Any man may brutally pay his way anywhere, but it is quite another thing to be accepted by your humankind not as a paid lodger but as a friend.

Always, it seems to me, I have wanted to submit myself, and indeed submit the stranger, to that test.
Moreover, how can any man look for true adventure in life if he always knows to a certainty where his next meal is coming from?
In a world so completely dominated by goods, by things, by possessions, and smothered by security, what fine adventure is left to a man of spirit save the adventure of poverty?
I do not mean by this the adventure of involuntary poverty, for I maintain that involuntary poverty, like involuntary riches, is a credit to no man.

It is only as we dominate life that we really live.

What I mean here, if I may so express it, is an adventure in achieved poverty.
In the lives of such true men as Francis of Assisi and Tolstoi, that which draws the world to them in secret sympathy is not that they lived lives of poverty, but rather, having riches at their hands, or for the very asking, that they chose poverty as the better way of life.
As for me, I do not in the least pretend to have accepted the final logic of an achieved poverty.

I have merely abolished temporarily from my life a few hens and cows, a comfortable old farmhouse, and--certain other emoluments and hereditaments--but remain the slave of sundry cloth upon my back and sundry articles in my gray bag--including a fat pocket volume or so, and a tin whistle.