lthough she was
quick to tell me that the teacher had just been hired.

Without a cent in my pocket, I could not ask for food--therefore, I
turned back weary, hungry and disheartened. To make matters worse a cold
rain was falling and the eighteen or twenty miles between me and the
Harris farm looked long.

I think it must have been at this moment that I began, for the first
time, to take a really serious view of my plan "to see the world." It
became evident with startling abruptness, that a man might be both
hungry and cold in the midst of abundance. I recalled the fable of the
grasshopper who, having wasted the summer hours in singing, was
mendicant to the ant. My weeks of careless gayety were over. The money I
had spent in travel looked like a noble fortune to me at this hour.

The road was deep in mud, and as night drew on the rain thickened. At
last I said, "I will go into some farm-house and ask the privilege of a
bed." This was apparently a simple thing to do and yet I found it
exceedingly hard to carry out. To say bluntly, "Sir, I have no money, I
am tired and hungry," seemed a baldly disgraceful way of beginning. On
the other hand to plead relationship with Will Harris involved a
relative, and besides they might not know my cousin, or they might think
my statement false.

Arguing in this way I passed house after house while the water dripped
from my hat and the mud clogged my feet. Though chilled and hungry to
the point of weakness, my suffering was mainly mental. A sudden
realization of the natural antagonism of the well-to-do toward the tramp
appalled me. Once, as I turned in toward the bright light of a kitchen
window, the roar of a watch dog stopped me before I had fairly passed
the gate. I turned back with a savage word, hot with resentment at a
house-owner who would keep a beast like that. At another cottage I was
repulsed by an old woman who sharply said, "We don't feed tramps."

I now had the precise feeling of the penniless outcast. With morbidly
active imagination I conceived of myself as a being forever set apart
from home and friends, condemned to wander the night alone. I worked on
this idea till I achieved a bitter, furtive and ferocious manner.

However, I knocked at another door and upon meeting the eyes of the
woman at the threshold, began with formal politeness to explain, "I am a
teacher, I have been to look for a school, and I am on my way back to
Byron, where I have relatives. Can you