Socialists and horse-thieves we did not encounter; it must have been the Baptists, then, who were responsible for the law putting citizens who purchase gasoline on Sunday in the criminal class. Unluckily the easy-going garage man who obligingly gave us all other possible information neglected to tell us of this restriction on Saturday night. Accordingly, when we started on Sunday morning, we had only five gallons and a hundred odd miles to go. We had no desire to meet Houston’s judiciary again. A little group of advisers gathered to discuss our problem. The road our New York optimist had routed for us as “splendid going all the way” was a sea of mud. Four mule teams could not pull us out, we were told. Three months of steady rain had reduced the State of Texas to a state of “gumbo.” Each man had a tale of encounter and defeat for each road suggested. Each declared the alternatives suggested by the others impossible. But, at last, came one who had “got through” by the Sugarland road the day before. He voiced the definition of a good road in Texas, a definition which we frequently encountered afterward. “The road’s all right, ef yo’ don’t boag, otherwise you’ll find it kinder rough.” With this dubious encouragement we started, at nine in the morning, hoping the Baptists further out in the country would grow lenient in the matter of gasoline, as the square of their distance from Houston. It was a heavenly day, the sun hot and the vibrant blue sky belying the sodden fields and brimming ditches. The country, brown and faintly rolling, under the warmth of the Southern springtime was reminiscent of the Roman Campagna. Song sparrows filled the air with abrupt showers of music, and now and then a bald and black-winged buzzard thudded down into a nearby field. For miles on both sides of the road we saw only black soil soaked and muddy, with rivers for furrows, and only a few brown stalks standing from last year’s cotton or rice crop. The eternal flatness of the country suggested a reason for the astounding height of the loose-jointed Texans we had seen; they had to be tall to make any impression on the landscape. It accounted, too, for their mild, easy-going, unhurried and unhurriable ways. What is the use of haste, when as much landscape as ever still stretches out before one? Before we reached Sugarland, a lonesome group of houses on what had once been a huge sugar plantation, our misgivings began. Mud in Texas has a different meaning from mud in Massachusetts; it means gumbo, morasses, Sargasso Seas, broken axles, abandoned cars. From the reiteration of the words, “Yo’ may git through, but I think yo’ll boag” we began to realize that it was easier to get into Texas, even through the eye of the police court, than to get out of it.