Quietly and mysteriously, I fancy, to the other servants, I appeared among them at the "---- House," and with as little notice I tried to steal away. Instead of going to the kitchen at five o'clock on that Wednesday morning for scrubbing-water, I took to the road with my pack, and left behind me the "---- House" awaking to life in the servants' quarters. I had been a gang-laborer and a hotel porter, and now I wondered what my next rôle was to be. But the feeling was simply a genial curiosity, and was free from the timid shrinking with which I set out from the minister's house in Wilton, and my lodgings at Highland Falls. Then it was under the spur of self-compulsion that I launched afresh upon this fortuitous life. With strong animal instinct I had clung to any haven where shelter and food were secure. Now I warmly welcomed a freer courage born of experience. Not too sure of newly gained powers, but like a boy learning to swim, I fancied that I felt the strength of some confidence in the novel element. Light-hearted in spite of my pack, which gained weight with every step, I walked briskly along the country roads, charmed with everything I saw, and feeling sure that my wages would see me through to another job. Was it a real acquisition, and had I learned to catch the strange pleasure of this fugitive life? or did the difference lie in the bracing cool of the morning, and the beauty of the open country, and the sense of freedom after long restraint, and, most subtly of all, in that little, hoarded balance in my purse? It was nightfall when I entered Middletown, and too late to look for work. With my eye upon the rows of cottages which line the street by which I entered the town, I soon found a boarding-house for workmen. A bed could be had for twenty cents. At a bakery near by I got a loaf of bread and a quart of milk for a dime, and was thus supplied with a supper and breakfast. Twelve hours of unbroken sleep fell to me that night, and in the cool of a threatening morning I set out to find work. The scaffolding about a brick building in process of erection drew my attention, and I applied for a job as a hod-carrier, but found no demand there for further unskilled labor. The boss in charge refused me with some show of petulance, as though annoyed by repeated appeals. He was not more cheerful, but was politely communicative enough when I asked after the likelihood of my finding work in the town. "There is no business doing," he said. "The bottom has fallen out of this place. There's two men looking for every job here, and my advice to you is to go somewhere else."