and before Wednesday noon I began to experience in certain vital
centres recognizable symptoms of a variety of discomfort
anciently familiar to man. And it was all the sharper because I
did not know how or where I could assuage it. In all my life, in
spite of various ups and downs in a fat world, I don't think I
was ever before genuinely hungry. Oh, I've been hungry in a
reasonable, civilized way, but I have always known where in an
hour or so I could get all I wanted to eat--a condition
accountable, in this world, I am convinced, for no end of
stupidity. But to be both physically and, let us say,
psychologically hungry, and not to know where or how to get
anything to eat, adds something to the zest of life.

By noon on Wednesday, then, I was reduced quite to a point of
necessity. But where was I to begin, and how? I know from long
experience the suspicion with which the ordinary farmer meets the
Man of the Road --the man who appears to wish to enjoy the fruits
of the earth without working for them with his hands. It is a
distrust deep-seated and ages old. Nor can the Man of the Road
ever quite understand the Man of the Fields. 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