Shake the sordid from your soul. 
 
 Forget that work's your neighbor. 
 
 Strike the pike with joy afoot 
 Through the autumn's shining. 
 
 If it showers, never mind. 
 There's a silver lining. 
 
 Take God's star-set canopy 
 
 For a roof protection ; 
 Out of doors be all your home. 
 
 Four walls breed dejection. 
 
THE VAGABOND BOOK 
 
 Join the free-heart rovers who 
 Know the earth's best pleasure. 
 
 An autumn haze o'er all the days 
 And time one need not measure. 
 
 THE LAST WALK IN 
 AUTUMN 
 
 "No sound was in the woodland save 
 
 The squirrel's dropping shell, 
 And the yellow leaves among the boughs. 
 Low rustling as they fell." 
 
 THE nature lover's poet, the poet whose 
 verse is of a natural simplicity, free from 
 complexity, though possessed of depths 
 which are comprehended only after reading and 
 re-reading, is beyond a doubt Whittier, with his 
 ideal outdoor realm pictured through all the 
 changes of the year. 
 
 One of the most beautiful songs, from a Vaga- 
 bond's point of view, is "The Last Walk in 
 Autumn," which I beg you to read if you are of 
 the roving heart. You will realize part of its 
 beauty though you be hard-headed and practical, 
 
 4 
 
THE LAST WALK IN AUTUMN 
 
 but if you can catch the true spirit of such verse 
 you will in poetry find something responsive 
 which you have hitherto missed. 
 
 Just before the coming of the melancholy days 
 which belong to the early winter, or to fall — 
 which to me seems to be a season midway be- 
 tween autumn and winter — one must take what 
 will be the last walk before autumn gives way 
 to its successor. 
 
 Although devotedly and professedly a Vaga- 
 bond, yet the coming of winter must drive one 
 to seek the fireside's warmth a portion of the 
 time, though it be with a heart-depressing regret 
 that outdoors is less available than in the open 
 seasons. 
 
 The prophecies of winter's approach always 
 sadden the soul, and to the rover of the woods 
 and the fields they make that sadness too deep 
 for words to describe. It is as if the death of 
 one summer could not be atoned for in the birth 
 of another. The summer to come will in turn 
 become as dear as the one departing, though the 
 knowledge of that serves but little to moderate 
 the grief caused by the loss. 
 
 5 
 
THE VAGABOND BOOK 
 
 Sadness seems to impregnate the very atmos- 
 phere of the last autumn afternoon, scarce sunlit, 
 though far off to the south shines the sun, un- 
 obscured by any cloud; and it is in a mood cor- 
 responding to nature's own that one sets out, 
 stick in hand, for the last walk in autumn. 
 
 The browning pastures slope back from the 
 valley to the edge of the woodland where the 
 thorn-apple bushes make a fringe of Quaker 
 gray as far as the eye can distinguish between 
 them and the more leaden gray of the deeper 
 woods of beech and oak. 
 
 Foliage is only of the evergreens or of an oc- 
 casional beech whose crisp, brown leaves will not 
 be separated from the parent stem. Color seems 
 to have been ruled out of nature's decorative 
 scheme as much as though a semi-mourning garb 
 had been donned. It is not entirely missing, but 
 has become a matter of minute detail and is found 
 in splotches of red sumach pompons, bright green 
 grass around the springs, mullein leaves of deli- 
 cate green, purpling blackberry stalks and the 
 gayer colors of mosses and lichens. 
 
 The sun's long noon shadows are lacking in 
 6 
 
THE LAST WALK IN AUTUMN 
 
 sharpness of outline, and one faces the south to 
 find Sol looking him squarely but sleepily in the 
 eye. The hills are hazy and all the world is 
 unrecognizable as the same world that June 
 knew. 
 
 If one strolls out of the village and along the 
 river road it will be with a sense of a subtle, all- 
 pervading quiet. True, sounds are plenty; the 
 river rushes along with a bluster of self-im- 
 portance over its stronger current, the chickadees 
 call back and forth and an occasional lumber 
 wagon rolls by, laden to the top of the side-boards 
 with apples and a row of empty barrels, on the 
 way to the cider-mill; but in spite of the occa- 
 sional noises, the sense of quiet will not down. 
 It is the calm spirit of the autumn pervading 
 everything, and it gives to the heart a feeling 
 like unto that which comes with silence. 
 
 A mile out of the village a lane branches from 
 the road, and following the heart's inclination one 
 takes that direction and begins to climb the south 
 side of the hill. Exertion proves that the days 
 do still possess warmth, and just at the edge of 
 the woods it is good to sit down in the shelter of 
 
 7 
 
THE VAGABOND BOOK 
 
 a big rock where the sun falls hot on its side, and 
 rest. 
 
 It is like summer again; the grass is green 
 among the tall brakes and the * 'devil's pitch- 
 forks," grasshoppers and crickets are as lively as 
 ever and one belated bee drones past, seeking a 
 stray Michaelmas daisy or an out-of -season dan- 
 delion in some moist spot. 
 
 One leans back against the warm rock and 
 watches a woodpecker attack a tall pine stub, 
 and life with its worries and its sordid neces- 
 sities seems a thing very far off and unneedful 
 of consideration. The breeze blows overhead 
 rattling the dead leaves, and it is like a June 
 breeze as it touches the forehead with its finger, 
 or reaches down to shake the little feather dusters 
 of the goldenrod. 
 
 From below in the valley come occasional 
 sounds — the barking of a dog, the shouts of 
 school children on their way home, or perhaps a 
 wagon rumbling over a bridge with a noise like 
 that of distant thunder. A cow lows across the 
 valley, a partridge drums in the underbrush, 
 while high above, circling around the hill's very 
 
 8 
 
THE LAST WALK IN AUTUMN 
 
 top, crow's hoarse call answers call, and yet a 
 sense of quiet envelopes all. 
 
 The grateful warmth of the place bids one stay 
 until the walk is apt to end at that point. The 
 sun crawls further into the southwestern hills, 
 the breeze grows chill, and as the shadows creep 
 up your hillside there comes a coolness that starts 
 you villageward in a mood all the more sad for 
 the little glance back into summer. 
 
 Early lights are twinkling and the fragrance 
 of leaf bonfires fills the streets. It is fall, and 
 autumn with its gay foliage, its golden harvest 
 fields, its fruit-laden orchards and shouting bands 
 of nut gatherers, has made way for the frosty 
 mornings and the early twilights that prophesy 
 the advent of winter. 
 
THE YEAR'S TWILIGHT 
 
 T 
 
 HE grapes are purpling on the wall, 
 The goldenrod turns gray ; 
 The tawny beech leaves fade and fall, 
 Low rustling all the day. 
 
 The briars, fruit stripped, vengeance seek 
 With sharpened claws outstretched. 
 
 The jingling streamlet's silvery streak 
 With lifeless leaves is etched. 
 
 The grass is parching on the knoll. 
 
 The mulleins hang their heads, 
 The milkweed pods their down unroll. 
 
 The thistles' virus spreads. 
 
 Naught troubles nature's drowsy sleep 
 While the year's soft twilight falls. 
 
 Save the chipmunk's shrill, persistent ''cheep" 
 Or the crow's uncanny calls. 
 
 lO 
 
THROUGH OCTOBER WOODS 
 
 THERE'S a path leads through the wood- 
 land 
 Where the squirrels chirp and call, 
 Where the partridge whirs and whistles 
 Through the days of fading fall. 
 
 Deep the winding way is sprinkled 
 With the leaves of red and brown, 
 
 And protesting loud, they rustle 
 As our footsteps beat them down. 
 
 Overhead the naked branches 
 
 With but here and there a leaf, 
 Have lost their scarlet raiment 
 
 At the hands of Wind, the thief. 
 
 There's a silent sigh of sadness 
 
 Goes quivering through the wood ; 
 It's the tree-folk's sign of sorrow 
 
 In their melancholy mood. 
 
 They are reft of summer beauty 
 
 And deserted by each friend ; 
 Now resigned to winter's coming, 
 
 Hushed, they're waiting for the end. 
 
 II 
 
VAGABONDIA FOR SHUT-INS 
 
 NOT all of those who are Vagabonds at 
 heart can be Vagabonds of foot. To 
 make up for this in some degree the Vag- 
 abond heart always goes hand in hand with a 
 vivid imagination, which not only adds to the 
 glory of the outdoor Vagabondia, but makes it 
 more nearly possible to the shut-in. 
 
 The shut-in who has no view of green fields or 
 running waters to aid the imagination must per- 
 force make his own Vagabondia, and however 
 devoted a disciple he may be of the creed, there 
 will of course be many days when he will be un- 
 able to rise to its sublimest heights. More than 
 this, his imaginary revellings in the glories of 
 outdoors will probably alternate with spells of 
 deep gloom cast by the thought of the inability to 
 enjoy in reality the pictures drawn by the imag- 
 ination. 
 
 But the shut-in who can look upon a willow- 
 bordered stream, a wooded hilltop, a grassy park, 
 a gnarled and knotted orchard or a long, maple- 
 lined village street with snug lawns on either side, 
 
 12 
 
VAGABONDIA FOR SHUT-INS 
 
 has therein a basis for endless imaginative jour- 
 neyings into the unlimited realms of outdoor 
 travel. 
 
 If the outlook be the row of maples, there will 
 be an ever changing picture from the time the 
 snows begin to melt in the early spring days until 
 the branches are again covered with glittering ice 
 crystals. First come the robins to bid the trees 
 prepare for the summer campaign; then there 
 is a general raking and scraping of the lawns 
 along the line, giving up, in the warm sun of the 
 first days when the doors and windows are left 
 open, a fresh earthy smell that invigorates and in- 
 spires the dullest spirit. 
 
 Then the greening branches with the first leaf 
 buds, the up-springing blades in mottled patches 
 on the lawns, crocuses along the house walls and 
 daffodils in the flower beds. Soon the leaves be- 
 gin to cast a shade on the pavement, the grass 
 reaches a point where the lawn-mower has to be 
 used, and there floats up to open windows a frag- 
 rance identical with that which the wanderer 
 meets with in the July days when out among the 
 broad farm lands. 
 
THE VAGABOND BOOK 
 
 Every day is different to one who would follow 
 the imagination and forget self to live the life of 
 such outdoors as is visible, be it much or little. 
 Every day the breezes play a different tune 
 among the leaves and every day the leaves flicker 
 with different variations of their artistic and 
 graceful gyrations. 
 
 The road lies dusty down the street or it shines 
 with the wet of the recent rain ; a brown path it 
 lies for the soul of the shut-in to travel in imag- 
 ination to the regions where nature is queen, even 
 to the eye of the most prosaic. 
 
 When the late days of summer show the leaves 
 with the brightest gloss rubbed from their green- 
 ness by the roughness of the winds, and the lawns 
 show brown spots where the dry season has 
 parched the roots of the grass, then comes the 
 time of anticipation, a looking ahead to the glories 
 of the autumn foliage which will be as bright on 
 the avenue for the shut-in as on the hillsides for 
 the rover. 
 
 First comes the call of a cicada, then a chorus 
 of them in shrill voiced conclave and the early 
 September days are at hand. Far off in some in- 
 
 H 
 
VAGABONDIA FOR SHUT-INS 
 
 visible marsh a red branch flames with its frost 
 danger signal ; soon the signal is taken up by one 
 branch of the farthest tree on the avenue ; one old, 
 half-broken maple bursts into yellow, and then 
 the whole row, taking alarm at the sign, turn 
 into red and gold torches just before the first hard 
 frost loosens their foliage. 
 
 For a week the display of color is beyond de- 
 scription, then a second frost, and in the quiet 
 of the next morning comes a continual shower of 
 the loosened leaves, covering road and pavement 
 with their fresh, moist carpet which by noon has 
 dried and goes scattering before the rising south- 
 erly breeze. Still the trees are aflame, and for 
 days the air is filled with the flying leaves as the 
 equinoctial gales tear them from the branches 
 and send them to eternity by way of the relent- 
 less bonfires of gleeful youth. 
 
 What a memory-arousing incense arises from 
 those same bonfires to entice the imagination 
 away from the cares of the present into the irre- 
 sponsible freedom of past childhood ! 
 
 Then comes the time of the bare branches, and 
 when the hunter's moon shows its full face above 
 
 15 
 
THE VAGABOND BOOK 
 
 the neighboring house-tops it shows an endless 
 variety of deHcate patterns woven in the leafless 
 boughs of the maples. 
 
 One window that I know — the window of a 
 shut-in — at first glance seems to look out upon 
 little but blank walls; but above the walls there 
 towers in a single spot a rounding hilltop with a 
 ragged fringe of trees and an open spot around 
 one veritable giant of the forest left standing by 
 some oversight of the woodsman. The observer 
 can see from the window for a considerable dis- 
 tance down the hillside, and though the rest of his 
 little outlook may be dismal enough, yet such is 
 the charm of that hill-crest that it is a source of 
 never ending joy to the shut-in whose sole sight 
 it is of the realm of nature. 
 
 There the seasons change from the dazzling 
 white of winter, with a line of rugged rocks 
 stretching across the face of the hill, to the green 
 bank of the summer foliage, and to the variegated 
 crimson and gold of autumn. To a common- 
 place mind it w^ould at any time be but a hillside, 
 just a bit of wooded land, the w^orse off for hav- 
 ing the trees still upon it, but to the confined Vag- 
 
 i6 
 
VAGABONDIA FOR SHUT-INS 
 
 abond it is a source of a thousand joys ; and joys 
 of the soul are no less joys than those of ex- 
 huberant physical strength. 
 
 The detail of nature's beauties escapes the eye 
 of the non- Vagabond, which notes only the great 
 sights: the majestic waterfall, the mighty river. 
 the tallest mountain or the deepest chasm. It is 
 to the shut-in with the narrow horizon that ob- 
 servance of detail reaches its highest perfec- 
 tion. 
 
 There is one such with a beautiful view from 
 a high, third-story window, a view which shows 
 a winding stream with rows of willows lining its 
 low banks, a little island meadow with a village 
 beyond and a range of divided hills o'ertopping 
 all. You who have never learned or cared to 
 learn the joys of Vagabondia would w^eary of the 
 view in an afternoon. You would say, *'Yes, to 
 be sure, it is pretty, but there is such a sameness 
 to it. Don't you get very tired of it?" 
 
 Of course any one would become weary of the 
 same view day in and day out and year in and 
 year out, but weary not so much of the view as 
 of the deprivation from seeing other views. 
 
 17 
 
THE VAGABOND BOOK 
 
 To the person whose own view this one is, it 
 is a source of countless pleasures, and through all 
 the long winter and through all the long summer 
 — if either winter or summer or any time in one 
 life can be called long — ^the river, the meadow, the 
 willows, the tree-framed roofs, the hills beyond, 
 are each day as a new chapter in a book of well- 
 sustained interest. 
 
 There are days when the snow so covers every- 
 thing that all contrast is obliterated and nothing 
 but white shows from the surface of the frozen 
 stream to the top of the highest peak, while the 
 next day perhaps under the influence of a soft 
 south wind the trees show black against the hill's 
 white coating and the rocks peer through the 
 snow, and if the same wind blows another day, 
 bringing the rain, there will be a general change 
 from the glaring white to an indigo black, ending 
 with a rushing of waters in the little river and a 
 clearing of the sky with the following cold snap, 
 once more putting King Frost in charge of the 
 scene. 
 
