Only he had never taken it. The shop had tied him up for eleven
months in the year, and the twelfth had always found him settled
decorously with his wife in some seaside villa. He had not fretted,
for he was content with dreams. He was always a little tired, too,
when the holidays came, and his wife told him he was growing old.
He consoled himself with tags from the more philosophic of his
authors, but he scarcely needed consolation. For he had large
stores of modest contentment.

But now something had happened. A spring morning and a safety razor
had convinced him that he was still young. Since yesterday he was a
man of a large leisure. Providence had done for him what he would
never have done for himself. The rut in which he had travelled so
long had given place to open country. He repeated to himself one of
the quotations with which he had been wont to stir the literary
young men at the Guthrie Memorial Kirk:

"What's a man's age? He must hurry more, that's all;
Cram in a day, what his youth took a year to hold:
When we mind labour, then only, we're too old--
What age had Methusalem when he begat Saul?

He would go journeying--who but he?--pleasantly."

It sounds a trivial resolve, but it quickened Mr. McCunn to the
depths of his being. A holiday, and alone! On foot, of course,
for he must travel light. He would buckle on a pack after the
approved fashion. He had the very thing in a drawer upstairs, which
he had bought some years ago at a sale. That and a waterproof and a
stick, and his outfit was complete. A book, too, and, as he lit his