bbath morning of my life, but what an end it
had! I would have travelled a thousand miles for the adventures which a
bounteous road that day spilled carelessly into my willing hands.

I can give no adequate reason why it should be so, but there are Sunday
mornings in the spring--at least in our country--which seem to put on,
like a Sabbath garment, an atmosphere of divine quietude. Warm, soft,
clear, but, above all, immeasurably serene.

Such was that Sunday morning; and I was no sooner well afoot than I
yielded to the ingratiating mood of the day. Usually I am an active
walker, loving the sense of quick motion and the stir it imparts to both
body and mind, but that morning I found myself loitering, looking widely
about me, and enjoying the lesser and quieter aspects of nature. It was
a fine wooded country in which I found myself, and I soon struck off the
beaten road and took to the forest and the fields. In places the ground
was almost covered with meadow-rue, like green shadows on the hillsides,
not yet in seed, but richly umbrageous. In the long green grass of the
meadows shone the yellow star-flowers, and the sweet-flags were blooming
along the marshy edges of the ponds. The violets had disappeared, but
they were succeeded by wild geraniums and rank-growing vetches.

I remember that I kept thinking from time to time, all the forenoon, as
my mind went back swiftly and warmly to the two fine friends from whom I
had so recently parted:

How the Vedders would enjoy this! Or, I must tell the Vedders that. And
two or three times I found myself in animated conversations with them
in which I generously supplied all three parts. It may be true for some
natures, as Leonardo said, that "if you are alone you belong wholly to
yourself; if you have a companion, you belong only half to yourself";
but it is certainly not so with me. With me friendship never divides: it
multiplies. A friend always makes me more than I am, better than I am,
bigger than I am. We two make four, or fifteen, or forty.

Well, I loitered through the fields and woods for a long time that
Sunday forenoon, not knowing in the least that Chance held me close
by the hand and was leading me onward to great events. I knew, of
course, that I had yet to find a place for the night, and that this might
be difficult on Sunday, and yet I spent that forenoon as a man spends
his immortal youth--with a glorious disregard for the future.

Some time after noon--for t