d into a violent appetite, and as we draw nearer we
impatiently quicken our steps and turn every corner with a beating
heart. It is through these prolongations of expectancy, this succession
of one hope to another, that we live out long seasons of pleasure in a
few hours' walk. It is in following these capricious sinuosities that we
learn, only bit by bit and through one coquettish reticence after
another, much as we learn the heart of a friend, the whole loveliness of
the country. This disposition always preserves something new to be seen,
and takes us, like a careful cicerone, to many different points of
distant view before it allows us finally to approach the hoped-for
destination.

In its connection with the traffic, and whole friendly intercourse with
the country, there is something very pleasant in that succession of
saunterers and brisk and business-like passers-by, that peoples our ways
and helps to build up what Walt Whitman calls "the cheerful voice of the
public road, the gay, fresh sentiment of the road." But out of the great
network of ways that binds all life together from the hill-farm to the
city, there is something individual to most, and, on the whole, nearly
as much choice on the score of company as on the score of beauty or easy
travel. On some we are never long without the sound of wheels, and folk
pass us by so thickly that we lose the sense of their number. But on
others, about little-frequented districts, a meeting is an affair of
moment; we have the sight far off of some one coming towards us, the
growing definiteness of the person, and then the brief passage and
salutation, and the road left empty in front of us for perhaps a great
while to come. Such encounters have a wistful interest that can hardly
be understood by the dweller in places more populous. We remember
standing beside a countryman once, in the mouth of a quiet by-street in
a city that was more than ordinarily crowded and bustling; he seemed
stunned and bewildered by the continual passage of different faces; and
after a long pause, during which he appeared to search for some suitable
expression, he said timidly that there seemed to be a _great deal of
meeting thereabouts_. The phrase is significant. It is the expression of
town-life in the language of the long, solitary country highways. A
meeting of one with one was what this man had been used to in the
pastoral uplands from which he came; and the concourse of the streets
was in h