Within a week, the Royal progress had swept through parts of three of our United States, without serious damage either to the lad or to the landscape. The curve of operations was now fast shaping itself into a circle. Day and night, the weather had been magically lovely. Royal had gladly passed the first three nights _à la belle étoile_; with keen relish, he rolled the phrase under his tongue, thinking that now not a boy in Froggy Beaurivage’s French Literature classes understood its charm as well as he. His Norfolk coat, a bore by day, proved a godsend in the chill hours before dawn, and he knew the use of a Sunday paper as a mattress. Before falling asleep, he would gaze with delight into the skies; thrilled with their beauty and immensity, he would say to himself, “After this, I am changed forever; I shall always be something more than I was before I came here.” No doubt he was right. And his days were no less wondrous, for their sun, and shade, and good going. Sometimes, when he was beginning to feel dusty or weary, an unexpected pool would signal to him from beside a shaded road; and when he came up from it, he was a new-made creature. He liked being solitary, yet he liked stopping at sudden inns for frugal meals, and he liked chatting with the wayfarers he met. The latter half of the week had moments less idyllic. His fourth night he spent in a box car, his fifth in a boarding-house for Polish immigrants, and his sixth, in part at least, in the jail-room of a village town-hall, where he had been held in custody on a false charge of having stolen an automobile.