He saw himself daily growing browner and leaner, swinging along broad highways or wandering in bypaths.

He pictured his seasons of ease, when he unslung his pack and smoked in some clump of lilacs by a burnside--he remembered a phrase of Stevenson's somewhat like that.

He would meet and talk with all sorts of folk; an exhilarating prospect, for Mr.McCunn loved his kind.
There would be the evening hour before he reached his inn, when, pleasantly tired, he would top some ridge and see the welcoming lights of a little town.

There would be the lamp-lit after-supper time when he would read and reflect, and the start in the gay morning, when tobacco tastes sweetest and even fifty-five seems young.

It would be holiday of the purest, for no business now tugged at his coat-tails.
He was beginning a new life, he told himself, when he could cultivate the seedling interests which had withered beneath the far-reaching shade of the shop.