I came through the hill country for three or four miles, even running down some of the steeper places for the very joy the motion gave me, the feel of the air on my face.
Thus I came finally to the Great Road, and stood for a moment looking first this way, then that.
"Where now ?" I asked aloud.
With an amusing sense of the possibilities that lay open before me, I closed my eyes, turned slowly around several times and then stopped.
When I opened my eyes I was facing nearly southward: and that way I set out, not knowing in the least what Fortune had presided at that turning.
If I had gone the other way-- I walked vigorously for two or three hours, meeting or passing many people upon the busy road.

Automobiles there were in plenty, and loaded wagons, and jolly families off for town, and a herdsman driving sheep, and small boys on their way to school with their dinner pails, and a gypsy wagon with lean, led horses following behind, and even a Jewish peddler with a crinkly black beard, whom I was on the very point of stopping.
"I should like sometime to know a Jew," I said to myself.
As I travelled, feeling like one who possesses hidden riches, I came quite without warning upon the beginning of my great adventure.

I had been looking for a certain thing all the morning, first on one side of the road, then the other, and finally I was rewarded.

There it was, nailed high upon tree, the curious, familiar sign: [ REST ] I stopped instantly.

It seemed like an old friend.
"Well," said I."I'm not at all tired, but I want to be agreeable." With that I sat down on a convenient stone, took off my hat, wiped my forehead, and looked about me with satisfaction, for it was a pleasant country.
I had not been sitting there above two minutes when my eyes fell upon one of the oddest specimens of humanity (I thought then) that ever I saw.