admonition--like much of the excellent admonitions in
this world--affected me perversely: it made me more restless than ever.
I felt that I could not rest properly until I found out who wanted me to
rest, and why. It opened indeed a limitless vista for new adventure.

Presently, away ahead of me in the road, I saw a man standing near
a one-horse wagon. He seemed to be engaged in some activity near the
roadside, but I could not tell exactly what. As I hastened nearer I
discovered that he was a short, strongly built, sun-bronzed man in
working-clothes--and with the shortest of short hair. I saw him take a
shovel from the wagon and begin digging. He was the road-worker.

I asked the road-worker if he had seen the curious signs. He looked up
at me with a broad smile (he had good-humoured, very bright blue eyes).

"Yes," he said, "but they ain't for me."

"Then you don't follow the advice they give?"

"Not with a section like mine," said he, and he straightened up and
looked first one way of the road and then the other. "I have from Grabow
Brook, but not the bridge, to the top o' Sullivan Hill, and all the
culverts between, though two of 'em are by rights bridges. And I claim
that's a job for any full-grown man."

He began shovelling again in the road as if to prove how busy he was.
There had been a small landslide from an open cut on one side and a
mass of gravel and small boulders lay scattered on the smooth macadam. I
watched him for a moment. I love to watch the motions of vigorous men
at work, the easy play of the muscles, the swing of the shoulders, the
vigour of stoutly planted legs. He evidently considered the conversation
closed, and I, as--well, as a dusty man of the road--easily dismissed.
(You have no idea, until you try it, what a weight of prejudice the man
of the road has to surmount before he is accepted on easy terms by the
ordinary members of the human race.)

A few other well-intentioned observations on my part having elicited
nothing but monosyllabic replies, I put my bag down by the roadside
and, going up to the wagon, got out a shovel, and without a word took
my place at the other end of the landslide and began to shovel for all I
was worth.

I said not a word to the husky road-worker and pretended not to look
at him, but I saw him well enough out of the corner of my eye. He was
evidently astonished and interested, as I knew he would be: it was
something entirely new on the road. He didn't qui