You might have turned to look back at him, as you passed, and found him turning also to look back at you--and wishing he might know you.

But you would not have known what he was chanting under his breath as he tramped (how little we know of a man by the shabby coat he wears), nor how keenly he was enjoying the light airs and the warm sunshine of that fine spring morning.
After leaving the hill farm he had walked five miles up the valley, had crossed the ridge at a place called the Little Notch, where all the world lay stretched before him like the open palm of his hand, and had come thus to the boundaries of the Undiscovered Country.

He had been for days troubled with the deep problems of other people, and it seemed to him this morning as though a great stone had been rolled from the door of his heart, and that he was entering upon a new world--a wonderful, high, free world.

And, as he tramped, certain lines of a stanza long ago caught up in his memory from some forgotten page came up to his lips, and these were the words (you did not know as you passed) that he was chanting under his breath as he tramped, for they seem charged with the spirit of the hour: I've bartered my sheets for a starlit bed; I've traded my meat for a crust of bread; I've changed my book for a sapling cane, And I'm off to the end of the world again.
In the Undiscovered Country that morning it was wonderful how fresh the spring woods were, and how the birds sang in the trees, and how the brook sparkled and murmured at the roadside.

The recent rain had washed the atmosphere until it was as clear and sparkling and heady as new wine, and the footing was firm and hard.