The Friendly Road [25]
Martha crossed the room to the cottage organ and seated herself on the stool.
"What shall we sing?" said she.
"Something with fight in it, Martha," he responded; "something with plenty of fight in it."
So we sang "Onward, Christian Soldier, Marching as to War," and followed up with:
Awake, my soul, stretch every nerve And press with rigour on; A heavenly race demands thy zeal And an immortal crown.
When we had finished, and as Martha rose from her seat, the minister impulsively put his hands on her shoulders, and said:
"Martha, this is the greatest night of my life."
He took a turn up and down the room, and then with an exultant boyish laugh said:
"We'll go to town to-morrow and pick out that sewing-machine!"
I remained with them that night and part of the following day, taking a hand with them in the garden, but of the events of that day I shall speak in another chapter.
CHAPTER V. I PLAY THE PART OF A SPECTACLE PEDDLER
Yesterday was exactly the sort of a day I love best--a spicy, unexpected, amusing day--crowned with a droll adventure.
I cannot account for it, but it seems to me I take the road each morning with a livelier mind and keener curiosity. If you were to watch me narrowly these days you would see I am slowly shedding my years. I suspect that some one of the clear hill streams from which I have been drinking (lying prone on my face) was in reality the fountain of eternal youth. I shall not go back to see.
It seems to me, when I feel like this, that in every least thing upon the roadside, or upon the hill, lurks the stuff of adventure. What a world it is! A mile south of here I shall find all that Stanley found in the jungles of Africa; a mile north I am Peary at the Pole!
You there, brown-clad farmer on the tall seat of your wagon, driving townward with a red heifer for sale, I can show you that life --your life--is not all a gray smudge, as you think it is, but crammed, packed, loaded with miraculous things. I can show you wonders past belief in your own soul. I can easily convince you that you are in reality a poet, a hero, a true lover, a saint.
It is because we are not humble enough in the presence of the divine daily fact that adventure knocks so rarely at our door. A thousand times I have had to learn this truth (what lesson so hard to learn as the lesson o humility!) and I suppose I shall have to learn it a thousand times more. This very day, straining my eyes to see the distant wonders of the mountains, I nearly missed a miracle by the roadside.
Soon after leaving the minister and his family--I worked with them in their garden with great delight most of the forenoon--I came, within a mile--to the wide white turnpike--the Great Road.
Now, I usually prefer the little roads, the little, unexpected, curving, leisurely country roads. The sharp hills, the pleasant deep valleys, the bridges not too well kept, the verdure deep grown along old fences, the houses opening hospitably at the very roadside, all these things I love. They come to me with the same sort of charm and flavour, only vastly magnified, which I find often in the essays of the older writers--those leisurely old fellows who took time to write, REALLY write. The important thing to me about a road, as about life--and literature, is not that it goes anywhere, but that it is livable while it goes. For if I were to arrive--and who knows that I ever shall arrive?--I think I should be no happier than I am here.
Thus I have commonly avoided the Great White Road--the broad, smooth turnpike--rock-bottomed and rolled by a State--without so much as a loitering curve to whet one's curiosity, nor a thank- you-ma'am to laugh over, nor a sinful hill to test your endurance--not so much as a dreamy valley! It pursues its hard, unshaded, practical way directly from some particular place to some other particular place and from time to time a motor-car shoots in at one end of it and out at the other, leaving its dust to settle upon quiet travellers like me.
Thus to-day when I came to the turnpike I