wooden water-bottle, such as the Italian
soldiers used to carry, filling it from the fountain at the gate of Assisi
before starting. Just a month later, under the same full moon, I was
walking between midnight and morning in New Hampshire. I had the same
water-bottle and stopped at a spring to fill it. When I turned the bottle
upside down, a few drops of water from the fountain of Assisi fell into the
New England spring, which for me, at any rate, has been forever sweetened
by this association.

All my long night walks seem to me now as but preparation for one which I
was obliged to make at the outbreak of the war in Europe. I had crossed the
Channel from England to France, on the day that war was declared by
England, to get a boy of ten years out of the war zone. I got as far by
rail as a town between Arras and Amiens, where I expected to take a train
on a branch road toward Dieppe; but late in the afternoon I was informed
that the scheduled train had been canceled and that there might not be
another for twenty-four hours, if then. Automobiles were not to be had even
if I had been able to pay for one. So I set out at dusk on foot toward
Dieppe, which was forty miles or more distant. The experiences of that
night would in themselves make one willing to practice walking for years in
order to be able to walk through such a night in whose dawn all Europe
waked to war. There was the quiet, serious gathering of the soldiers at the
place of rendezvous; there were the all-night preparations of the peasants
along the way to meet the new conditions; there was the pelting storm from
which I sought shelter in the niches for statues in the walls of an
abandoned chateau; there was the clatter of the hurrying feet of soldiers
or gendarmes who properly arrested the wanderer, searched him, took him to
a guard-house, and detained him until certain that he was an American
citizen and a friend of France, when he was let go on his way with a _bon
voyage_; there was the never-to-be-forgotten dawn upon the harvest fields
in which only old men, women, and children were at work; there was the
gathering of the peasants with commandeered horses and carts in the
beautiful park on the water-front at Dieppe; and there was much besides;
but they were experiences for the most part which only one on foot could
have had.

And the moral of my whole story is that walking is not only a joy in
itself, but that it gives an intimacy with the sacred things a