Mackail’s “Georgics.” 
Hans Andersen’s Fairy Tales. 
Shakespeare’s Sonnets. 
Locke’s “Beloved Vagabond.” 
Selections from R.L.S. 
Pater’s “Marius the Epicurean.” 
Alfred de Musset’s “Premieres Poesies.” 
Baedeker’s “United States.” 
Road Map of New York State.

And, though my knapsack already weighed eighteen pounds, I could not resist the call of a cheap edition of Wordsworth in a drug-store at Warsaw, a charming little town embosomed among hills and orchards, where we arrived, dreamy with country air, at the end of the day.

CHAPTER XIII

FELLOW WAYFARERS

With the morn our way still lay among apples and honey, hives and orchards; a land of prosperous farms, sumptuous rolling downs, rich woodland, sheep, more pigs, more apple-barrels and velvety sunshine.  The old ruined houses had ceased, and the country had taken on a more generous, broad-shouldered, deep-bosomed aspect.  Nature was preparing for one of her big Promised Land effects.  We were coming to the valley of the Genesee River.  We made a comparison of two kinds of prosperity in the look of a landscape.  Some villages and farms suggest smugness in their prosperity.  They have a model-farm, business-like, well-regulated, up-to-date, company-financed air, suggesting such modern agricultural terms as “ensilage,” “irrigation” and “fertilizer.”  Other villages and farms, while just as well-kept and well-to-do, have, so to say, a something romantic about their prosperity, a bounteous, ruddy, golden-age look about them, as though Nature herself had been the farmer and they had ruddied and ripened out of her own unconscious abundance—­the difference between a row of modern box beehives and the old thatched-cottage kind.  The countryside of the Genesee valley has the romantic prosperous look.  Its farms and villages look like farms and villages in picture-books, and the country folk we met seemed happy and gay and kind, such as those one reads of in William Morris’s romances of the golden age.  As from time to time we exchanged greetings with them, we were struck with their comely health and blithe ways—­particularly with their fine teeth, as they laughed us the time of day, or stopped their wagons to gossip a moment with the two outlandish packmen—­the very teeth one would expect in an apple-country.  Perhaps they came of so much sweet commerce with apples!

The possessor of a particularly fine display hailed us as he drove by in an empty wagon, at the tail of which trailed a long orchard ladder, and asked us if we would care for a lift.  Now it happened that his suggestion came like a voice from heaven for poor Colin, one of whose shoes had been casting a gloom over our spirits for several miles.  So we accepted with alacrity, and, really, riding felt quite good for a change!  Our benefactor was a bronzed, handsome young fellow, just through Cornell, he told us, and