y morning wind was blowing fresh from the clover-fields,
rose-gardens, and new-leafed black birch and sassafras. Such a
well-kept, clean world of open country it looked to Patsy as her eye
followed the road before her, on to the greening meadows and wooded
slopes, that her heart joined the chorus of song-sparrow and
meadow-lark, who sang from the sheer gladness of being a live part of
it all.

She sighed, not knowing it. "Faith! I'm wishing 'twas more nor seven
miles to Arden. I'd like to be following the road for days and days,
and keeping the length of it between Billy Burgeman and myself."

Starting before the country was astir, she had met no one of whom she
could inquire the way. A less adventuresome soul than Patsy might
have sat herself down and waited for direction; but that would have
meant wasting minutes--precious minutes before the dawn should break
and she should be no longer sole possessor of the road and the world
that bounded it. So Patsy chose the way for herself--content that it
would lead her to her destination in the end. The joy of true
vagabondage was rampant within her: there was the road, urging her
like an impatient comrade to be gone; there was her errand of
good-will giving purpose to her journey; and the facts that she was
homeless, penniless, breakfastless, a stranger in a strange country,
mattered not a whit. So thoroughly had she always believed in good
fortune that somehow she always managed to find it; and out of this
she had evolved her philosophy of life.

"Ye see, 'tis this way," she would say; "the world is much like a
great cat--with claws to hide or use, as the notion takes it. If ye
kick and slap at it, 'twill hump its back and scratch at ye--sure as
fate; but if ye are wise and a bit patient ye can have it coaxed and
smoothed down till it's purring to make room for ye at any
hearthside. And there's another thing it's well to remember--that
folks are folks the world over, whether they are wearing your dress
and speaking your tongue or another's."

And as Patsy was blessed in the matter of philosophy--so was she
blessed in the matter of possessions. She did not have to own things
to possess them.

There was no doubt but that Patsy had a larger share of the world
than many who could reckon their estates in acreage or who owned so
many miles of fenced-off property. She held a mortgage on every inch
of free roadway, rugged hilltop, or virgin forest her feet crossed.
She claimed