was growing old. He consoled
himself with tags from the more philosophic of his authors, but he
scarcely needed consolation. For he had large stores of modest
contentment.

But now something had happened. A spring morning and a safety razor
had convinced him that he was still young. Since yesterday he was a
man of a large leisure. Providence had done for him what he would
never have done for himself. The rut in which he had travelled so long
had given place to open country. He repeated to himself one of the
quotations with which he had been wont to stir the literary young men
at the Guthrie Memorial Kirk:

"What's a man's age? He must hurry more, that's all;
Cram in a day, what his youth took a year to hold:
When we mind labour, then only, we're too old--
What age had Methusalem when he begat Saul?

He would go journeying--who but he?--pleasantly."

It sounds a trivial resolve, but it quickened Mr. McCunn to the depths
of his being. A holiday, and alone! On foot, of course, for he must
travel light. He would buckle on a pack after the approved fashion.
He had the very thing in a drawer upstairs, which he had bought some
years ago at a sale. That and a waterproof and a stick, and his outfit
was complete. A book, too, and, as he lit his first pipe, he
considered what it should be. Poetry, clearly, for it was the Spring,
and besides poetry could be got in pleasantly small bulk. He stood
before his bookshelves trying to select a volume, rejecting one after
another as inapposite. Browning--Keats, Shelley--they seemed more
suited for the hearth than for the roadside. He did not want anything
Scots, for he was of opinion that Spring came more richly in England
and that English people had a better notion of it. He was tempted by
the Oxford Anthology, but was deterred by its thickness, for he did not
possess the thin-paper edition. Finally he selected Izaak Walton. He
had never fished in his life, but The Compleat Angler seemed to fit his
mood. It was old and curious and learned and fragrant with the youth of
things. He remembered its falling cadences, its country songs and wise
meditations. Decidedly it was the right scrip for his pilgrimage.

Characteristically he thought last of where he was to go. Every bit of
the world beyond his front door had its charms to the seeing eye. There
seemed nothing common or unclean that fresh morning. Even a walk among
coal-pits had its attractions.... But