 All the spring and all the summer the island 
 meadow varies from day to day with a profu- 
 
 i8 
 
VAGABONDIA FOR SHUT-INS 
 
 sion of cowslips, dandelions, buttercups, violets, 
 daisies, cardinal flower and goldenrod. These 
 come and go in their time with an utter disregard 
 of wind and weather, and the bird choir in the 
 willows supplies a vaudeville far surpassing any 
 to be heard indoors. 
 
 The water writhes and wrinkles in endless 
 variety, never twice the same, around the moated 
 field. In the sun of a summer morning it shines 
 clear and cool and refreshing, and in the evening 
 there come across it the lights and shades of the 
 sunset glories, all duplicated in the reflections 
 beneath the willows. The kingfishers watch for 
 their prey from the overhanging branches and 
 now and again dive swiftly and surely into the 
 current, bearing away in each sharp beak wrig- 
 gling game for the dinner of the mate with a 
 nestful of featherless offspring. 
 
 The further hills offer the greatest glory of all 
 the view, and one leaves the beauties of the near 
 at hand with a regret lessened only by the knowl- 
 edge of further joys. 
 
 Hills of azure, hills of gray, hills of golden, 
 purple, opal and maroon, hills of spotless white or 
 
 19 
 
THE VAGABOND BOOK 
 
 inky blue ; these are the hills across the valley, the 
 hills which are never two days alike, hills which 
 are never aught but glorious and beautiful, awe- 
 inspiring and satisfying to the Vagabond soul. 
 How their summits draw^ one to leave the narrow, 
 cabined and cribbed confines of the four walls! 
 How they make one long for the freedom of 
 roaming without care or responsibility! How they 
 satisfy the soul that cannot roam, the soul in a 
 body that must measure its travels by the length 
 of the journey from bed to couch and from couch 
 to bed! Thank God for good legs and the 
 strength to use them in going where nature has 
 meant that people should go — out in the glories 
 of the woods, fields, roads and hills ! 
 
 How the hills speak to one who knows their 
 voices ! The photographer may be clever, so cun- 
 ning perhaps as to reproduce upon his paper the 
 picture of the October afternoon with all its 
 o'erspreading grays and browns and greens re- 
 produced with a perfect regard for their proper 
 tone values and the proportionate light and 
 shadow of each and every tree and shrub. He 
 may make a picture so perfect that no person can 
 20 
 
VAGABONDIA FOR SHUT-INS 
 
 point a single way in which that picture varies 
 from the original. He may perhaps make it so 
 nearly perfect that you and I, Vagabonds though 
 we are, must acknowledge its perfection ; and yet, 
 and yet, to look at the picture will resemble ex- 
 periencing and seeing the view no more than 
 looking at a perfect painting of the most delicious 
 fruits will resemble eating them and tasting their 
 lusciousness. 
 
 The lights and the shadows, the distances, the 
 perspectives and the objects will all be there, but 
 they will not bring the feeling that the hills them- 
 selves communicate to one, the indescribable, 
 sympathetic mood which steals upon the senses 
 unawares and sobers the most irrepressible ; there 
 will not be the October smell, the perfume of the 
 moistened, dying leaves of the willows and the 
 incense of the bonfires ; in short there will be lack- 
 ing the life of the scene though it be technically 
 perfect, just as one might make up according to 
 a model a perfect reproduction of a bird or a fish, 
 but at the last lack utterly the power to make a 
 live animal of the imitation. 
 
 But all these joys of the heart those shut in 
 
 21 
 
THE VAGABOND BOOK 
 
 can share with the rover, and we beg of them, 
 with a perfect appreciation of their losses and 
 their deprivations, a more thorough devotion to 
 the creed of the Vagabond, which shall enable 
 them to wander far and wide through the earth 
 without let or hindrance and with endless pleas- 
 ure to themselves. 
 
 LIFE'S HIGHWAY 
 
 DUSTY down the valley way 
 I The riband of the road, 
 A long, brown streamer in the sun. 
 Leads off from my abode. 
 
 I sit, a loafer in the shade 
 
 Before my house of clay, 
 And wonder, wonder as I sit. 
 
 Where leads that long highway. 
 
 22 
 
THE WANDERLURE 
 
 H, the wanderer heart is tugging strong 
 At the leash that holds it fast, 
 And a luring wile is the siren smile 
 Of the summer slipping past. 
 
 O 
 
 The hills are calling near and far, 
 The highway stretches brown, 
 
 The woodland's show of flaming glow 
 Draws rover hearts from town. 
 
 Come break your tether, heart of mine. 
 
 Let's out and steal away. 
 There's rampant life in the joy that's rife 
 
 With the sun of an autumn day. 
 
RIVERS 
 
 IN one of his novels, Henry Seton Merriman 
 likened the character of people living along 
 the greater streams to the streams them- 
 selves. This classification is not inept and might 
 be carried even further; if one does but walk be- 
 side a stream, there is an unconscious tendency 
 on the part of the thoughts to resemble the 
 stream. 
 
 One does not wander down a turbulent moun- 
 tain torrent, the mind placidly contemplating the 
 peaceful qualities of human nature, or dwelling 
 upon the calm, unruffled serenity of a June day, 
 nor does one stray beside a smooth, deep, slug- 
 gish river with grass and flower-lined banks, to 
 recline thereon and dream of battles, murders and 
 direful calamities. 
 
 It is not that a person deliberately says when 
 starting out to roam along the quiet stream, 
 ''Now I will fill my mind with thoughts of peace 
 and piety." The effect of the stream is as un- 
 conscious as it is certain. 
 
 Choose then a stream befitting the mood in 
 
RIVERS 
 
 which you would be placed. There is no stroll 
 more nearly ideal than that which combines the 
 charm of the most favored upland road with the 
 near proximity of some small brook which adds 
 its voice to those of the other denizens of nature 
 clamoring for attention. 
 
 A noisy stream is a companion which pleases 
 as much as a noisy human companion disturbs. 
 It joins you and chatters incessantly for a hun- 
 dred yards, then rambles off by itself to explore 
 a willow copse across the narrow valley from the 
 highway. When it returns to the road, it may 
 be with its waters turned turbid by the cattle 
 fording its shallows, or it may bring a surface 
 yellow dotted with a scattering of leaves, telling 
 the swan song of the willows. 
 
 It broadens into shallows where its voice is 
 silenced, or it narrows to a breadth to be crossed 
 at a leap, and rushes through the miniature 
 chasm with its best imitation of a roaring moun- 
 tain torrent. 
 
 With all its profounder influences upon the 
 emotions and with all its more forceful inspira- 
 tion, walking by a big stream has not the attrac- 
 ts 
 
THE VAGABOND BOOK 
 
 tion that one finds by the Httle waters. The fas- 
 cinations of the Httle river are as countless as the 
 bubbles in its foaming caldrons, and the variety 
 of its phases is beyond the withering power of 
 time. No month of the twelve but brings its 
 particular charm to evidence in some peculiar 
 manner, and month in and month out, there 
 exists in the walk on its bank an irresistible 
 attraction. 
 
 The big rivers for the strenuous, but the little 
 rivers for the Vagabond. 
 
 T 
 
 THE RIVER PATH 
 
 HERE'S a path beside the river. 
 
 Winding through the willow copse, 
 Where I love to walk in autumn 
 Ere the season's curtain drops. 
 
 On far hillsides beech and maple 
 Touched by early, nipping frost, 
 
 Have their brown and scarlet jackets 
 To the boisterous breezes tossed. 
 26 
 
THE RIVER PATH 
 
 Still the willow leaves are clinging, 
 
 Latest foliage of fall, 
 Shading yet my river pathway 
 
 Underneath the osiers tall. 
 
 On the wimpling water's surface 
 Where the sallow sunlight glints. 
 
 Float the leaves from woodlands stolen 
 By the Wind, of thieves the prince. 
 
 All along the river edges 
 
 Verdure's turned to brown and gray, 
 Rustling through the drying sedges 
 
 Autumn's low voiced breezes play. 
 
 Nowhere sweeter walk or rarer 
 Than my path beside the stream. 
 
 There I love to walk in autumn, 
 There to loiter and to dream. 
 
THE ROAD 
 
 THERE is the highway; you may love it or 
 you may scoff at it, I know not your habit, 
 but whatever you do, follow it day in and 
 day out. Ride over it, drive over it or walk over 
 it; best of all is the walking, for the true Vaga- 
 bonds are the walkers. 
 
 The bicycle as a fad has passed into oblivion, 
 poor overdone bicycle craze! How it kept thou- 
 sands of riders scurrying across the country hith- 
 er and yon just for the sake of piling up the miles 
 on a cyclometer ! But how it enabled, how it still 
 enables those of us who love outdoors to bring 
 the hitherto distant parts near to our homes! 
 How it stimulated to added charm the old way- 
 side inn where it is so enjoyable to halt for a 
 lunch or supper and rest on its wide verandah in 
 the broad content of the hour after the meal ! 
 
 What a host of pleasures the bicycle renewed, 
 rescued from boyhood or girlhood, pleasures 
 which have not followed the fad into oblivion! 
 The road itself exhibits a charm which it never 
 before possessed fo thousands who had ever been 
 
 28 
 
THE ROAD 
 
 mere house-ridden servers of Father Time. If the 
 bicycle redeemed them from their slavery to four 
 walls and dejection, though some of them have 
 gradually fallen back into that slavery, yet many 
 could not give up their outdoors. If afraid of 
 fashion's decrees, vucy now automobile, golf, 
 drive or walk, but indoors can no more satisfy. 
 
 The road is still there with its fringe of maples, 
 elms, fruit trees, hedge rows; of wild growing 
 shrubbery or banks blossoming with an adorable 
 variety, from the yellow-hearted bloodroot of 
 earliest spring to the smoke-blue aster tufts of 
 fall. 
 
 As a nation we are persistent health seekers. 
 We study patiently countless long treatises upon 
 the prevention or cure of disease. We were never 
 so well posted upon the methods for excluding 
 germs from our systems; and first and foremost 
 among the germicides is outdoors, fresh air, with 
 its attendant diversions of the mind. 
 
 There is the road. It lies brown and inviting 
 before you, a clear cut way to health, leading 
 down the perspective between borders of green, 
 yellow and red ; bird and bud and blossom : bob- 
 
 2C) 
 
THE VAGABOND BOOK 
 
 o'links, ■ warblers and orioles ; daisies and butter- 
 cups; with the smell of the June-time or the 
 breath of the harvest fields filling the air. Winter 
 closes it not, but ofYers the bracing, invigorating, 
 hyper-oxygenated air and white stretching vistas, 
 or brown, breeze-blown hillsides to call you forth 
 to follow the sparrow and the chickadee. 
 
 The road is there to be treated as your temper- 
 ament dictates. Long may it find favor in your 
 heart ! 
 
 30 
 
TRAIL SONG 
 
 HERE'S out on the open trail, my lass, 
 With a heart for rain or shine! 
 Here's out to race with wind in the face, 
 To roam or rove at the wilding pace 
 Where the weather thrills like wine! 
 
 We'll follow the wind of the way, my lass, 
 
 Where it chases a truant stream. 
 We'll loaf along with a vagrant song. 
 With the glow of life all thrilling strong 
 
 And the future a vibrant dream. 
 
 For what's a day or a year, my lass, 
 
 But time for finding joy? 
 We've naught to do, we crony two. 
 With the Ship of Worry's crafty crew. 
 
 We're free from all annoy. 
 
 Then here's a song, a song, my lass, 
 
 A song for the open trail ! 
 We're off to seek the crimson streak 
 That's sunk behind West Mountain's peak. 
 
 And drink from freedom's grail. 
 
 31 
 
THE LAND SAILOR 
 
 c 
 
 OME, fill my sails, you wastrel wind, 
 And waft me o'er the fields, 
 The golden fields, rich harvest lined 
 With all that red earth yields. 
 
 Come, blow me down the valley way 
 
 Between the crimson hills, 
 Where hardwoods make the landscape gay 
 
 And nature's glad heart thrills. 
 
 Blow, blow my craft where yellow leaves 
 Swirl vagrant through the air. 
 
 And blow me where the rustling sheaves 
 Dot fields of stubble bare. 
 
 For I would sail the autumn land 
 
 While glow its radiant hues. 
 With boat and breeze at my command, 
 
 All down its length I'll cruise. 
 
 32 
 
TRAVELERS 
 
 TRAVELERS are of two classes, the real 
 and the make believe. Usually the make 
 believes have journeyed infinitely more 
 miles than the real, but traveling is not a matter 
 of distance. 
 
 I know a man who has spent every winter in 
 Egypt for years, and all he remembers of the 
 country is that a native guide robbed him on one 
 occasion of a pair of gold sleeve links. He is a 
 make believe. I know another man who has 
 never been out of his own county, but he knows 
 every nook and corner of every locality that he 
 ever visited. He knows at how many and what 
 places the Beaverkill stream is dammed, how 
 many roads and paths lead over the hills lying 
 between Fall Clove and Terry Clove. He has 
 seen things in detail and in such as he we find the 
 real travelers. It is the old story of eyes and no 
 eyes. 
 
 Sometimes travel is for education, sometimes 
 for enjoyment. Enjoyment is not dependent 
 upon the number of miles traversed and neither 
 
 33 
 
THE VAGABOND BOOK 
 
 is education; nor does either depend upon the 
 country through which one journeys. All de- 
 pends simply upon the way in which one takes en- 
 vironment and what the effect of new views and 
 scenes may be upon the soul. 
 
 In taking a pleasure trip do you spend its days 
 in impatient waitings for arrival at its turning 
 points? Does the anxiety to get to some place 
 eclipse the joy of the journey there? Then you 
 are not a Vagabond and traveling is but the 
 wearying means to an unsatisfying end, which as 
 soon as it is reached becomes merely one of the 
 stepping stones to some goal yet farther distant. 
 
 Do you travel for the journey? Do you set 
 out on a pleasure trip with a sense of the keenest 
 enjoyment of every minute of the way? Would 
 you prefer a journey in an ox-cart to one on the 
 vestibule limited in order that you might have a 
 better opportunity to enjoy the world by the 
 way ? Then you are a real traveler, a true nature 
 lover and a member of the Vagabond Club. Life 
 holds more joy for you in the pleasures of travel, 
 though your means be never so small, than the 
 private car and steam yacht class can ever com- 
 pass. 
 
 34 
 
SONG FOR MARCH 
 
 To be a make-believe traveler is but a matter 
 of dollars and cents. To be a real traveler is a 
 matter of the heart's deepest desires and the 
 imagination's capabilities, and those will go 
 farthest whose love of gypsying carries their 
 hearts farthest afield. 
 
 SONG FOR MARCH 
 
 SING ho ! Sing ho, for the sleet and snow ! 
 For the stormy March and the winds that 
 blow 
 From north and south, now high, now low. 
 
 Or chill or warm ! 
 Oh, March is the month of months for me ; 
 Its south winds set old winter free, 
 And tell of the spring time soon to be. 
 With all its charms. 
 
 Sing ho for March on the sea's bleak shore, 
 Where the bracing breezes evermore 
 Blow up from the ocean, bearing before 
 The salt sea spray ! 
 35 
 
THE VAGABOND BOOK 
 
 Sing ho for March among the hills ; 
 Melting snows filling the ice-rimmed rills, 
 Streams rushing madly past meadows and mills 
 Day after day! 
 
