“Why, Mr. Grayson!”

“How’s the boy, Anna?”

And it was the cheerful talk we had there by the roadside, and the sight of the sturdy boy playing in the sunshine—­and the hollyhocks, and the dilapidated house—­that brought to memory the old story of Anna which I here set down, not because it carries any moral, but because it is a common little piece out of real life in which Harriet and I have been interested.

VI

THE DRUNKARD

It is a strange thing:  Adventure.  I looked for her high and I looked for her low, and she passed my door in a tattered garment—­unheeded.  For I had neither the eye of simplicity nor the heart of humility.  One day I looked for her anew and I saw her beckoning from the Open Road; and underneath the tags and tatters I caught the gleam of her celestial garment; and I went with her into a new world.

I have had a singular adventure, in which I have made a friend.  And I have seen new things which are also true.

My friend is a drunkard—­at least so I call him, following the custom of the country.  On his way from town he used often to come by my farm.  I could hear him singing afar off.  Beginning at the bridge, where on still days one can hear the rattle of a wagon on the loose boards, he sang in a peculiar clear high voice.  I make no further comment upon the singing, nor the cause of it; but in the cool of the evening when the air was still—­and he usually came in the evening—­I often heard the cadences of his song with a thrill of pleasure.  Then I saw him come driving by my farm, sitting on the spring seat of his one-horse wagon, and if he chanced to see me in my field, he would take off his hat and make me a grandiloquent bow, but never for a moment stop his singing.  And so he passed by the house and I, with a smile, saw him moving up the hill in the north road, until finally his voice, still singing, died away in the distance.

Once I happened to reach the house just as the singer was passing, and Harriet said: 

“There goes that drunkard.”

It gave me an indescribable shock.  Of course I had known as much, and yet I had not directly applied the term.  I had not thought of my singer as that, for I had often been conscious in spite of myself, alone in my fields, of something human and cheerful which had touched me, in passing.

After Harriet applied her name to my singer, I was of two minds concerning him.  I struggled with myself:  I tried instinctively to discipline my pulses when I heard the sound of his singing.  For was he not a drunkard?  Lord! how we get our moralities mixed up with our realities!

And then one evening when I saw him coming—­I had been a long day alone in my fields—­I experienced a sudden revulsion of feeling.  With an indescribable joyousness of adventure I stepped out toward the fence and pretended to be hard at work.