."

George Willard stopped by a picket fence near a street lamp and his body
began to tremble. He had never before thought such thoughts as had just
come into his head and he wondered where they had come from. For the
moment it seemed to him that some voice outside of himself had been
talking as he walked. He was amazed and delighted with his own mind and
when he walked on again spoke of the matter with fervor. "To come out of
Ransom Surbeck's pool room and think things like that," he whispered.
"It is better to be alone. If I talked like Art Wilson the boys would
understand me but they wouldn't understand what I have been thinking
down here."

In Winesburg, as in all Ohio towns of twenty years ago, there was a
section in which lived day laborers. As the time of factories had not
yet come the laborers worked in the fields or were section hands on the
railroads. They worked twelve hours a day and received one dollar for
the long day of toil. The houses in which they lived were small cheaply
constructed wooden affairs with a garden at the back. The more
comfortable among them kept cows and perhaps a pig, housed in a little
shed at the rear of the garden.

With his head filled with resounding thoughts George Willard walked into
such a street on the clear January night. The street was dimly lighted
and in places there was no sidewalk. In the scene that lay about him
there was something that excited his already aroused fancy. For a year
he had been devoting all of his odd moments to the reading of books and
now some tale he had read concerning life in old world towns of the
middle ages came sharply back to his mind so that he stumbled forward
with the curious feeling of one revisiting a place that had been a part
of some former existence. On an impulse he turned out of the street and
went into a little dark alleyway behind the sheds in which lived the
cows and pigs.

For a half hour he stayed in the alleyway, smelling the strong smell of
animals too closely housed and letting his mind play with the strange
new thoughts that came to him. The very rankness of the smell of manure
in the clear sweet air awoke something heady in his brain. The poor
little houses lighted by kerosene lamps, the smoke from the chimneys
mounting straight up into the clear air, the grunting of pigs, the women
clad in cheap calico dresses and washing dishes in the kitchens, the
footsteps of men coming out of the houses and going off to the stores