THE AMERICAN BLUEBIRD AND ITS SONG I wish I could convey the singular feeling of freedom and adventure that possessed us as Colin and I grasped our sticks and struck up the green hill--for New York.

It was a feeling of exhilaration and romantic expectancy, blent with an absurd sense of our being entirely on our own resources, vagrants shifting for ourselves, independent of civilization; which, of course, the actual circumstances in no way warranted.

A delightful boyish illusion of entering on untrodden paths and facing unknown dangers thrilled through us.
"Well, we're off!" we said simultaneously, smiling interrogatively at each other.
"Yes! we're in for it." So men start out manfully for the North Pole.
Our little enterprise gave us an imaginative realization of the solidarity, the interdependence, of the world; and we saw, as in a vision, its four corners knit together by a vast network of paths connecting one with the other; footpaths, byways, cart-tracks, bride-paths, lovers' lanes, highroads, all sensitively linked in one vast nervous system of human communication.

This field whose green sod we were treading connected with another field, that with another, and that again with another--all the way to New York--all the way to Cape Horn! No break anywhere.

All we had to do was to go on putting one foot before the other, and we could arrive anywhere.