a muskrat, I saw the
nest of a hawk--and how, how many other things of the wilderness I must
not here relate. And I came out of it renewed and refreshed; I know now
the feeling of the pioneer and the discoverer. Peary has no more than I;
Stanley tells me nothing I have not experienced!

What more than that is the accomplishment of the great inventor, poet,
painter? Such cannot abide habit-hedged wildernesses. They follow the
Open Road, they see for themselves, and will not accept the paths or the
names of the world. And Sight, kept clear, becomes, curiously, Insight.
A thousand had seen apples fall before Newton. But Newton was dowered
with the spirit of the Open Road!

Sometimes as I walk, seeking to see, hear, feel, everything newly, I
devise secret words for the things I see: words that convey to me alone
the thought, or impression, or emotion of a peculiar spot. All this, I
know, to some will seem the acme of foolish illusion. Indeed, I am not
telling of it because it is practical; there is no cash at the end of
it. I am reporting it as an experience in life; those who understand
will understand. And thus out of my journeys I have words which bring
back to me with indescribable poignancy the particular impression of a
time or a place. I prize them more highly than almost any other of my
possessions, for they come to me seemingly out of the air, and the
remembrance of them enables me to recall or live over a past experience
with scarcely diminished emotion.

And one of these words--how it brings to me the very mood of a gray
October day! A sleepy west wind blowing. The fields are bare, the corn
shocks brown, and the long road looks flat and dull. Away in the marsh I
hear a single melancholy crow. A heavy day, namelessly sad! Old sorrows
flock to one's memory and old regrets. The creeper is red in the swamp
and the grass is brown on the hill. It comes to me that I was a boy
once----

So to the flat road and away! And turn at the turning and rise with the
hill. Will the mood change: will the day? I see a lone man in the top of
a pasture crying "Coo-ee, coo-ee." I do not see at first why he cries
and then over the hill come the ewes, a dense gray flock of them,
huddling toward me. The yokel behind has a stick in each hand. "Coo-ee,
coo-ee," he also cries. And the two men, gathering in, threatening,
sidling, advancing slowly, the sheep turning uncertainly this way and
that, come at last to the boarded pen.

"That'