vagabond millers. They sat side by side on the footboard while the
old horse jogged on, whisking flies away with a scanty but
persistent tail.

Paul, barefoot and barelegged, hatless, coatless, absorbed blaze and
dust with the animal content of a young lizard. A month's summer
wandering had baked him to gipsy brown. A month's sufficient food
and happiness had filled gaunt hollows in his face and covered all
too visible ribs with flesh. Since his flight from Bludston his life
had been one sensuous trance. His hungry young soul had been gorged
with beauty--the beauty of fields and trees and rolling country,
of still, quivering moons and starlit nights, of exultant freedom,
of never-failing human sympathy. He had a confused memory of
everything. They had passed through many towns as similar to
Bludston as one factory chimney to another, and had plied their
trade in many a mean street, so much the counterpart of Budge Street
that he had watched a certain window or door with involuntary
trepidation, until he realized that it was not Budge Street, that he
was a happy alien to its squalor, that he was a butterfly, a thing
of woods and hedgerows fluttering for an inconsequent moment in the
gloom. He came among them, none knew whence he was going, none knew
whither. He was conscious of being a creature of mystery. He pitied
the fettered youth of these begrimed and joyless towns--slaves,
Men with Muckrakes (he had fished up ail old "Pilgrim's Progress"
from the lower depths of the van), who obstinately refused to raise
their eyes to the glorious sun in heaven. In his childish arrogance
he would ask Barney Bill, "Why don't they go away and leave it, like
me?" And the wizened little man would reply, with the flicker of an
eyelid unperceived by Paul, "Because they haven't no 'igh-born
parents waiting for 'em. They're born to their low estate, and they