And here was I, for so long the stationary Man of the Fields, essaying the role of the Man of the Road.

I experienced a sudden sense of the enlivenment of the faculties: I must now depend upon wit or cunning or human nature to win my way, not upon mere skill of the hand or strength in the bent back.

Whereas in my former life, when I was assailed by a Man of the Road, whether tramp or peddler or poet, I had only to stand stock-still within my fences and say nothing--though indeed I never could do that, being far too much interested in every one who came my way--and the invader was soon repelled.

There is nothing so resistant as the dull security of possession the stolidity of ownership! Many times that day I stopped by a field side or at the end of a lane, or at a house-gate, and considered the possibilities of making an attack.

Oh, I measured the houses and barns I saw with a new eye! The kind of country I had known so long and familiarly became a new and foreign land, full of strange possibilities.