ches,
toward the sky-line.

We stood still a moment, gazing at the well-loved landscape. Then we
turned and breasted the hill.

"_Allons_!" cried Colin.

"_Allons_!" I answered. "_Allons_! To New York!"

CHAPTER VIII

THE AMERICAN BLUEBIRD AND ITS SONG

I wish I could convey the singular feeling of freedom and adventure that
possessed us as Colin and I grasped our sticks and struck up the green
hill--for New York. It was a feeling of exhilaration and romantic
expectancy, blent with an absurd sense of our being entirely on our own
resources, vagrants shifting for ourselves, independent of civilization;
which, of course, the actual circumstances in no way warranted. A
delightful boyish illusion of entering on untrodden paths and facing
unknown dangers thrilled through us.

"Well, we're off!" we said simultaneously, smiling interrogatively at
each other.

"Yes! we're in for it."

So men start out manfully for the North Pole.

Our little enterprise gave us an imaginative realization of the
solidarity, the interdependence, of the world; and we saw, as in a
vision, its four corners knit together by a vast network of paths
connecting one with the other; footpaths, byways, cart-tracks,
bride-paths, lovers' lanes, highroads, all sensitively linked in one vast
nervous system of human communication. This field whose green sod we were
treading connected with another field, that with another, and that again
with another--all the way to New York--all the way to Cape Horn! No break
anywhere. All we had to do was to go on putting one foot before the
other, and we could arrive anywhere. So the worn old phrase, "All roads
lead to Rome," lit up with a new meaning, the meaning that had originally
made it. Yes! the loneliest of lovers' lanes, all silence and wild
flowers, was on the way to the Metropolitan Opera House; or, vice versa,
the Flat Iron Building was on the way to the depths of the forest.

"Suppose we stop here, Colin," I said, pointing to a solitary,
forgotten-looking little farmhouse, surrounded by giant wind-worn poplars
that looked older than America, "and ask the way to Versailles?"

"And I shouldn't be surprised," answered Colin, "if we struck some bright
little American schoolgirl who could tell us."

Although we as yet knew every foot of the ground we were treading, it
already began to wear an unfamiliar houseless and homeless look, an air
of foreign travel, and though the shack was but a few yar