 Sing ho for the roughest month of all, 
 When shrill o'er the tempest sounds the call 
 Of the crow from forest tree-top tall, 
 
 Telling of spring ! 
 And ho for the waning winter days 
 When the lingering north wind's cold delays 
 April's coming and chills the sun's red rays ! 
 
 Oh, March is king! 
 
 36 
 
DECEMBER WALKING 
 
 YOU who have made a fleeting fad of some 
 outdoor sport, have taken up for a time a 
 form of recreation which has proved more 
 beneficial than all the medicine the druggist ever 
 compounded for your chronic ailments. The only 
 trouble with such a fad was that it was nothing 
 more, and while fads may do much good while 
 they last, they are too short of life. A fad, though 
 it may prove as stimulating as wine without the 
 subsequent depression, is after all only a fad. 
 
 As the disciple of no ology, cult or creed except 
 that of Vagabondia, I am not going to write tech- 
 nically of the proper motions to be made in walk- 
 ing in order to get the most appetite for the least 
 number of miles. I simply feel inclined to tell 
 those who wish to know, that there is much in 
 December air that appeals strongly enough to 
 draw some people out to walk in it day after day 
 until they come up to Christmas with a feeling of 
 exhilaration that makes it a pleasure to look for- 
 ward to the remaining months of cold. 
 
 The kind of December walking that I like and 
 
 37 
 
THE VAGABOND BOOK 
 
 that every walker by choice Hkes is not the shiver- 
 ing, shuddering, grumbling, be-mittened, ulstered 
 and fur-buried shamble that takes one only so far 
 as the cold can be kept out by main force and then 
 rushes to the nearest radiator. It is not the 
 nervous sprint that sets out to walk to a certain 
 point and back and speeds along cringing at the 
 bluff heartiness of the brisk air, hurrying to the 
 fire as soon as possible with a great sigh of relief 
 that the task is finished. 
 
 No one can gain any pleasure from such walk- 
 ing, and there is apt to be but little benefit from it. 
 
 December is not as cold as it is painted. As a 
 rule there is no permanent snow in most of our 
 land until about Christmas time. Oftentimes 
 there are lingering days of the good St. Martin's 
 summer as late as the opening of December, and 
 Whittier himself gives us a picture like this, in 
 'The Last Walk in Autumn" : 
 
 "Along the river's summer walk 
 The withered tufts of asters nod; 
 And trembles on its arid stalk 
 The hoar plume of the goldenrod; 
 
 38 
 
DECEMBER WALKING 
 
 And on a ground of sombre fir 
 And azure studded juniper 
 The silver birch its buds of purple shows, 
 And scarlet berries tell where bloomed the sweet wild rose." 
 
 With such a picture, one might expect to find 
 early December filled with the haze of late autumn 
 and perhaps even its erratic warmth and its subtle 
 spirit of Vagabondia. 
 
 For most of us the ground will be frozen hard 
 before December appears. The fields will be 
 almost as hard as the highways and the walking 
 will be good anywhere. No dust and no mud, 
 the marshy spots covered and the little streams 
 bordered with crystal, though still running clear 
 and musical, their tones more silvery than ever 
 in the summer days. 
 
 There is a sharp ring to the sound of the heels 
 on the pavement as one starts out on a December 
 afternoon. The air is good to breathe and makes 
 a person involuntarily take those long, deep 
 breaths that are the enemy of every sort of 
 microbe that has been invented (for I believe that 
 as many microbes are invented as are discovered). 
 
 Even just after midday the shadows are 
 
 39 
 
THE VAGABOND BOOK 
 
 stretching far to the north and the sun seems 
 ready to set behind the southern hills in spite of 
 the tradition that it always disappears in the west. 
 The shade trees on the avenues loom lace-like 
 against the gray sky, shaking an occasional leaf 
 in defiance of the king of cold. Along the north- 
 ern side of the street where the shelter of the 
 buildings keeps the wind away, one might prom- 
 enade at leisure, coat unbuttoned, and think that 
 the sunshine was that of a spring day. However, 
 December is no time for loiterers, and loitering is 
 no fit occupation for December. 
 
 Leave the paved streets and strike for the coun- 
 try lane leading off between fields where flocks of 
 Christmas turkeys pick their stately way about 
 amid the ruins of the summer verdure. 
 
 How near the hills are and how clear they stand 
 up there against the sky, their wrinkled brows 
 frowning down at the river as it glitters away to- 
 ward the sun and disappears in a blaze of light. 
 Not a hill now that can conceal the skeleton in its 
 family closet. All is exposed to view, from the 
 smallest rock to the highest ledge and the crook- 
 edest tree. There is a softness of color tone, 
 
 40 
 
DECEMBER WALKING 
 
 particularly in the early twilight hours, that never 
 shows on the summer hills. The inky blues and 
 the marvelous grays and browns of barren De- 
 cember are as artistic as ever are the greens of 
 other seasons. Theirs is a strength that is more 
 than mere beauty. 
 
 One wanders across the orchard toward the hill 
 pasture with an appreciation of the gnarled and 
 knotted apple trees which largely enhances their 
 value in the scheme of the landscape's beauty. 
 Overhead there are plentiful birds' nests to remind 
 one of the denizens of the summer orchard, and 
 under foot there is a carpet the solid color of the 
 dead grass, through which the field mice are 
 gleaning after the last of the larger harvesters. 
 
 One detects a feeling of snow in the atmosphere 
 and if the day be dull there is an involuntary re- 
 verting of the mind to "Snow Bound" and *The 
 sun that brief December day rose cheerless over 
 hills of gray." Even the person who dislikes 
 snow might almost be reconciled to its discom- 
 forts for the sake of that beautiful poem. 
 
 In walking up the hill, what a picture the valley 
 and the hills across make in the thin sunshine with 
 
 41 
 
THE VAGABOND BOOK 
 
 the curling smoke arising from the farmhouse 
 chimneys! What a stillness there is! A hound 
 up there in the woods bays loudly in pursuit of a 
 rabbit, or of Br'er Fox maybe. Voices come up 
 out of the valley as one goes higher. Every dis- 
 tant sound adds to the stillness. 
 
 The roar of the water in the river as it flows 
 over the dam fills the air as it never seems to do in 
 summer. The sounds are like those in a big empty 
 hall. Noises that would not be heard when it is 
 full reverberate from side to side with amazing 
 clearness when it is empty. 
 
 One feels so much more like walking in De- 
 cember. The air is so full of vigor and there is 
 such an utter absence of the tired feeling that 
 haunts the unambitious during the dog days. It 
 is no effort to keep right on up the hill without 
 halting to get breath. However keen the air, 
 with the hands protected and perhaps the ears, 
 and a thick jacket for facing the wind, none, 
 unless it may be old age, need be fearful of Jack 
 Frost. 
 
 There's a cow-path leads out through the 
 grove where the feet stir up the leaf carpet and 
 
 42 
 
DECEMBER WALKING 
 
 one may pause for a moment to speculate upon 
 the fancy of Oliver Wendell Holmes' "Cracked 
 Teacup," who said that the trees were naught 
 but great subterranean creatures with their tails 
 waving in the air. 
 
 The December walker will find much to medi- 
 tate upon and will be a more thoughtful person 
 than the summer rambler. One who thinks that 
 there is a monotonous sameness to outdoor De- 
 cember will, upon closer investigation, discover 
 the fallacy of such a notion. 
 
 This when the ground is bare; and when the 
 snow comes ! — 
 
 "A brightness which outshines the morning, 
 A splendor brooking no delay, 
 Beckons and tempts my feet away. 
 
 "I leave the trodden village highway 
 
 For virgin snow-paths glimmering through 
 A jewelled elm-tree avenue." 
 
 When the walk has gone far enough, if there 
 is another way home, go that way. It ought to 
 be the first rule in walking never to return by the 
 same way one goes. If you have started out at a 
 
 43 
 
THE VAGABOND BOOK 
 
 moderate pace you will feel fresh and energetic, 
 and as you near home you will unconsciously in- 
 crease your gait until you will come down the 
 home stretch at a good smart clip, warm and 
 glowing outside and in and rejoicing that you 
 had the sense to go walking rather than spend the 
 afternoon hugging the fire. 
 
 WINTER SONG 
 
 HERE'S out on the hilltop bold and bare 
 Where the bracing breezes blow! 
 There's a frosty edge on the wintry air. 
 Exhilaration keen and rare 
 That sets the heart aglow. 
 
 Over the crest the snow lies deep. 
 
 Over the brow of the hill. 
 Down below the forests sleep 
 Blanketed well on the sloping steep 
 
 *Neath a snow sheet white and chill. 
 
 44 
 
WINTER SONG 
 
 A song, a song for the galloping gale 
 
 That sweeps the summit clear 
 And drives the mass of icy shale 
 Into the pines whose every wail 
 
 Fills timid souls with fear ! 
 
 There's that in the winter's whistling wind 
 
 That stirs dead hearts to life, 
 And energy and health you'll find 
 In the breath of the breeze that's rough yet kind, 
 
 That's keen as the surgeon's knife. 
 
 45 
 
THE WINTER CAMP 
 
 D 
 
 EEP buried in the winter drifts 
 
 While wild the wind is wailing, 
 While through each chink the snow sand 
 sifts, 
 Stands the winter camp unquailing. 
 
 It shivers not with the icy blast 
 
 That raids the pines' dominion. 
 Its sturdy frame has strength to last, 
 
 Held firm by thole and pinion. 
 
 Without, the winter sets its teeth 
 
 And girds itself for revels. 
 Wild moans the gale the pines beneath. 
 
 Across the woodland levels. 
 
 Within, the wide-mouthed fireplace glares, 
 
 A hungry, hot-breathed dragon. 
 While storm bound hunters drown their cares 
 
 In draughts from brimming flagon. 
 
 46 
 
THERE IS A PLACE 
 
 I KNOW a place toward which the footsteps 
 of the Vagabond, having once turned, always 
 return. It is not a wonderful place. The 
 places that appeal to one along life's pathway are 
 not the wonderful places. This is just a long 
 slope of the bank from the road to the river, 
 smooth in the main, with a few rocks jutting out 
 here and there, while at the water's edge are a 
 half dozen hemlocks, tall and straight, through 
 which a pictured bit of the river gleams with a 
 brightness sevenfold greater for the darkness of 
 the evergreen frame. The stream makes a long, 
 graceful, willow-hedged sweep down the valley, 
 with the western hills showing in the background. 
 In the opposite direction a green reaching vista 
 ends in Mt. Utsayantha's cloud-capped summit, 
 while directly across the river the perspective 
 shows the sinuous valley of the Elk Creek. 
 
 In a general way that is all. You cannot see 
 why the place is so especially attractive. If we 
 were to go there together, I could not point out 
 
 47 
 
THE VAGABOND BOOK 
 
 wherein lies its individual charm, though you 
 would at once admit its presence. 
 
 There is a wonderful profusion of such spots 
 throughout the world, though many of them 
 must ever remain undiscovered. You doubtless 
 know the exact location of many of them your- 
 self; spots which impress themselves upon the 
 mind at sight, though they lack much or all of 
 the grandeur or glory of the show places which 
 are visited and admired indiscriminately by the 
 Make Believes who think themselves travelers be- 
 cause of having journeyed to far countries. That 
 class would fail utterly in the effort to name a sin- 
 gle one of such places as are known to those of 
 the gypsy heart. 
 
 There is a little bridge over a stream near 
 UAssomption (some thirty-odd miles east of 
 Montreal) where one would sit for hours and 
 gaze at the spire in the village as it shows above 
 the trees, with not a building in sight, while the 
 black waters of the river rush along past the 
 high reed-grown bank, and the bell of a native 
 cart tinkles somewhere down the road. 
 
 There is a bit of shore near Marblehead where 
 
 48 
 
THERE IS A PLACE 
 
 the ocean pulls one to its edge to loaf along the 
 rocks for hours at a stretch with no definite con- 
 sciousness of the particular charm that makes up 
 the attraction of that individual place. 
 
 A little piece of the tow-path of the Chesapeake 
 and Cumberland canal, at one of the points where 
 it skirts the edge of the Potomac river, detains 
 the Vagabond as does no other spot from Har- 
 per's Ferry to the sea. 
 
 Many are the little pictures of nature which 
 surpass the magnificent ones even as the Bear- 
 camp water excels in beauty the Mississippi. 
 Beauty is a matter of quality, not quantity. 
 
 A review of such representative spots treasured 
 up in the mind of another Vagabond would locate 
 them in totally different places from my own. No 
 one vicinity can claim a monopoly of the beauty 
 spots upon the face of Mother Nature. They 
 are scattered from Dan to Beersheba. Every 
 Vagabond shall have his own, the mental visions 
 of which, in the absence from those places, shall 
 be caressed tenderly by the homesick heart as they 
 carry the mind back to the hours spent in their 
 enjoyment. The store of mental treasures laid 
 
 49 
 
THE VAGABOND BOOK 
 
 up by the Vagabond is beyond comparison with 
 the pile of fool's gold in the miser's strong- 
 box. 
 
 Such treasures as those of the gypsy heart af- 
 ford a pleasure in their mere possession that can 
 never come to the miser with the glitter of his 
 aureate hoard. Gold is but gold. Its value is 
 counted in mere figures, while happy memories 
 know neither unit nor limit of value. 
 
 I 
 
 REST YE HERE 
 
 N the edge of Windham wood 
 
 Where the pine trees tower and taper, 
 Where their fragrance, clean and good, 
 Rises like a censer's vapor. 
 
 There's a place for vagrant souls 
 In the waning day to linger, 
 
 While the sun the shaggy boles 
 Touches with vermilion finger. 
 
 50 
 
BY LOTUS LAKE 
 
 Listen ! Hear the breezes croon, 
 Sighing to the pine trees, singing 
 
 Soft a mellow, rhythmic rune. 
 
 Peace to life's wayfarers bringing. 
 
 Outdoor rovers, journey's end 
 Lies within this piney cloister. 
 
 Here pray rest while shadows blend. 
 Let the gay world romp and roister ! 
 
 BY LOTUS LAKE 
 
 EHIND the slopes of Windham wood 
 
 The autumn sun sinks low ; 
 Its disk of fire as red as blood 
 Flames up like blazing tow. 
 
 B 
 
 The hilltop's shadow steals across 
 The gleam of Lotus lake ; 
 
 A deep, mysterious, mirrored gloss 
 The evening waters take. 
 
 SI 
 
THE VAGABOND BOOK 
 
 From smooth reflecting depths shines back 
 
 The sun's red ball of fire. 
 A golden path its dazzling track 
 
 To the home of dear desire. 
 
 The woodland's gay kaleidoscope 
 
 Of swiftly changing hue, 
 From crimson maples on the slope 
 
 To birchen retinue, 
 
 Betokens one more passing year 
 
 With all its golden chain 
 Of links of hope and links of fear. 
 
 Of links of joy or pain. 
 
 Come rain or shine, come foul or fair 
 O'er Windham's wooded way; 
 
 Come breeze caress, or wintry air 
 Lash Lotus lake to spray ; 
 
 It's one to us, the dark or bright ; 
 
 Year follows year, day turns to night, 
 Life passes, grave or gay. 
 
