doorway at mealtime had made me long for my own home, for the
sight of Harriet calling from the steps:

"Dinner, David."

But I had covenanted with myself long before starting that I
would literally "live light in spring." It was the one and
primary condition I made with myself--and made with serious
purpose--and when I came away I had only enough money in my
pocket and sandwiches in my pack to see me through the first
three or four days. 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.