e to a point of necessity.
But where was I to begin, and how? I know from long experience the
suspicion with which the ordinary farmer meets the Man of the Road--the
man who appears to wish to enjoy the fruits of the earth without working
for them with his hands. It is a distrust deep-seated and ages old. Nor
can the Man of the Road ever quite understand the Man of the Fields. And
here was I, for so long the stationary Man of the Fields, essaying
the role of the Man of the Road. I experienced a sudden sense of the
enlivenment of the faculties: I must now depend upon wit or cunning or
human nature to win my way, not upon mere skill of the hand or strength
in the bent back. Whereas in my former life, when I was assailed by a
Man of the Road, whether tramp or peddler or poet, I had only to stand
stock-still within my fences and say nothing--though indeed I never
could do that, being far too much interested in every one who came my
way--and the invader was soon repelled. There is nothing so resistant as
the dull security of possession the stolidity of ownership!

Many times that day I stopped by a field side or at the end of a lane,
or at a house-gate, and considered the possibilities of making an
attack. Oh, I measured the houses and barns I saw with a new eye! The
kind of country I had known so long and familiarly became a new and
foreign land, full of strange possibilities. I spied out the men in the
fields and did not fail, also, to see what I could of the commissary
department of each farmstead as I passed. I walked for miles looking
thus for a favourable opening--and with a sensation of embarrassment at
once disagreeable and pleasurable. As the afternoon began to deepen I
saw that I must absolutely do something: a whole day tramping in the
open air without a bite to eat is an irresistible argument.

Presently I saw from the road a farmer and his son planting potatoes in
a sloping field. There was no house at all in view. At the bars stood a
light wagon half filled with bags of seed potatoes, and the horse which
had drawn it stood quietly, not far off, tied to the fence. The man and
the boy, each with a basket on his arm, were at the farther end of the
field, dropping potatoes. I stood quietly watching them. They stepped
quickly and kept their eyes on the furrows: good workers. I liked the
looks of them. I liked also the straight, clean furrows; I liked the
appearance of the horse.

"I will stop here," I said to myse