THE SPIRIT 
 
 THE fellowship of outdoors brings together 
 as motley an assortment of bedfellows as 
 politics itself. 
 
 You who love nature, who glory in her beauties 
 at times of the year when the uncalled think her 
 moulting and unlovely; you know how often in 
 your rambles you have come upon some uncouth 
 son of the soil admiring just the beauties which 
 you were congratulating yourself that you ap- 
 preciated because of a superior and inner poetical 
 intelligence which at first you would feel unwil- 
 ling to share with the unaesthetic stranger. 
 
 Nature is lavish in her display of charms, and 
 love for her grows by what it feeds upon. The 
 appreciation which is the exception among 
 strangers to her glory is more nearly the rule 
 among those who are her constant associates. 
 
 It may be that the uncouth one is possessed of 
 a soul as truly poetical, and he may be as genuine 
 a Vagabond as you who at first assumed a pity 
 for his ignorance. At all events the real Vaga- 
 
 53 
 
THE VAGABOND BOOK 
 
 bond, when he recognizes in another the love of 
 nature which imbues his own soul, will forthwith 
 extend to him the right hand of good fellowship, 
 regardless of any external appearances of unfit- 
 ness. 
 
 The spirit of Vagabondia knows no class dis- 
 tinction. It locates in the hearts of the highest 
 or the humblest. The spark of subtle sympathy 
 which flashes through a thousand hearts when 
 comes the one touch of nature that makes the 
 whole world kin, is conducted by the latent spirit 
 of Vagabondia which moves each heart to little 
 or great emotion in proportion as it is slightly or 
 fully dominated by that spirit. 
 
 54 
 
s 
 
 ROAD SONG 
 
 ING ho, my lass, for the dusky road 
 
 That stretches sunset way! 
 Sing ho for the east-bound path of morn, 
 
 A writhing riband gray ! 
 
 And ho, sing ho for the quivering track. 
 
 The highway hot of noon ! 
 Each one's a path for a wanderer heart 
 
 To rove or late or soon. 
 
 We'll out and foot it down the days 
 Through weather fit for kings; 
 
 With ho for the open road, my lass, 
 And ho for the joy it brings ! 
 
A 
 
 THE SPIRIT 
 
 CROSS the sea of daisies roll 
 
 Billows of white. From knoll to knoll 
 They surge above the meadow's shoal. 
 
 And break against the gray stone walls 
 Like ocean surf on its rocky thralls. 
 They shimmer where the sunlight falls 
 
 Like fields of deep December snow. 
 Each floweret tosses to and fro, 
 A dainty fraction of the show, 
 
 Or listening to the lover breeze 
 Whispering o'er the foamy leas, 
 Bows her head before his pleas. 
 
 Oh, billowing, dazzling daisy field, 
 'Tis but a reflection of life you yield 
 With surface fair and depths concealed. 
 
THE TRAPPER 
 
 OF all the thousand and one delights that 
 the boy brought up in the city cannot 
 know, one of the chief is that of trapping 
 the fur-bearing animals in the fall. What normal 
 boy who grew up within reach of woods or waters 
 where such animals were to be found ever failed 
 to feel the desire to trap them in the months when 
 their fur thickens for the coming of winter ? 
 
 There are boys who never care for any of the 
 outdoor things that other boys love. They grow 
 up to be a matinee sort of men who condemn foot- 
 ball as brutal and who frequent afternoon teas 
 and clubs on the days when all the sporting world 
 is on tiptoe as to the outcome of some big inter- 
 collegiate battle. 
 
 Of such boys I would not tell in writing of 
 trappers. Nor would I write of the boys who 
 read dime novels and glow with a desire to be 
 "Trapper Dick, the Human Catamount," or 
 something equally bloodthirsty. I mean just the 
 normal, every-day sort of lads who compose the 
 
THE VAGABOND BOOK 
 
 great majority of the boy population in any small 
 town or countryside. 
 
 When the streams attain their autumnal crystal 
 clearness and the wooded hillsides shimmer red 
 and yellow up and down the valleys with a golden 
 fringe by the water-ways, then on a day the 
 schoolboy bethinks himself of the traps in the 
 attic and a need of spending money, and a course 
 of subtle logic connects the two in his mind with 
 the result that after school the same day the 
 traps are brought out and made ready for use, 
 and with a bunch of forked sticks he sets out 
 along the bank of the stream to look for muskrat 
 holes. 
 
 Along the muddy banks he pries and peers and 
 wherever he finds a hole he pushes a stick into the 
 bank through the ring in the end of the trap's 
 chain, with the trap set well up into the hole 
 under water. All the pleasure that anticipation 
 can offer is in the work and as he goes along his 
 mind is filled with plans for the expenditure of 
 the money that he is as sure of possessing as was 
 the milkmaid before she upset the bucket from 
 her crown. 
 
 58 
 
THE TRAPPER 
 
 A good deal of solid comfort goes with work 
 of this sort for a boy. He finds nut trees with the 
 prickly burrs split open by the frost and he fills 
 his pockets from the ground for use in school the 
 next day. Something to eat in school is the boy's 
 delight, even if it is nothing more than beech- 
 nuts or thorn-apples. He finds apple trees too 
 by the riverside where the best fall pippins are 
 waiting to be taken, and when the traps are all 
 set and a bit of time yet remains before dusk, he 
 lies flat on his back under a big willow and 
 munches and munches while he meditates on the 
 things that fill a boyish mind — ^things that are 
 deeper than much that occupies the maturer in- 
 tellect. 
 
 The following morning finds the youngster 
 an early visitor at the river. Trap after trap is 
 visited with never a sign of a catch, unless one 
 that is simply sprung is a sign, until in the last 
 one a foot is found which the luckless muskrat 
 has gnawed off to set himself free. 
 
 That one foot is enough to buoy up the hope 
 of the young trapper for another day, and after 
 school that night each trap is again visited to 
 
 59 
 
THE VAGABOND BOOK 
 
 make sure that everything is aU right. The 
 second morning two muskrats are the reward of 
 dihgence, and the boy is half an hour late to 
 school, and smells most woefully as a result of his 
 work. 
 
 All day long through the droning of lessons 
 he is planning his trapping campaign, and by time 
 for afternoon dismissal has evolved an idea which 
 he intends to carry out at once. 
 
 There must be a shanty for headquarters and 
 it must be built in a secluded spot, as wild as pos- 
 sible. As soon as school is out he gets to work. 
 The hut must be arranged for keeping the pelts, 
 with a fireplace to keep a fellow warm on frosty 
 mornings when there is much work to be done 
 and mother objects to the bold trapper's presence 
 near the kitchen stove. 
 
 A heavily willowed spot by a bend in the river 
 makes a favorable site and there the boy begins 
 the erection of a shanty of odd boards and tim- 
 bers purloined from no one knows v/here. A boy 
 who has to grow up without knowing the fun of 
 a shanty will never know half that makes youth 
 happy. To be the proud owner of a shanty is 
 more than to own a donkey cart and patronize 
 60 
 
THE TRAPPER 
 
 the other boys, or in later years to own a touring 
 car when no other business man on the block can 
 afford one. 
 
 Inside the shanty with its stove-pipe chimney, 
 its four feet of height and its dirt floor are hung 
 the skins as they are obtained, and here the boy 
 hides various treasured trophies which are not 
 safe from a marauding mother at home. Here 
 too the other boys who enjoy his friendship are 
 allowed to gather on Saturdays and steep in the 
 smudge of the fire and smoke corn silk and sweet 
 fern cigarettes. 
 
 After a week trapping gets to be a business 
 that is not all pleasure, and it is then that the boy 
 shows in a measure the stuff that he is made of. 
 He either gives up the game and calls it square, 
 with the shanty to play in, or he gets down to 
 trapping in earnest, shifting his traps around, up 
 and down the stream day by day, until the 
 weather gets so cold that the river freezes and he 
 has to give up for the year. 
 
 When the season ends he has at all events the 
 benefit of a gained knowledge of outdoors and 
 outdoor things, from the probabilities of the 
 
 6i 
 
THE VAGABOND BOOK 
 
 weather to the habits of the semi-amphibious ani- 
 mals whose fur he covets. 
 
 In all likelihood he will get about fifty cents' 
 worth of furs, for the hide of the muskrat is far 
 from being a valuable article of commerce. If 
 an occasional mink gets into the traps, the results 
 will improve vastly, and if the boy goes up on the 
 hills and tries successfully for foxes (as he is 
 not likely to do) he will make quite a neat sum 
 for holiday spending. 
 
 Often the trapping venture is a partnership 
 affair of two or even three lads, in which case 
 there is apt to be trouble. One owns the boat and 
 the other the traps, with the result that the boy 
 with the boat will claim that he is contributing a 
 share of greater value than the traps, which will 
 at first entitle him to skin the rats and later, by 
 the same application of principle, will exempt him 
 from that task. 
 
 In any case quarrels are inevitable and may 
 result in a dissolution of partnership or in a 
 clearing of the atmosphere by a scrap, which is 
 as a rule, the quickest and surest way of bringing 
 about an understanding. If partnership squab- 
 
 62 
 
THE TRAPPER 
 
 bles among older men could be settled as simply, 
 most of the business of the legal fraternity would 
 be wiped out. 
 
 Trapping does a boy no end of good. It would 
 do anybody good. It gets one nearer to nature 
 and that is what people need, though they are 
 better acquainted with the woods and fields now 
 than for many decades past. The boy who takes 
 to trapping and hunting and fishing naturally is 
 made up on the right formula, but the boy who 
 dislikes the outdoors will never be in touch with 
 the great things of life, for he is not in touch with 
 the greatest. 
 
 63 
 
WHEN AUTUMN CALLS 
 
 s 
 
 OFT southern breezes blowing by, 
 Low rustling through the corn ; 
 Pipes cicada loud and high 
 Upon his tiny horn. 
 
 The bluish asters line the way, 
 A long, thin, smoky cloud, 
 
 While o'er the wall, a mantle gray. 
 Spreads virgin's bower its shroud. 
 
 With colors flecked, the hills of fall 
 
 Invite the vagabond 
 To roam where forests tower tall, 
 
 Or by the willowed pond. 
 
 Cast off the cloak of carking care, 
 Fling wide your worries too. 
 
 Out, gypsy heart, abroad to fare 
 E'er autumn days are through ! 
 
 64 
 
AN ABDICATION 
 
 INDIAN wigwams in the corn-lands, 
 Rows and rows of ragged shocks ; 
 Fields all polka-dotted yellow 
 With the pumpkins' golden blocks : 
 
 Pastures brown with greening ribbons 
 Where the springs come straggling down, 
 
 Meadows fading, gray the woodlands, 
 Summer throws aside her crown ; 
 
 Casts aside her royal purple. 
 
 Folds her robes all somber grown ; 
 
 Silent, shadow-like and weary, 
 Abdicates a tottering throne. 
 
 65 
 
GYPSYING 
 
 THERE is the theory of the countless joys 
 of gypsying as it is considered in the ab- 
 stract by people who would never think of 
 sleeping under the stars, and there is the practice 
 which is enjoyable only to those who have the 
 roving spirit, the outdoor love that will not down. 
 
 Any one can sit in the sun of an early October 
 afternoon when outdoors is at its best and say 
 "What would I not give to be a gypsy these days, 
 with no responsibility save to roam where nature 
 seemed most beautiful!" Not every one though 
 would really desire to be a vagabond, with a 
 trust to luck and Providence for food and bed to 
 come at the right time. 
 
 In the autumn days when the sham Vagabond 
 talks of gypsying and its manifest charms, the 
 true gypsy hearted one is on the road. Nothing 
 but the direst necessity will keep the heart Vaga- 
 bond from the road when September comes. 
 
 Do you remember the little verse, 
 
 "Under the tree 
 When fire outdoors burns merrily, 
 There the witches are making tea." 
 66 
 
GYPSYING 
 
 Does such a fragment appeal to you? Does it 
 stay with you for days and return to your mind 
 with persistent frequency, drawing you away 
 from the conventional toward the freedom of in- 
 dividual creed and doctrine, toward the great 
 wide outdoor world with its welcome for all? 
 Does the quotation cause to arise in your mind's 
 eye a vivid picture of the edge of an early autumn 
 wood, with a bright fire burning briskly under 
 the darkest tree, and in your heart a desire to be 
 part of the picture? 
 
 Such things perhaps do not appeal with the 
 same force to all gypsy hearts, but what pleases 
 one rarely fails to win a portion of the love of all 
 the brethren of the fraternity of the open air. 
 Exceptions are few to the rules that would be 
 laid down to define the desires of the Vagabond. 
 All normal mankind loves nature outdoors — 
 autumn foliage, hills and rivers, woodland and 
 meadow. Most people love these things in a 
 general, abstract way. The gypsy heart loves 
 winter outdoors well ; spring it hails with a poef s 
 joy; summer is a season of luxurious idling, and 
 the autumn is welcomed with a very lover's ardor. 
 
 67 
 
THE VAGABOND BOOK 
 
 Then the foot will not be still; it must out and 
 down the brown highway to the tune of the 
 mellow breezes in the trees as certainly as the 
 dancer's foot must beat time to the music's 
 rhythm. 
 
 When the early twilights fall, with their myr- 
 iad beauties of rose-streaked sunsets and hill- 
 sides of gold and crimson and purple; when the 
 evening comes with a softness of horizon outlines 
 that the other seasons miss, how can one endure 
 four walls ? Outdoors is home ; indoors a prison. 
 
 But after all no one can be told of these things 
 and made a Vagabond by any secret rites or oc- 
 cult process. The gypsying joy is instinctive and 
 comes like the poet's inspiration or the artist's 
 temperament. You are a gypsy heart or you are 
 one of the larger proportion who laugh at such 
 enthusiasts. You are as you are. If you can- 
 not understand, be content with the things that 
 Providence meant should content you. 
 
 68 
 
A 
 
 GYPSY INVITATION 
 
 WAY with your wealth, it fetters the heart, 
 Come Hve from hand to mouth ! 
 Come Hve with our band, our vagabond 
 clan 
 And roam the north and south ! 
 
 There's never a wind or never a stream 
 
 With sunshine bright aglare, 
 There's never a hill and never a vale 
 
 But ours their beaut}^ rare. 
 
 WeVe here for a night and gone in a day. 
 
 There's naught that can restrain. 
 Our journey lies to ends o' the earth. 
 
 Life's cares are our disdain. 
 
 We're gypsies and rovers; home is the world, 
 
 We're free to come or to go. 
 Here's for the life of the open road 
 
 And the wandering to and fro ! 
 
 69 
 
THE ROVER HEART 
 
 VER the hills and far away 
 
 The wind of the west is winging; 
 Out where the summer greens grow gray 
 Songs of the fall are singing. 
 
 O 
 
 Raucus the call of the craven crow 
 
 Across the fields of stubble; 
 Silver the siren notes that flow 
 
 Where autumn brooklets bubble. 
 
 Plaintive and shrill, the noontide heat 
 
 Is pierced with locust's treble, 
 And lakeside waves with lilting beat 
 
 Roll up o'er sand and pebble. 
 
 The mellow, golden harvest time. 
 With glowing, blowing weather. 
 
 Is turning hearts to raptured rhyme 
 While wandering together. 
 
 Then out, my soul, just you and I, 
 
 We're crony two for roaming! 
 Ecstatic joys will hover by 
 
 Through gleaming and through gloaming. 
 
