Then he routed out his knapsack, packed it with a modest change of
raiment, and sent out Tibby to buy chocolate and tobacco and to cash
a cheque at the Strathclyde Bank. Till Tibby returned he occupied
himself with delicious dreams....He saw himself daily growing
browner and leaner, swinging along broad highways or wandering in
bypaths. He pictured his seasons of ease, when he unslung his pack
and smoked in some clump of lilacs by a burnside--he remembered a
phrase of Stevenson's somewhat like that. He would meet and talk
with all sorts of folk; an exhilarating prospect, for Mr. McCunn
loved his kind. There would be the evening hour before he reached
his inn, when, pleasantly tired, he would top some ridge and see the
welcoming lights of a little town. There would be the lamp-lit
after-supper time when he would read and reflect, and the start in
the gay morning, when tobacco tastes sweetest and even fifty-five
seems young. It would be holiday of the purest, for no business now
tugged at his coat-tails. He was beginning a new life, he told
himself, when he could cultivate the seedling interests which had
withered beneath the far-reaching shade of the shop. Was ever a man
more fortunate or more free?

Tibby was told that he was going off for a week or two. No letters
need be forwarded, for he would be constantly moving, but Mrs.
McCunn at the Neuk Hydropathic would be kept informed of his whereabouts.
Presently he stood on his doorstep, a stocky figure in ancient
tweeds, with a bulging pack slung on his arm, and a stout hazel
stick in his hand. A passer-by would have remarked an elderly
shopkeeper bent apparently on a day in the country, a common little
man on a prosaic errand. But the passer-by would have been wrong,
for he could not see into the heart. The plump citizen was the
eternal pilgrim; he was Jason, Ulysses, Eric the Red, Albuquerque,