Two hours' walk carried me beyond the point of my acquaintance with the country roads; but this presented no real difficulty, for I had but to keep a steadily westward course. Other details of my expedition were not so simple, and I began to have an uncomfortable sense of unsuspected difficulty. I look back from the vantage-point of a week's experience, with a feeling of amused tolerance, upon my naïve preconceptions. It is like a retrospect of years. My notion of earning a living by manual labor was the securing of an odd job whenever I should need a meal or a night's lodging. Much advice had come my way before I set out. As a means of access to people, I was told to take with me a book or magazine, and to invite subscriptions. I adopted this plan; and a copy of a magazine was under my arm as I walked on through the dust and heat of the country road, wondering how long it would take me to reach the Hudson, and how I should earn my first meal. There was nothing at all adventurous or exciting in a dusty walk. My pack was taking on increments of weight with each mile of the journey. I was beginning to feel conscious of change in unexpected ways. There was no money in my pocket, and a most subtle and unmanning insecurity laid hold of me as a result of that. The world had curiously changed in its attitude, or rather I saw it at a new angle, and I felt the change most keenly in the bearing of people. My good-morning was not infrequently met by a vacant stare, and if I stopped to ask the way, the conviction was forced upon me that, as a pack-pedler, I was a suspicious character, with no claim upon common consideration. In the shade of his porch sat the keeper of a country store, at a fork of the road. His chair was tilted against the outer wall, and his feet rested upon the balustrade. My question as to the course of the two roads before me was responded to by the merchant, first with a look, and then a spurt of tobacco-juice, which stirred the dust between my feet, and, finally, a caustic sentence to the effect that he 'did not much know, and did not care a damn,' while his blue eyes swept the horizon, and rested finally on the Sound, gleaming golden in the morning sun, and the purple line of the Long Island shore. The new-born self-consciousness which I found asserting itself was like a wound on the hand, exposed to constant injury. I had walked several miles before I summoned courage to speak to anyone else. Finally, very hot and thirsty, I knocked at the door of an unpainted cottage which stood on the road. The door opened to the touch of an old woman, who bent toward me in the emaciated angularity of a decrepit figure which must once have been strikingly tall and vigorous.