 70 
 
FELLOWSHIP 
 
 LONELINESS is good. The society of 
 self, if self be the right sort of a soul, is 
 good. The fellowship of kindred souls is 
 better. Loneliness is desirable only in compara- 
 tively small quantities, but fellowship of congen- 
 ial spirits knows no limit of desirability. 
 
 Fellowship for the Vagabond must be fellow- 
 ship of the Vagabond. Two to share the out- 
 doors makes the share of neither a whit the less 
 but rather more. 
 
 The perfection of congenial spirit is found, not 
 where two lifelong companions of mutual regard 
 and identical tastes join hands for the trail, but 
 where man finds in the heart of woman all that 
 he found in the heart of that boon companion, 
 and the love of woman beside. 
 
 When the nature lover, the outdoor worship- 
 per, finds one who will share his every emotion 
 and feel with him the great force of nature's at- 
 traction drawing him out to wander down the 
 days of beauty through the autumn's shining and 
 blowing, then will come life's perfection. 
 
 71 
 
J 
 
 THE VAGABONDS 
 
 UST we two across the world, 
 Phyllis, you and I, 
 Straying wide from ocean side 
 To hills that kiss the sky; 
 
 Wandering far as vagabonds, 
 From sea to singing sea, 
 
 Hand in hand adown the land 
 Roving glad and free. 
 
 Phyllis, yours the golden heart. 
 
 Yours the nature wild; 
 Of the over-blue a daughter true. 
 
 Rare heart, fair heart child. 
 
 Phyllis mine, the beautiful, 
 Ours the world to roam. 
 
 Where the night puts day to flight. 
 There we make our home. 
 
 Gypsy vagrants, best we love 
 
 Roving like the wind. 
 No certain aim we ever claim 
 
 But wander unconfined. 
 
 72 
 
THE ART OF LOAFING 
 
 Astart at morn's first dancing ray, 
 
 We strike the dew-damp pike, 
 Swing along with laugh and song 
 
 And choose the way we like. 
 
 There's peaceful rest at any time 
 
 When weary with the way 
 And your loving touch that means so much 
 
 To keep me blithe and gay. 
 
 Just we two, O Phyllis mine, 
 
 And no one else beside. 
 For us all strife fades out of life ; 
 The world is wander-wide. 
 
 THE ART OF LOAFING 
 
 LOAFING is an art which properly applied 
 means an economy of time and a wise 
 prodigality of happiness. 
 To many the term is merely a synonym for 
 laziness and inanition, but loafing as an art is 
 not a simple withholding of exertion, allowing 
 
 73 
 
THE VAGABOND BOOK 
 
 time to spend its force in a fruitless, unharnessed 
 onrush; it is idleness with an object. 
 
 Idleness is the suspension of effort; vagrancy 
 is being conspicuously idle by effort, but the fine 
 art of loafing is the blissful relaxation of muscle 
 and mind under the benign influence of the drift- 
 ing sense. This sense, to those possessing it, is 
 instinctive and intuitive — a sixth sense, rare and 
 precious, to be treasured by its possessors. 
 
 Simple idleness is but a waiting for an inclina- 
 tion. When the inclination comes it is welcomed, 
 for waiting was ever a wearisome task. If the 
 inclination be evil the chances for its adoption are 
 the greater, for when was an evil inclination ever 
 met and combated by a more attractive good in- 
 clination? Aimless idleness gone wrong is crime 
 if penniless, is indiscretion if moneyed. 
 
 Diogenes was not the first loafer in history, but 
 he was one of the best. There is a bare possibility 
 of his having overplayed the part, but no one 
 has ever done better. "Get out of my sunlight" 
 was all he asked of any man. 
 
 Every successful loafer must be a philosopher, 
 but not every philosopher can be a loafer. Then 
 
 74 
 
THE ART OF LOAFING 
 
 too, perpetual loafing will be its own murderer. 
 If Diogenes failed it was on this account. When 
 his philosophy was overworked it failed him and 
 made him in his latter days merely a harmless 
 crank. 
 
 A man need not be rich to loaf; in fact a rich 
 man is rarely successful or accomplished in the 
 art. Neither need a man be a pauper. Paradoxi- 
 cal as it may seem, the artistic loafer may be 
 genuinely ambitious and energetic. It is all a 
 matter of that sixth sense. He must be a Vaga- 
 bond at heart, and that keeps no man from work. 
 
 Loafing is the conservator of energy, most val- 
 uable and at the same time most agreeable. A 
 New York business man, known to his associates 
 as one of the keenest and most alert, leaves his 
 office at three o'clock on a bright afternoon, takes 
 the Cortlandt street ferry and gets out on the for- 
 ward deck next the rail. As the green water 
 sparkles at his feet, cares slip from his mind. He 
 rests, and the harbor picture of rush and activity 
 is but a background for the intimate details of the 
 clear-cut mental vision which occupies his at- 
 tention. 
 
 75 
 
THE VAGABOND BOOK 
 
 If a bootblack cries "Shine, sir?" he hears him 
 not; if the other passengers jostle him, he knows 
 it not. Instead he hears the rippling song of a 
 brook under overhanging willows and birches 
 with cat-birds in the branches; instead he feels 
 a thrill along the rod with which he is whipping 
 a mountain strip for speckled trout. Or it may 
 be a very different dream, but a dream it is and 
 a pleasant dream. 
 
 "Ah," you say, "so the loafer is but a dreamer. 
 Your Art of Loafing' is but castle building?" 
 Well, if you will have it so, the loafer is a dream- 
 er; but what dreams! 
 
 They are not the dreams of power, ambition, 
 wealth, glory ; in short, not dreams of the future, 
 but of the past, the happy past with its trials and 
 troubles omitted. With the mind at rest, a fair 
 dream of past happiness effects the conservation 
 of energy by producing the highest type of rest — 
 except sleep. 
 
 The worker who would also be a loafer must 
 make every moment count. He condenses his 
 work ; he wastes not his spare moments for they 
 are the oases in each desert of labor. He values 
 
 76 
 
THE ART OF LOAFING 
 
 life and knows accordingly the value of time, the 
 stuff of which life is made. He works better and 
 with a clearer mind for his rest oases, each of 
 which is in result but as a settling back and get- 
 ting a fresh grip on his work. 
 
 It is not custom that prevents woman from be- 
 ing a good loafer. Eve had no customs to follow 
 and yet it was she and not Adam who found the 
 long, quiet happiness too fretful, too tiresome. 
 Adam did not yield to Satan, but Eve followed 
 the first evil inclination. 
 
 Adam yielded to Eve? Of course; the man 
 does not, nor ever did live in whom the dreaming 
 instinct could not be killed by his wife if she had 
 nothing to do but devote herself to tempting him 
 — and preferred him with the romantic part of 
 his nature dead. 
 
 If you are a Vagabond and a dreamer, you 
 know that you are misunderstood by your flint- 
 headed, ultra - practical, keep-your-nose-to-the- 
 grindstone friends who believe that rest is waste 
 and that time exists only for work; but be inde- 
 pendent in your determination to get out of life 
 all the delicious joy of a proper Vagabondage. 
 
 77 
 
THE HAZY DAYS 
 
 WHEN the leaves are pointing upward 
 Blown by wind from out the south, 
 And the haze upon the hilltops 
 Hints of coming days of drouth; 
 
 Then, oh heart, we'll roam the highways 
 Where the long, brown shadows lie; 
 
 Follow through the mapled byway 
 By the fields of waving rye. 
 
 Who could e'er be low in spirit 
 
 With the golden days at hand ? 
 Lightfoot, in a shoe that's easy, 
 
 Joys to roam the harvest land. 
 
 Soul of gypsy, soul of rover, 
 
 Soul of free heart vagabond 
 Thrills to feel the red horizon 
 
 Calling to the great beyond. 
 
 78 
 
MY DREAM 
 
 NO soul but dreams a perfect joy ; 
 'Tis love or lurid gold, 
 Or freedom from the world's annoy 
 To roam earth's byways old. 
 
 Whate'er another soul may dream, 
 
 Mine be the vagrant path 
 That winds beside the forest stream 
 
 All strewn with aftermath 
 
 Of ripened leaves and frost-split burrs; 
 
 My joy's in wandering there 
 While partridge drums and pheasant whirrs. 
 While nature rustles when there stirs 
 
 The Indian summer air. 
 
 79 
 
NIGHT 
 
 WHY are we afraid in the dark? We 
 know plenty of people who claim that, 
 light or dark, it is all the same to them 
 so far as any fear is concerned. There are those 
 of whom that is doubtless true, but most of us, 
 when we get at the actual truth of the matter 
 as we know it in our hearts, admit that we do 
 not feel just the same to walk into that old, de- 
 serted mill in the dark of midnight as we do to 
 go there on a sunshiny afternoon. 
 
 It is sad that we are so constituted as to feel 
 that nervousness which ofttimes means appre- 
 hension, fear or even terror. Doubtless many of 
 us of the Vagabond spirit feel more at home in 
 the night than others less willing to place their 
 trust in Mother Nature. We have been drawn 
 so strongly to try what our favorite walks might 
 be like by the light of the moon, or the stars 
 alone, that we have braved the plunge into the 
 Stygian stream, to find that after the shivers of 
 apprehension ceased, the reality failed to exhibit 
 the terrors at which we had shuddered in antici- 
 pation. 
 
 How different nature is under the stars ! Gone 
 80 
 
NIGHT 
 
 are her gorgeous earthly pageants, even the spec- 
 tacular autumn display of raiment quieting down 
 to a shade no less dusk than that of the black 
 pine woods. The river shows only the reflected 
 glimmer of the stars and sings along on its way, 
 unaccompanied save by the obligato of the wind 
 ebbing and flowing through the willows. The 
 imagination acquires full reign and peoples the 
 darkness with a myriad impossible creatures to 
 be slain only by the sword of matter-of-factness. 
 Not all of the most practical, common-sense 
 minds can master the distrust of darkness, but 
 when one does reach a point where night is as 
 free from terror as midday itself, there are many 
 of the rarest pleasures to lead the believer forth 
 •'when honest folk are abed." The music of the 
 creatures of the night, from the katydid in the 
 vines by the window to the hoot-owl in the pine 
 woods, is full of charm, and with a congenial 
 companion the favorite walk, taken in the dark- 
 ness, becomes a real experience — a memory to be 
 treasured up for the days when the almond tree 
 shall flourish and the grasshopper shall be a 
 burden. 
 
 8i 
 
SOUTH WIND BLOW 
 
 BLOW Up, blow Up, thou bold South Wind, 
 Blow up from down the bay. 
 Come sprinkle green and blushing bloom 
 Where buried winter lies in tomb, 
 Weave perfumed wreaths for May. 
 
 Sift through the air the salt sea spray 
 
 That spurs and stimulates 
 The soul to wander far afield 
 Where summer soon will sceptre wield, 
 
 Where Joy for Soul awaits. 
 
 Thy voice we welcome from afar ; 
 
 Soon comes delight anear. 
 The blowing of thy balmy breath 
 The land will resurrect from death ; 
 
 Now opens nature's year. 
 
 Then come, blow on, thou bold South Wind, 
 
 Thou herald of the spring. 
 With all thy song of spuming sea 
 Full glad w^e'll ever welcome thee. 
 
 Of thee we'll sing and sing. 
 
 82 
 
SHOW PLACES 
 
 BY show places I mean such places as the 
 railroads describe in their allurement 
 pamphlets and summer boarding pros- 
 pectuses. They are the points where sOjme won- 
 der-inspiring natural spectacle is on exhibition ; 
 where a magnificent display of past or present 
 natural force is expected to awe one into silent 
 admiration, or where some beautiful vista or 
 wide-spreading panorama unfolds itself before 
 the eyes. 
 
 Such spots have all the effect that could be 
 expected upon the true nature lovers who stand 
 apart from the mob and view the falls of Niagara 
 or the wonders of the Yellowstone in a spirit that 
 fills their mind with thoughts as worthy of utter- 
 ance as any of those of a Bryant or an Emerson, 
 had they the language in which to utter them 
 for the world. 
 
 Of course the presence of a crowd of mere 
 sight-seers detracts from the glory of any view 
 spot. They know no respect for the beautiful or 
 the sublime. They rush around in broods, chas- 
 
 83 
 
THE VAGABOND BOOK 
 
 ing each new spectacle that comes into sight as 
 a bunch of feathering chicks chase a bug, and 
 with about the same interest, namely, to get it, 
 devour it and be ready for the next. 
 
 There ought to be days set apart when the 
 elect might have the glorious beauty spots of the 
 world to themselves. 
 
 How may one hope to enjoy such a view as 
 that from Dufferin Terrace, Quebec, by moon- 
 light, with a crowd of giggling, gabbling, love- 
 making world-worshippers prancing up and 
 down the boards at his back ? Though in the in- 
 stance of other show places it might not be possi- 
 ble to do the same, here one may wait for mid- 
 night and the departure of the promenaders. 
 Then stand by the high guard rail and look out 
 upon such a picture as is worth journeying to see. 
 
 Above the further end of the Terrace towers 
 the citadel, the military guardian of the St. Law- 
 rence. From beyond that, down past the point 
 where Wolfe's army scaled the heights, comes the 
 river, winding its sinuous length, past Levis with 
 its cathedral spire — a graceful outline against 
 the low, eastern moonlit sky, past Quebec's docks 
 
 84 
 
SHOW PLACES 
 
 and wharves, past the Isle d'Orleans (once Isle 
 of Bacchus) and the Montmorency river and 
 falls, past far Ste. Anne, disappearing finally in 
 the blue of the distant, haze-enveloped Lauren- 
 tian mountains of the north. Darkness rules the 
 river channel below you with lights twinkling 
 across from Levis' bluffs; the street lights glow 
 in old Lower Quebec at your feet; the red and 
 green signal lights on the ferry boats dart across 
 the river ; some sailors strike up a song on a man- 
 o'-war in the stream, and from Little Champlain 
 street at the foot of the cliff floats up the music 
 of girls' voices in an old love song. The slap, 
 slap, slap of the water on the piers and ship sides, 
 the creak of the cordage, the rattle of oars; all 
 these are sounds that add to the witchery of the 
 situation. 
 
 The orchestra in the Chateau back of the Ter- 
 race breaks into the "Home, Sweet Home" waltz 
 and the moon rises from behind a long, straight 
 bank of clouds. It is a scene like that of some 
 play, and one almost expects to see it dissolve. 
 
 What a host of such glorious places there are 
 in the world ! How one regrets the brevity of a 
 
 85 
 
THE VAGABOND BOOK 
 
 life which keeps those who enjoy them most 
 from enjoying a fair proportion of them! Such 
 a regret is Hke that which one feels in the realiza- 
 tion that our lives are too short to allow us to 
 follow to any conclusion the workings of the 
 destinies of nations. 
 
 QUEBEC 
 
 OH belated, super-sated 
 Ones who're feeling overweighted 
 With the city's heat and care. 
 Get away from all the hustle 
 Of the summer's dusty bustle, 
 Seek the luring Northland's lair. 
 
 Leave your mumming city strumming, 
 With the torrid dog-days coming, 
 
 Leave the worry and the wear. 
 Try the calm of cool vacation. 
 Rest your soul from toil's vexation. 
 
