Tramping on Life

Excerpt: ...to them. And over them the outhouse was also built, so that our human efforts might not be wasted. One night, despite a hard day's work, I could not sleep. So I went out on the hillside to enjoy the moonlight. On my way back to the attic I observed a light in the barn. I stopped in to see who was there. It was Sowerby, cleaning out the stable, to the plain disgust of the horses and cows. I asked him if anything was the matter. I learned that he had risen in the middle of the night and gone to work . because that was his happiness, his only happiness. Driven by an impulse of distaste for him and his house and market garden, I started to leave in secret. What money was coming to me for my two weeks' work I did not care about-in the face of the curious satisfaction it would give me just to quit, and to have the old man call up to me and find me missing. I heard him pottering back to his bedroom again. I waited till he was quiet and back to sleep-then I stole forth in the quiet moonlight near dawn. It gave me a pleasure to vanish like smoke. I thought of the time when I had that job plowing in Southern California; that time I had driven the horses to the further end of the field, and left them standing there under the shade of a tree and then made off, wishing to shout and sing for the sheer happiness of freedom from responsibility and regular work. Each time I have made off that way, from a multitude of varying employments, it has not been, surely, to the detriment of my successive employers. I have always decamped with wages still owing me. I swung a scythe for a week for another Yankee farmer, on a marsh where the machine couldn't be driven in-which I was informed was King Phillip's battle ground. I visited the inn where Longfellow was supposed to have gotten his inspiration for Tales of a Wayside Inn. I must see all the literary landmarks, even those where I considered the authors that had caused the places to be celebrated, as...