That night the minister insisted upon my taking a bed in his house. I pleaded an early start. He, too, was to be up early, and in the morning I found him in the kitchen before me. On the table were bread and milk; and as I ate I parried the somewhat searching questions of my host. My course from Wilton lay through Ridgefield and Salem and Golden's Bridge, and then, crossing the line between Connecticut and New York, it made directly for the Hudson River. This was no great distance; but in the early stages of the march I was much delayed by rains. Driven to shelter, I found it usually in a barn, or a shed under which were housed the farming implements. Here is an example: From a sudden downpour of rain I ran to an open barn. A farmer, whom I found there unhitching his horses, eyed me suspiciously, and gave a halting assent to my request for shelter. He soon left me alone. I tried to read, and could not. The dull day was deeply depressing. Like the burden of a haunting sorrow the trial of separation weighed upon me. It was not homesickness alone, but added to that a feeling of isolation. Poverty, I had thought, would at once bring me into vital contact with the very poor. Instead, it had made me an object of unfailing distrust. The very poor I found in an occasional cottage of a farm laborer, or some grotesquely dilapidated hovel, swarming with negro life. But they were no more hospitable to my approach than were the well-to-do farmers, and I met not a single vagrant like myself in the course of my walk to the Hudson. I was lonely with the loneliness of a castaway, and I climbed into the hay-loft and fell asleep. Here, at least, was comfort; the deep, dreamless sleep, to which I had long been a stranger, was making gracious advances. When I awoke, the rain was past for the time, and I resumed my journey, with a leaden sky overhead, and soft, clinging mud under foot; but I was strangely refreshed, and walked on quite enheartened. The intermittent rains interfered with my progress, and increased the difficulty of finding chance work. Repeatedly I was offered a meal, but denied the privilege of working for it. For twenty-four hours I went hungry, and spent much of that time asleep in a hole which I burrowed into a hay-stack. But under a brightening sky on Friday, I was given some wood to chop, and the promise of a dinner in payment. The work was soon done, and to the dinner there was given an added pleasure in the company of one of the two old women for whom I chopped the wood. She sat at the table and talked to me. Perhaps she was solicitous for her spoons. Certainly she was very entertaining. Her dark calico dress fitted closely her thin figure; and she sat very straight in her chair, with her hands folded in her lap, and her eyes bright with gentle benignity.