 Get a whiff of God's pure air. 
 
 86 
 
QUEBEC 
 
 Pack your chattels; drop your battles; 
 Leave the street where traffic rattles; 
 
 Let the roar of commerce blare! 
 There's a time in summer weather 
 When it's wise to slip the tether 
 
 And forsake the garish glare. 
 
 There's a river all aquiver 
 
 With the kiss the breezes give her 
 
 As they touch her surface fair. 
 She's the queen of northern waters, 
 She's the belle of Neptune's daughters, 
 
 Gay St. Lawrence, regal, rare. 
 
 There's a veering cliff uprearing 
 Haughty head above the gearing 
 
 Of a masted harbor where 
 Stands Quebec, the queenly, royal; 
 Stands Quebec the ever loyal, 
 
 Native born, with foreign air. 
 
 Rough and jagged, rugged, ragged. 
 Looms the promontory cragged; 
 
 Looms the fortress high and bare. 
 From its battlemented coping 
 Downward to the eastward sloping. 
 
 Bright the glinting house-roofs glare. 
 
 87 
 
THE VAGABOND BOOK 
 
 City bolder, quainter, older 
 
 Than are some whose ruins moulder. 
 
 Hers a charm to cancel care. 
 Wander down her narrow alleys. 
 From her Terrace view the valleys 
 
 Of the rivers meeting there; 
 
 Learn the histories, trace the mysteries 
 Of chapels, convents and consistories; 
 
 Each old building has its share. 
 Nowhere brims Dame Fortune's beaker 
 Fuller for the treasure seeker, 
 
 Seeker after legends rare. 
 
 As you wander you'll grow fonder 
 Of the great Northland up yonder. 
 
 Once you've seen its face so fair, 
 Whether it through tears was smiling 
 Or shone bright 'neath skies beguiling, 
 
 Ever will it beckon there. 
 
 S8 
 
HOSPITALITY 
 
 HOSPITALITY is the welcome that makes 
 you feel that they want you there. Old- 
 fashioned hospitality usually ceases with 
 the advent of the second servant. Two servants 
 nowadays seem to stiffen hospitality, though one 
 is a very material aid if of the right sort. 
 
 It is true that if the hostess herself is the ser- 
 vant, housekeeper and cook, you feel that she 
 must really desire your presence or she would 
 never take so much trouble for you; but it is 
 also true that hospitality with no servant takes 
 the edge off the pleasure — for the hostess. 
 
 I do not mean that hospitality ceases because 
 there are two servants. It is just that the getting 
 out into the kitchen and becoming imbued with 
 the excitement incidental to the preparation for 
 the guest helps vastly to fill the hostess with the 
 spirit of hospitality. Its perfection !froni the 
 guest's point of view, its most real and sincere 
 form, is found when you drop in, unexpected, up- 
 on people whom you know not at all or but slight- 
 ly, people whom you come upon at just the point 
 along the road where hunger seems to have 
 reached an insupportable degree. 
 
 89 
 
THE VAGABOND BOOK 
 
 When you call at a farm house door and say 
 "Could I buy a little lunch here — bread and milk, 
 or something?" and are taken into the kitchen 
 and put in front of a big bowl of Jersey milk, 
 while a whole loaf of the best white bread you 
 ever tasted is placed before you, flanked by 
 a saucer of berries and sugar and cream, and a 
 generous bar of gingerbread; then you know 
 that you have come upon hospitality in its un- 
 adorned and unadulterated state. 
 
 You eat, and as you do so you talk to the 
 housewife and the little girl who comes in with 
 "Shep," the pup, telling them who you are, 
 whence and whither, and are told in turn of the 
 farm affairs, the family, the produce, and the 
 tricks of "Shep," and you are met with injured 
 looks when you offer to pay ere saying your 
 good-bye. 
 
 Such hospitality is not a rarely encountered, 
 Utopian condition ; it is the rule with our farmer 
 folk and you can readily prove the proposition. 
 In fact if you are inclined by nature or by cir- 
 cumstance to be cynical, pessimistic, morbid, 
 doubting the sincerity of human nature and the 
 
 90 
 
HOSPITALITY 
 
 genuineness of its protestations, nothing could 
 be better calculated to renew in your mind a right- 
 heartedness and fill you with a sense of the real 
 value of man to man than to be placed where 
 dependent temporarily upon true hospitality. 
 
 We rub against the contrary natures and the 
 selfish ambitions of the business side of people 
 in the every-man-for-himself rush after the dol- 
 lars until we form crooked and distorted ideas 
 of nearly every one we know. Chance throws us 
 upon the hospitality of some such and we find 
 them to be, in their homes, genial, congenial, 
 cordial, interesting and the reverse of all that we 
 had thought them. 
 
 Hospitality is the salvation of the social side 
 of man's nature, the part which our swift-mov- 
 ing and selfish commercialism is all too much 
 inclined to throw into the background. 
 
 91 
 
THE INN OF THE GOLDEN 
 DREAM 
 
 HERE'S to the Inn of the Golden Dream 
 Far out on the king's highway! 
 Here's to the peace that reigns supreme 
 Through all its idle day ! 
 
 With a shady, vine-twined portico 
 
 Alluring from the heat, 
 A place where vagrant breezes blow 
 
 Through honeysuckles sweet, 
 
 There's ever a dreamy atmosphere 
 
 Free from carking care; 
 And ever a boon companion near 
 
 That joy and cheer to share. 
 
 There's talk that touches deep the heart. 
 
 There's silence saying more; 
 There's wine and song, and e'er we part 
 
 There's a toasting o'er and o'er. 
 
 Oh, it's good to halt where a brimming drink 
 
 Awaits your fancy's call; 
 So tune your soul to the silvery clink 
 
 Of the ice in the glasses tall. 
 
 92 
 
THE COVERED BRIDGE 
 
 Forget the world and its toiling scheme, 
 
 Let worries fade away. 
 Here's to the Inn of the Golden Dream 
 
 Far out on the king's highway! 
 
 THE COVERED BRIDGE 
 
 DID you live near an old red-covered bridge 
 when you were a boy ? 
 
 The man who did not have the ad- 
 vantages of a covered bridge education will miss 
 from life some of the things that would have 
 added very materially to its perfection. A boy 
 with neither a barn nor a covered bridge is indeed 
 unfortunate. 
 
 All summer the covered bridge is the ideal 
 rainy day resort. Through the openings in the 
 floor, where here and there a plank is too short, 
 fishing is the easiest of sports. Overhead there 
 are beams to walk and all shades of daring are 
 given their respective opportunities. Swallows 
 and robins nest under the eaves, offering a per- 
 
 93 
 
THE VAGABOND BOOK 
 
 petual temptation; circus posters emblazon the 
 available spots and countless patent medicine ad- 
 vertisements are waiting to be torn down. ''Pris- 
 oner's base" and ''pull-away" are always the best 
 games, and some local "Mealys" and "Plupys" 
 are ever ready to run match races or to see who 
 can make ten laps around the outer edge in the 
 least time. 
 
 What a place it is to play all sorts of boys' 
 games! A great opportunity awaits some Dan 
 Beard who will write a good "Boy's Book of 
 Covered Bridge Sports." 
 
 In winter the bridge serves the same purposes, 
 though to a less extent; and then, joy of joys! 
 boys who are thrifty and boys who are shiftless 
 can resort thither with snow shovels to make a 
 snow path through the bridge, and to extort 
 blackmail from the teamsters who find sleighing 
 better over snow than over a bare floor. 
 
 The covered bridge is a directory of all the 
 past and present boys of the neighborhood whose 
 handiwork is there shown in the "jack-knife's 
 carved initial." A visit to the old covered bridge 
 of boyhood is like returning in after days to the 
 
 94 
 
BONFIRE DAYS 
 
 little red schoolhouse, ''the ragged beggar sun- 
 ning." Either is prolific of reminiscence, satis- 
 faction, regret, as the mood is. These reminis- 
 cent times are the times which bring to the sur- 
 face all that is best in a man, and human nature 
 would soften much its aspects if the best part 
 could show at the surface oftener. 
 
 BONFIRE DAYS 
 
 A HAZE above the village rides; 
 The late October hills are blue 
 With smoke. In wind-blown, rolling 
 tides 
 The bonfire's fumes go surging through 
 The leaf-strewn streets of fall. 
 The garden shows a funeral pyre, 
 
 A heap of charred and blackened vines, 
 Now blazing clear with flickering fire. 
 
 Now hid by shifting, smoke-built shrines 
 With toppling turrets tall. 
 
 95 
 
THE VAGABOND BOOK 
 
 The shade trees on the avenues 
 
 Have ceased their masquerade and thrown 
 To winds their gaudy garb, and crews 
 
 Of boisterous children those far-strewn 
 Remnants of mantles gay 
 In armfuls heap in a blazing pile. 
 
 The pungent incense fills the air 
 And flames leap high and ruddy while 
 
 Their weird, uncertain, fitful glare 
 Turns red the twilight gray. 
 
 96 
 
THE MARCHING SOULS 
 
 DARK, dark, dark, 
 The night on the lowland lea; 
 Chill, chill, chill, 
 The damp of the sombre sea, 
 And grisly grim by the brackish brine 
 Walk ghastly spectres, an endless line 
 Of victims of Neptune's wrath. 
 
 Roll, roll, roll, 
 
 The bones on their salty bed. 
 Tramp, tramp, tramp. 
 
 Pale spirits of the dead ; 
 And ever on and on they go, 
 No peace may any spirit know 
 
 Whose bones are not at rest. 
 
 Red, red, red. 
 
 The fires of Hell may glow; 
 White, white, white. 
 
 The lights of heaven show. 
 But the souls of those whose bones roll 
 Over and over and know no goal, 
 
 Must march and march for aye. 
 
 97 
 
A PARTICULAR WALK 
 
 EVERY lover of walking has a favorite 
 walk. It may be up and over the hill 
 back of the village and home by the toll- 
 gate — a little long that walk for any but favor- 
 able occasions — or it may be around by the 
 spring-run and across the river flat by the path 
 that follows the stonewall. 
 
 There is one particular walk which would be- 
 come your favorite if you were to go that way 
 but a single time. It leads out of the village past 
 the fair grounds, following the river road for a 
 mile and a half to the Falls Mills, where it doubles 
 back after a climb up through the gorge by the 
 falls. 
 
 Needless to say, the best time for this walk, 
 as for many others, though beautiful the year 
 'round, is in October. Choose a late afternoon 
 and loaf along at a comfortable gait until you 
 reach the cider mill, just where you can see the 
 lower falls from the highway. After a cupful 
 of new cider, go up the hill to the watering trough 
 and turn to the left for the short stony road that 
 
 98 
 
A PARTICULAR WALK 
 
 leads up through the rocks of the glen, high 
 above the waters of Honest Brook. 
 
 At a point half way up, where the way enters 
 the woods, climb the stonewall and sit and watch 
 the shadow of sunset creep up the opposite hill, 
 far across the valley, darkening the flush of crim- 
 son that mantles the hardwood slope, and tipping 
 the highest pyramidal peak with a rosy hue just 
 before the twilight falls. 
 
 This resting place is one of those that keep 
 a man too long in revery unless he brings him- 
 self back to earth very frequently, and if you 
 linger you will find it too dark through the rocks 
 to distinguish the clean cut Roman profile of the 
 Guardian of the Gorge; so keep on your journey 
 before the dusk hides the minute beauties of the 
 slow turning leaves near the stream. 
 
 The turn at the top of the hill leads back to 
 the village over the Meredith road, partly 
 through woods and by a long down grade, with 
 Round Top and Mt. McGregor still clear against 
 the evening sky. 
 
 That walk is susceptible of many variations 
 (as all favorite walks are) by which one may 
 
 Lor S)9 
 
THE VAGABOND BOOK 
 
 travel one or both ways across fields instead of 
 by road, and every change of direction brings a 
 different vista before the eyes, while a reversal of 
 the route alters it completely. 
 
 Every Vagabond has such a favorite tramp — 
 dearer to him than cards to the born gambler. 
 Every trip brings some new beauty into view 
 and there are certain hills whose sky-lines from 
 a particular point become as dear to the memory 
 as the face of a friend. 
 
 The favorite walk has its antithesis in the al- 
 together unfamiliar one. There is something 
 utterly fascinating in the tramp through new 
 country where the outlook from the next turn in 
 the road is known only when it opens before the 
 eyes. To the real gypsy heart, the love of the 
 new, the desire for fresh sights and unknown 
 paths perhaps surpasses the passion for the old 
 favorites. To all there is an undeniable charm 
 in the unwinding of the new route. It may be 
 that it is the young heart that beats more strong- 
 ly for the possible adventures of the untried way, 
 while the one well on in years turns with greatest 
 joy to the old familiar paths. Be that is it may, 
 
 lOO 
 
THE HILL ROAD 
 
 whether the old or the new charm more power- 
 fully, there will always be one walk that is the 
 favorite. 
 
 People who do not walk at all, people who 
 look indoors for their chief pleasures, though 
 they appreciate not the fact, are missing the best 
 part of life — the part that Providence meant 
 should be placed next to companionship itself. 
 
 THE HILL ROAD 
 
 HOUGH beautiful the valley roads 
 That wind along the river, 
 Where vine-grown walls and hedges 
 green 
 In glowing sunlight quiver; 
 
 T 
 
 Though picturesque the woodland ways, 
 
 Cool byways all deserted. 
 Where fresh with fragrant brake and fern 
 
 The darksome trail is skirted; 
 
 lOI 
 
THE VAGABOND BOOK 
 
 Though fair and fine all other paths, 
 One road there is that's calling 
 
 Far louder than those quiet ways 
 Where peace and calm are falling. 
 
 The hilltop road that meets the sky 
 
 And leads us boldly faring 
 Against the very roof of things 
 
 Is breeding deeds of daring. 
 
 Oh roam you roads that suit your will, 
 
 My wander loving rover. 
 But when you'd know the life that's real, 
 
 Just tramp the hill road over. 
 
 I02 
 
HAVING FUN 
 
 I CARE not who you are or what your sta- 
 tion in Hfe, if you would have the best fun 
 in the world, take a basket filled with simple 
 lunch, not forgetting by any chance to include 
 some potatoes and green corn if obtainable; get 
 a congenial companion and go a mile or so out 
 of town into the woods. 
 
 Build you there a fire within a little semi-circle 
 of stones and spread your picnic lunch close at 
 hand on the windward side of the blaze. Wrap 
 the potatoes in many thicknesses of wet news- 
 paper and put them among the coals to bake. 
 Roast the corn as you want it, on a sharp stick; 
 but anyone knows how to roast corn, and to fix 
 an outdoor lunch too, for that matter. 
 
 If it be a fall day, just cool enough to make 
 the warmth of the fire grateful, so much the bet- 
 ter. Talk while the potatoes roast. Talk of out- 
 doors; get into the spirit of the woods; let twi- 
 light come as you eat ; let it get dark ; who cares ! 
 There will be a moon and if you can stay and 
 safely keep up your fire until the darkness of twi- 
 
 103 
 
THE VAGABOND BOOK 
 
 light time gives place to the filtered woodland 
 moonlight, you will find the experience some- 
 thing well worth repeating. 
 
