Chapter I: READ the newspapers and then tick off the names of the stations on

the printed time-table of the B. and O. folder and patiently await the city and its bard. A four-hour journey in a slow train in England would seem intolerable, but America has a different sense of time and space, and a long time is not thought so long. At last, in the late dusk, behold Springfield, Illinois, and the unmistakable marble of the poet’s face under a small black felt--“waitin’ for me, prayin’ for me,” and certainly not really believing in the act of faith which can bring the mountain to Mahomet. In the literary world when invitations are rife there is a golden rule--_Promise everything and do just what you like._ So one never really knows whether “Yes, I’ll come,” means yea, yea or nay, nay.

It meant yea, yea this time, and so, getting out of the Beardstown local which pulled up outside the station, behold--two strong men stand face to face and they come from the ends of the earth. Vachel Lindsay rasped out sentences of welcome in broad Illinois and I replied in whispering English, and we bundled along Fifth Street for home. Then mother, of seventy years, tiptoed and curtsied and smiled with the roguishness of a young maid, and brought us in. So we sit now on rocking-chairs and talk while beads of moisture roll ticklingly adown our brows, and it is home.

Vachel is a poetical vagabond. I also am a vagabond. There lies our common ground. He is an old-fashioned hiker of the tramping parson type. He leaves home, as it were to post a letter, and does a thousand or so miles. He made a rule once to travel without money, and he recited his poems to the farmers and their wives for food and a night’s lodging. Like Weston, who tramped with ice-blocks under his hat and water streaming down his neck, he can do his twenty miles a day over a long time and has travelled some huge distances in his day. I for my part hardly believe in tramping for tramping’s sake, but in living with Nature for what that is worth.

To sleep under the stars, to live with the river that sings as it flows, to sit by the embers of morning or evening fire and just dream away time and earnestness, to gather sticks to keep the old pot a-boiling, to laze into the company of strangers and slip out of their company in time, to make friends with bird and beast, and watch insects and grubs--to relax and to be; that’s my idea of tramping. The blessed nights full of dew or rain and breeze, the full length of a ferny bed that Mother Earth provides--don’t they attract, don’t they pull one away from the town! And then the day, with celestial, unadvertised, unpaid-for sunshine or shade, on the rocks, on the tufty hills, beside tiny springs or stream on the stairs of the mountains!

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