 The camper who has really lived in the woods 
 day In and day out, needs no one to tell him of the 
 charm of the campfire at night. I speak of It and 
 call It alluring, Inspiring, fascinating, confidence 
 begetting, that the Inexperienced may be impelled 
 to enter the charmed circle of Its spell. Let me 
 advise that you join the cult of the fi re- vv^or ship- 
 pers and get more of the pleasure of life than was 
 ever yours before. 
 
 104 
 
MISTRESS WILLOW 
 
 DOWN along the pasture brook 
 The bending willow trees 
 Sweep and sway, and turn and look 
 As brushes past the breeze, 
 
 To see if any overheard 
 
 Perchance, without intent, 
 The tender, loving, whispered word 
 
 The Wind spoke as it went. 
 
 Know you what the South Wind sighed 
 
 In Mistress Willow's ear; 
 He who's sought her for his bride 
 
 From year to golden year? 
 
 Know you what the answer was ? 
 
 A faintly murmured "yes" ; 
 Or asked she for delay because 
 
 Of undue suddenness? 
 
 Down along the pasture brook 
 
 Where the South Wind went, 
 Mistress Willow turns to look. 
 
 Blushing shy consent. 
 
 105 
 
OUT IN THE WIND 
 
 NATURE on a still day falls far short of 
 attracting the Vagabond as it does on the 
 breezy days. In a calm there is no such 
 call to the rover as comes with a good forty-knot 
 breeze when all nature is trembling with life. It 
 is worth a king's ransom, the joy of walking 
 down the road through the pasture land when 
 the wind comes rushing up from the south, filling 
 the air with fresh falling leaves — every tree on 
 the hillside looking like a bag of confetti emptied 
 to the breeze. 
 
 There comes with the wind an emphasis to that 
 nameless something that makes us gypsy if we 
 feel it. If we feel it not, then the wind is dis- 
 agreeable, rough, unpleasant, any of the things 
 that it gets called by the prim, precise person out 
 for a stroll with clothes fixed just so. 
 
 Did you ever see anything more delightful than 
 the leaf shower from the maples down lover's 
 lane, when in the bright sunshiny morning after 
 a snappy frost, a quick breeze springs up and car- 
 ries before it every loosened leaf of red and gold ? 
 
 io6 
 
OUT IN THE WIND 
 
 Did you ever see a field of grain as beautiful 
 at rest as it appears when wave after wave sweeps 
 over it in golden, uncrested billows ? 
 
 Did the silent times of nature ever lull you into 
 the land of memory as has the song of the pines 
 while letting the south wind sift through their 
 slender fingers? 
 
 Did the calm of a glassy sea ever appeal to you 
 like the rush of the surf on a causeway of black 
 rocks ? 
 
 As much of the irresistible call of autumn to 
 the heart is due to the breezes as to the brightness 
 of nature's garb. There is a constant singing in 
 the ears of the rover; not the singing of birds or 
 summer insects, but a song like the rustling of 
 dead leaves or the murmuring of the evergreens ; 
 just as the shell, once of the ocean, ever after 
 sings the ocean's song. 
 
 In nature song comes with the wind, the gypsy 
 heart follows the song, while simple indolence 
 bides in the calm. 
 
 107 
 
THE FOUR WINDS 
 
 WITH a whoop and shriek of ghoulish 
 glee 
 I swirl through branches stark. 
 I am the North wind. The life of me 
 Is bluff and bluster; far and free 
 I carry my lusty lark. 
 
 From out the dawn with breath all chill 
 
 I glide, a spirit dank. 
 Behind, the sea turn's salty frill 
 O'erspreads with fog the valley and hill, 
 
 The East wind's ghostly prank. 
 
 Fair are the skies of the westering breeze 
 
 With cloud ships sailing by, 
 On, on through boundless azure seas. 
 Fair are earth's days 'neath quivering trees; 
 
 The blithe West wind am I. 
 
 Up from the south with smoke-blown hair 
 
 Drifting far a-rear, 
 I stroll with languid, passionate air; 
 I, the breeze from southern lair ; 
 
 The idling days are here ! 
 io8 
 
BEING LONELY 
 
 We four, the free Borean quartette, 
 Wild ranging the earth and sky; 
 No Hmits e'er confined us yet. 
 No bounds our spirits ever fret; 
 And can immortals die? 
 
 BEING LONELY 
 
 WAS there ever a more delicious time for 
 being lonely than on a warm night late 
 in fall when one may sit by the open 
 window with a little southerly breeze stirring 
 the dying leaves outside in the moonlight, 
 and the chir-r-r, chir-r-r of the cricket sound- 
 ing from the grass ? 
 
 If any poet were able to put into words the 
 greatest depths of life, depths that come within 
 the grasp of the human mind only at such times, 
 his would be a song to eclipse in grandeur any 
 ever written. There is that in life which the soul 
 knows and of which glimpses are occasionally 
 visible to the mind, though lying too deep for 
 even the poet's craft to lure to the surface. 
 109 
 
THE VAGABOND BOOK 
 
 Life is not the shallow thing that the world 
 worshippers count it. Its depths are possessed 
 of joys that none dare attempt to portray. It is 
 in the loneliness of such nights in their throb- 
 bing, thinking loneliness that these depths open 
 before us acquainting us with a joy which is no 
 less a joy because of its exquisite sadness. 
 
 To say that one knows nothing of such feel- 
 ings, that one has never felt the presence of those 
 subliminal joys is to argue one's self shallow of 
 heart and incapable of the happiness of Vaga- 
 bondia. 
 
 no 
 
SPRING FOR ME! 
 
 THERE'S a whisper in the heart, 
 When the buds begin to start, 
 That allures. 
 When the birds their lyrics spill. 
 Loud they call from hill to hill, 
 "Joy is yours!" 
 
 How the green rimmed pasture pond, 
 How the velvet slopes beyond 
 
 Beckon there! 
 How the singing waterfall 
 And the piping marshlands call 
 
 "Banish care!" 
 
 Forests, where the sun shines through 
 On anemone and rue. 
 
 Lead us on. 
 Cowslips by the river bloom ; 
 Willows by the old mill flume 
 
 Verdure don. 
 
 Ill 
 
THE VAGABOND BOOK 
 
 Happiness all seasons know, 
 Tides of joy that ebb and flow, 
 
 Spring for me ! 
 Nature's calling sinner, saint. 
 Burst the bonds of all restraint! 
 
 Come, be free! 
 
 STONEWALLS 
 
 1HAVE sought in vain among the nature 
 books so common nowadays for a book of 
 stonewalls. If you think stonewalls are not 
 a part of nature, it is simply because you are not 
 on friendly footing with them. A bran new 
 stonewall is indeed an ugly sight, no matter how 
 elaborately laid, but the old stone fence of the 
 landscape is as much a part of nature as the 
 shrubs, and more, by right of its primogeniture. 
 Unfortunately however for the lover of the nat- 
 ural, the stone fence is doomed to follow into 
 obscurity the gnarled and ragged stump fence 
 and the zigzag fence of split rails. 
 
 Few people among the younger generation 
 
 112 
 
STONEWALLS 
 
 have even seen the fence made of huge stumps in 
 inverted position with their octopus-hke arms 
 reaching heavenward, and many know the rail 
 fence only through reading the life of Abraham 
 Lincoln, but the stonewall is still a thing common 
 enough, especially in the East. 
 
 Did you ever notice how a stonewall reflects 
 the nature and even the quality of the land which 
 it encloses ? One need not be a geologist to note 
 such a resemblance. I wonder that Thoreau did 
 not write more about stonewalls and less about 
 beans. 
 
 A stonewall is one of the best of companions, 
 and if there is any walk that breeds an outdoor 
 love, it is that which follows the wall's rambling 
 route; where the goldenrod rallies in greatest 
 numbers its gilded guidons, where the briers 
 seek protection against the ruthless blade of the 
 destroying scythe, and where the chipmunk finds 
 a broad and unobstructed highway leading to 
 the woods. 
 
 Along its course one may wander with a safe 
 assurance of a pleasant seat for a rest when the 
 spirit bids one stop and muse upon the glow of 
 
THE VAGABOND BOOK 
 
 sunlight on a distant hilltop, or upon the song 
 of the rustling leaves in the poplar grove. 
 
 Anyone can clamber over a stonewall. It 
 forms no prohibitory boundary for the walker, 
 and yet it restrains even the ambitious sheep and 
 forms such an imperishable indication of the 
 limit of ownership as outlasts the memory of 
 generations. 
 
 The old stonewalls of eastern Massachusetts, 
 dating back to Battle of Concord and Lexington 
 days are a part of the history of our country. 
 Those of other states, notably the South, are not 
 less so. What a pity that they must all disap- 
 pear to be replaced by spick and span barbed 
 wires, the enemy of stock and the despair of 
 cross-lots travelers ! 
 
 In the stonewall we truly have a link that 
 helps to bind the past of our fathers to the future 
 of our children. Its gradual extinction may serve 
 to remind the Vagabond that the necessities of 
 civilization are slowly driving into the back- 
 ground a thousand artifices that have long con- 
 tributed a great deal to the pleasure of the lovers 
 of outdoors, making clear the fact that though 
 
 114 
 
ALONG THE OLD STONEWALL 
 
 we enjoy much by living in the commercial pres- 
 ent, on the other hand we miss much of which 
 the Vagabond of the past was possessor. 
 
 ALONG THE OLD STONE 
 WALL 
 
 H 
 
 ERE'S out to stroll by the old stonewall 
 That borders in grey the fields of fall. 
 
 Its stones are moss and lichen lined, 
 With virgin's bower 'tis overtwined; 
 
 The goldenrod its body-guard, 
 
 With waving guidons, yellow starred. 
 
 Here a place where the top is gone, 
 There, and there, the bar-gaps yawn; 
 
 With crumbling spots all sheep-proof made 
 By rough hewn rails across them laid. 
 
 "S 
 
THE VAGABOND BOOK 
 
 Along the way of this old rock fence, 
 From open lot to forest dense, 
 
 We roam with eyes for the glories rare 
 Of nature*s autumn toilet fair. 
 
 We linger with a lagging tread 
 
 Where orchard fruit lie yellow and red, 
 
 And breathe the odor of drying corn 
 In skirting the field all harvest shorn. 
 
 By woodchuck, burrow and bubbling spring 
 The vagrant wall goes wandering 
 
 Until it leaves the pasture land. 
 
 With grassy slopes sun brown and tanned, 
 
 And disappears beneath the shade 
 Of templed woodland's high arcade. 
 
 There's no such stroll the country o'er 
 As that across the dry turf floor 
 
 Of outdoor autumn; and of all 
 
 The ways, choose that by the old stonewall. 
 
 Ii6 
 
CROSS LOTS 
 
 WHO of the nature lovers would prefer 
 the beaten path to the cross-lots way? 
 To most people the short cut through 
 the woods is the nearest route. To the Vaga- 
 bond the old saying is true, "The longest way 
 'round is the shortest way home." The cross- 
 lots walk will delay you, my gypsy hearted one, 
 until the fire burns low and the supper grows 
 cold with waiting. 
 
 You and I do not go cross lots because it is 
 shorter; we go because we like that way. That 
 way stands the little clump of pines where one 
 may lie on the needle cushioned ground by the 
 hour and dream of the glorious things that could 
 be accomplished if circumstances were only suf- 
 ficiently favorable. 
 
 That way the little stream sings through the 
 willows and an occasional trout darts up over the 
 rift into the deep hole where the big elm has 
 balked the attacks of the water upon the high 
 bank. That way are the songs of birds, the 
 flower pictures, the perfumes of the orchard blos- 
 soms, hay fields or corn shocks, as the season is. 
 117 
 
THE] VAGABOND BOOK 
 
 That way lies all that is good outdoors, all that 
 pulls at the heart strings. 
 
 For sake of the going cross lots one would 
 almost be willing to have lived in the pioneer 
 days when to go the neighbor's meant to walk 
 two or three miles up the hill back of the farm- 
 house, through the deep shade of the beech wood, 
 across the oak opening with its dancing lights and 
 shadows, and down the ravine beyond, following 
 a rugged bridle path to the log house. There is 
 quite too much improvement and too little orig- 
 inal simplicity nowadays. It is difficult to get 
 far enough away from the commercialism so 
 that one will not be stared out of countenance by 
 its omnipresent obviousness. 
 
 If we are properly metropolitan we love the 
 noise of traffic (theoretically) and we pride our- 
 selves upon the rapid advancement of our times. 
 There is something in the power, in the momen- 
 tum of our civilization that appeals even to the 
 Vagabond in a general way ; but we like to leave 
 it all behind and get where it can be forgotten. 
 We would like to get where it would efface itself 
 from our minds, where there need be no sensible 
 
 ii8 
 
CROSS LOTS 
 
 effort to forget, but its universality makes that 
 impossible. Even when sitting down to write of 
 the beauties of Cross Lots one can scarcely re- 
 frain from drifting back into a consideration of 
 what one goes cross lots to avoid. 
 
 Never mind! The gypsy heart will find that 
 while it is likely to forget commercialism in the 
 halls of finance, it can never forget nature in the 
 woods and fields. 
 
 119 
 
T 
 
 JUNE 
 
 HE joys of June, O Heart, are here ; 
 Now let me whisper ; bend an ear. 
 
 Just out beyond the village end 
 Where you and I our way may wend, 
 
 There stretches, 'neath the osiers tall, 
 A lane where long, green shadows fall. 
 
 Below the willows, overhung 
 
 By bending branches outward flung. 
 
 The mill-stream freed from tread-mill grind 
 Slips on, a simpler life to find. 
 
 Its laughing song but echoes there 
 The songs of willow choir lofts, where 
 
 A thousand feathered pipes o' Pan 
 Make rhythmic challenge, clan to clan. 
 
 A meadow's daisy-dotted plain, 
 Where bobolinks to sport are fain, 
 
 1 20 
 
JUNE 
 
 Sweeps down the slope to edge of rill 
 And back again to hooded hill ; 
 
 While floating on the drifting wind 
 Come perfumes such as lead the mind 
 
 On journeys far — as far away 
 As Blessed Isles or dim Cathay. 
 
 How twilight in the willowed lane 
 Will sweeten life and dull its pain! 
 
 How morning there, where sweeter dews 
 Than those of Paradise infuse, 
 
 Inspires the soul to do and dare, 
 
 To fling to winds creed, custom, care! 
 
 How clarion noon, rare noon of June, 
 Will set one's love of life in tune! 
 
 What banks of blossom line the way! 
 What June-born zephyrs o'er them play ! 
 
 Beneath the trees what vistas show, 
 Where radiant sunlight sets aglow 
 
 121 
 
THE VAGABOND BOOK 
 
 The clover-perfumed hunting ground 
 Where bee and butterfly abound! 
 
 O Heart, the lure of willowed lane 
 And joys of June are here again. 
 
 No sweeter secret can I tell, 
 
 All souls with happiness to swell. 
 
 June, June, let lovers' voices croon, 
 Let all earth sing I O Heart, 't is June 1 
 
 122 
 
H 
 
 OCTOBER 
 
 ERE'S to ripe October, lads; 
 
 Sing ho for her blazing hills, 
 With purpling vine and air like wine 
 
 That through us throbs and thrills! 
 
 Sing ho for crispy, sparkling dawns 
 
 That set the foot astir 
 To travel down the highway brown. 
 
 Through falling leaf and burr! 
 
 O red and gold; O red and gold; 
 
 And haze in the faraways, 
 The roadsides blue with asters hue, 
 
 Green sedge by the waterways! 
 
 The rover heart finds over- joy. 
 The wayworn heart finds life; 
 
 Then ho for the time when spirits climb 
 Beyond the clash of strife! 
 
 123 
 
AT THE OLD HOMESTEAD 
 
 AMONG the scenes most deeply impressed 
 upon the mind of the city-bred man are 
 those of his rare boyhood visits to the 
 country, and valued highly among his mental 
 treasures are memories of days spent in visits to 
 country relatives where the welcome of the farm 
 was of a hearty, cordial nature, backed by a hos- 
 pitality that knew none of the town's mechanical 
 formality. 
 
 Many a man who clings too tenaciously to 
 money making from year's end to year's end has, 
 in the heat and humidity which crowd the city's 
 summer night, thought longingly of an arrival 
 alone on a July evening years ago at grand- 
 father's farm; of the impatient, boyish eagerness 
 to visit at once the barns, the horses and the 
 cattle, and to explore without delay all the odd 
 corners of a place full of novelty and entrancing 
 possibilities — only reluctantly admitting the pro- 
 priety of postponing his divers excursions until 
 morning. 
 
 How vividly the man's present position in a 
 
 124 
 
THE OLD HOMESTEAD 
 
 life of care and worry contrasts with that of the 
 boy the first night on a farm ! Taken to a scrupu- 
 lously neat little bedroom at the head of the front 
 stairs, he was left with a good-night kiss by a 
 fond aunt, and was soon in bed, with probably a 
 homesick tear or two in his eyes as he thought 
 of the distance between himself and father and 
 mother. 
 
 In at the vine-covered window was wafted the 
 sweet perfume of a flower garden, old fashioned 
 in its growth of hollyhocks, sweet peas, mignon- 
 ette and lavender; while from beyond, through 
 the myriad rustling leaves of the orchard, came 
 the music of the brook as it rippled along over 
 the mossy stones, between banks overhung with 
 willows and sedges, singing the same happy song 
 that marked its course in the bright sunlight of 
 mid-day, though how differently its cadences 
 effect the listener who hears them breaking 
 through the solemn stillness of a summer night! 
 
 Mingled with the incessant babble of the brook 
 came the plaintively weird notes of the "peeper," 
 and at intervals the harsh "garung" of a solitary 
 frog from among the sweet flag and the cat- 
 
THE VAGABOND BOOK 
 
 tails in a far-off marshy spot. Soothed by these, 
 nature's own soft lullabys, weariness soon over- 
 came the home-longing, and restful and refresh- 
 ing Sleep took the boy in her arms. 
 
 The man can remember few happier occasions 
 than the morning of his first awakening to the 
 joys of farm life when, aroused by a gentle tap 
 on his door, he bounded out of bed at once, 
 anxious to be up and doing. The early morning 
 sunlight filtered through the vines into his room, 
 and the cooing of the doves around the barn 
 could be heard, taking the place of the daybreak 
 carnival of the wilder birds in the orchard trees. 
 
 By the time he came downstairs the family 
 breakfast was ready, and after a hearty meal he 
 set out upon his tour of exploration. It was 
 haying time and when he reached the barn he 
 found the horses hitched to a mowing machine 
 and just starting for the meadow. Of course 
 he followed in their wake and was soon watching 
 the daisy tops tremble and fall before the ruth- 
 less cut-bar while strawberries in profusion 
 crimsoned the white petals as they were crushed 
 beneath the horses' tread or the iron wheels of 
 the mower. 
 
 126 
 
AT THE OLD HOMESTEAD 
 
 As the sun rose higher, the circumference of 
 the plot of standing grass contracted until the 
 bob-o'-links that had fluttered about so gayly in 
 the earlier morning, betook themselves to fresher 
 fields, where their erratic flights and more 
 erratic song would be uninterrupted. 
 
 By noon the grass was down and there showed 
 only the long tracks of the mower's wheels with 
 the timothy laid smoothly between, while around 
 the outer edge by the stone wall, were tumbled in 
 ragged confusion the rough briars and the alders 
 trimmed out with a scythe, and over it all hov- 
 ered the sweet scent of the drying grass. 
 
 In the afternoon with the barns deserted, the 
 men and horses at work, the cattle in the pasture, 
 and even the ubiquitous hens foraging or dusting 
 themselves in the highway, the boy explored the 
 hay-mows and turned somersaults down their 
 uneven surfaces, or jumped from the big beam 
 to the springy cushion below ; raced up and down 
 the stationary ladders whose hard rungs were 
 worn smooth and slippery by years of everyday 
 use; climbed over feed-bins and mangers, 
 crawled through stanchions and under dusty, 
 
 127 
 
THE VAGABOND BOOK 
 
 cobwebby stairways until, when the horn sounded 
 summoning all hands to supper, he emerged from 
 the barn a tired and dirty, but happy youngster. 
 
 Following the early supper-time came milking, 
 which was a process new to the boy, and with 
 much interest he watched the cows wander 
 through the pasture bars into the barnyard, one 
 by one finding their devious ways into the right 
 places in the stable; and he has probably never 
 in later years seen anything that has excited his 
 wonder and admiration as did the ability of the 
 hired man to milk into the mouth of an old tabby 
 cat as she sat on the stable window-sill waiting 
 for her regular portion. 
 
 This day was but one of a succession of days 
 of unalloyed pleasure, in which the hay was dried 
 and brought in with shouts of laughter from the 
 high loads upon which the boy rode in state to 
 the barn where he was tossed like a big ball over 
 into the mow. 
 
 One source of joy was the little stream which 
 wandered along the side of the meadow, and 
 further down passed from view in the woods 
 that descended the hill to its edge, and in the cool 
 
 128 
 
AT THE OLD HOMESTEAD 
 
 depths of whose pools where the water swirled 
 around the big rocks or writhed through the 
 gnarled roots that thrust their octopus-like arms 
 into the chattering current, there lurked trout in 
 abundance. 
 
 Then, too, there were eggs to be hunted lest 
 some motherly inclined biddy should hide her 
 nest and bring forth one day a brood of too late 
 summer chicks. There were small pigs, ducks, a 
 flock of pigeons, turkeys, and one grandly proud 
 peacock. Each came in for its share in contrib- 
 uting to the amusement of the boy visitor, and 
 when the time came for him to go back to his 
 city home, it was with feelings of genuine sad- 
 ness that he parted from every inhabitant of the 
 farm, from the mouse he had captured alive in 
 the granary, to grandfather himself who knew 
 that nothing was too good for that boy. 
 
 129 
 
OLD HOME HILLS 
 
 OLD home hills that shimmer and shine 
 From valley land to timber line, 
 
 Ribbed with drifts where stone walls 
 stood, 
 Crowned by the blue and barren wood, 
 Dotted with sombre spruce and pine, 
 Each with its peaked, snowy hood ; 
 
 Spring-time hills of sober brown, 
 Early green, where ripple down 
 
 A myriad minute waterways; 
 
 Hills whose smiles on April days 
 Displace the winter's darkling frown 
 
 And charm again our eager gaze; 
 
 Hills of summer's dusky green 
 
 Where stately trees their verdure preenr 
 
 Hills whose softened outlines lie 
 
 Graceful 'gainst an azure sky 
 While the velvet clouds careen 
 
 Over plumed hilltops high ; 
 
 130 
 
OLD HOME HILLS 
 
 Autumn hills of opal hue 
 Reaching up to heaven's blue. 
 
 Or flaming bright with red and gold, 
 
 Gayest of nature's colors bold, 
 With dazzling beauties ever new 
 
 That our enchanted eyes behold ; 
 
 These are the old home hills we know 
 And love through rain or sun or snow. 
 
 Though wandering wide from land to land. 
 Though under foreign flags we stand. 
 We follow in our minds their slow, 
 Constant changing, ever grand. 
 
 131 
 
GOING FISHING 
 
 FISHING nowadays could scarcely be 
 properly called "The Contemplative 
 Man's Recreation," as Walton described 
 it. It has become one of the strenuous sports of 
 the time of too much strenuousness. To most 
 people it means whipping as many miles of some 
 stream as can be covered in a day, and bagging 
 as many fish as can be captured in the time. I 
 suppose there must be two kinds of fishing — the 
 strenuous and the contemplative fishing. 
 
 The former kind is the more exercise, the more 
 fashionable, if fashions there be in fishing, and 
 perhaps gets the more fish, but even so, the con- 
 templative fisherman gets the more real enjoy- 
 ment out of the sport. 
 
 The good Sir Isaac was never guilty of seeing 
 how many fish he could catch or of boasting of 
 the number. He made it his pride to get the 
 best of the available fish and to go still further, 
 seeing that they were prepared for the table in 
 the way that produced the best results. 
 
 If vou belong to the tribe of strenuous fisher- 
 
 132 
 
GOING FISHING 
 
 men you will not enjoy a talk about the other 
 sort of fishing. The best sort of fishing is not 
 the sort that counts its catch at every fresh addi- 
 tion to the basket. The real fun of a fishing 
 excursion is the fishing, not the fish. The means, 
 not the end, is the enjoyable part. 
 
 The sort of an expedition that a boy likes 
 begins with getting up at three o'clock in the 
 morning, sallying forth to the best trout stream 
 and commencing to fish at daylight. A boy will 
 get up at two o'clock to go fishing when you 
 could not drag him out at seven to weed garden 
 — and he is not to be blamed for that either. 
 
 A boy is not a contemplative fisherman, nor 
 does he belong to the other class, but he will sur- 
 prise you with the amount of philosophy of which 
 he is innocently capable. He will surprise you 
 too with the number of fish that he will catch. 
 Few boys are wanton in their fishing or their 
 hunting. Their love of killing for the mere sake 
 of killing has not yet been developed. That will 
 come when they arrive at the age of thinking 
 themselves men. 
 
 When you go fishing, take time. Never go in 
 
 ^33 
 
THE VAGABOND BOOK 
 
 a hurry if you would enjoy yourself. No sport 
 so imperatively requires an utter disregard of the 
 fleeting hours. No sport is so thoroughly the 
 Vagabond's own. 
 
 The very best plan for a fishing trip is to get 
 all things ready at night for a start at an early 
 hour in the morning. Have breakfast in the gray 
 dawn and set out afoot. It is not to be a Pull- 
 man car pilgrimage but a little journey to the 
 home of the finny tribe. 
 
 The river is easy of access but there are few 
 trout there. The fish that we want are in the 
 smaller streams that come wandering down the 
 little valleys tributary to the main one. If you 
 cannot get the right sort of a companion for the 
 trip, go alone. A man who likes the con- 
 templative sort of angling will enjoy it by himself 
 and be none the less a companionable fellow at 
 that. Chatterboxes are not fishermen and fisher- 
 men are never chatterboxes when they are fishing. 
 
 A good company for a fishing expedition is 
 made up of a small boy and his uncle. It is good 
 company for the small boy and good company for 
 the uncle. They meet on equal ground and on 
 
 134 
 
GOING FISHING 
 
 an even basis. Age is no advantage and youth is 
 no handicap. 
 
 The two start down along the brown highway 
 in the early morning light, talking as they go of 
 the good holes in the brook they are to fish and 
 of the bait that is most likely to prove effective. 
 By the time they reach the point where the smaller 
 stream branches off and the rough, stony by-road 
 meets the better river highway, it is full daylight 
 and a crimson aureole shows where the sun will 
 appear in less than an hour. 
 
 Up the little stream a short distance stands the 
 old sawmill that has cleared the hillsides of the 
 valley of spruce and pine and that is now a bat- 
 tered wreck with a mud-filled pond above the 
 falls where the water tumbles down over the 
 mossy planking of the dam and spurts out from 
 the places where an occasional plank is gone. 
 
 In the hole where the fallen water eddies 
 around before starting for the river, the boy finds 
 his first trout, while his older companion is yet 
 fixing his rod. Then up the stream they go, 
 working slowly along through willow copse and 
 tangled woods and across pasture and meadow 
 
 135 
 
THE VAGABOND BOOK 
 
 land, pulling here a gamy fish from a rift and 
 there a twenty-ounce beauty from a hole under 
 the birches. 
 
 Snappy dace fool them and minnows use up 
 the bait, but the sport is good and each fisherman 
 follows his own pace and keeps his own counsel. 
 Time counts for naught and before they have 
 given hunger a thought it is noon, and as the fact 
 is made patent by a glance at their diminutive 
 shadows, they realize that it is many hours since 
 they have eaten and that lunch would be and is 
 the most desirable thing in the world. 
 
 Here is a spot where a clump of water beeches 
 surrounds a patch of smooth greensward, making 
 an ideal dining hall. Then comes an hour of rest 
 with an interchange of experiences, a telling how 
 this big one got away just as he was almost in 
 the basket, and how that old and cunning chap 
 in the hole below the woods must be caught on 
 the return. The little incidents of such a trip are 
 of no moment, yet how charmingly they beguile 
 the time of lunch, taken as they arc, between bites 
 while the trout in the baskets attract occasional 
 attention by their fluttering. 
 136 
 
GOING FISHING 
 
 After lunch, on again up the ever-narrowing 
 stream, fishing the spring-runs and the cold-pools 
 until there is scarcely water enough to wet the 
 feet. Then a reeling up of lines and a disjoint- 
 ing of rods for the homeward trip. The bait is 
 thrown away, except the bit that the boy saves 
 for that one big trout, and the return walk begins 
 with the sun well on its downward way. Just as 
 it touches the tree-tops on the western crest, they 
 reach the hole at the edge of the woods, and after 
 a careful preparation of bait and a cautious up- 
 creeping the boy throws his line out into the pool 
 for the wary one. 
 
 There is a moment of waiting, tense on the 
 fisherman's part, cautiously intent on the part of 
 the watcher ; then a tug at the hook, a darting of 
 the line through the water, a swish, a splash — 
 and once more the biggest fish has got away ! 
 
 But this serves only to add to the interest of 
 the conversation on the way and to renew in the 
 boy the resolution to get that particular fish. 
 
 As twilight falls on the homeward journey 
 conversation stops or becomes only a matter of 
 exclamations over some new appearing vista 
 
 137 
 
THE VAGABOND BOOK 
 
 through the trees or some new and glorious tinge 
 of the sunset. It has been a happy day, a day 
 free from the care that shortens life. It has been 
 a day when to weary one's self was to rest one's 
 self abundantly, for it has rested the brain of the 
 man and added to his store of physical health, 
 while the boy has gained an added knowledge of 
 patience, an added love for nature and an added 
 appreciation of life. 
 
 No fishing of the man who goes into the woods 
 and stays for weeks trying to make a record for 
 the number or size of his catch, can put the things 
 into his soul that he could get in one such day as 
 the above. What a time for letting go, for 
 loosening that nervous grip on the ambition, for 
 resting that persistence, that determination with- 
 out which they say we can never succeed ! 
 
 One always pulls the harder after settling back 
 and getting a fresh grip, after resting for an in- 
 stant. It is not well to try to hold on with all 
 one's might all the time. There is plenty of time 
 for rest. Let's go a-fishing ! 
 
 13B 
 
A GOOD-BYE 
 
 HERE'S farewell, my lad, at the parting 
 place 
 Where our ways must separate! 
 God give you wealth of joy and friends 
 And the upper hand of fate ? 
 
''WK IB m^