Hypnotized by his own words, the young man stumbled along the board sidewalk saying more words.  “There is a law for armies and for men too,” he muttered, lost in reflection.  “The law begins with little things and spreads out until it covers everything.  In every little thing there must be order, in the place where men work, in their clothes, in their thoughts.  I myself must be orderly.  I must learn that law.  I must get myself into touch with something orderly and big that swings through the night like a star.  In my little way I must begin to learn something, to give and swing and work with life, with the law.”

George Willard stopped by a picket fence near a street lamp and his body began to tremble.  He had never before thought such thoughts as had just come into his head and he wondered where they had come from.  For the moment it seemed to him that some voice outside of himself had been talking as he walked.  He was amazed and delighted with his own mind and when he walked on again spoke of the matter with fervor.  “To come out of Ransom Surbeck’s pool room and think things like that,” he whispered.  “It is better to be alone.  If I talked like Art Wilson the boys would understand me but they wouldn’t understand what I’ve been thinking down here.”

In Winesburg, as in all Ohio towns of twenty years ago, there was a section in which lived day laborers.  As the time of factories had not yet come, the laborers worked in the fields or were section hands on the railroads.  They worked twelve hours a day and received one dollar for the long day of toil.  The houses in which they lived were small cheaply constructed wooden affairs with a garden at the back.  The more comfortable among them kept cows and perhaps a pig, housed in a little shed at the rear of the garden.

With his head filled with resounding thoughts, George Willard walked into such a street on the clear January night.  The street was dimly lighted and in places there was no sidewalk.  In the scene that lay about him there was something that excited his already aroused fancy.  For a year he had been devoting all of his odd moments to the reading of books and now some tale he had read concerning life in old world towns of the middle ages came sharply back to his mind so that he stumbled forward with the curious feeling of one revisiting a place that had been a part of some former existence.  On an impulse he turned out of the street and went into a little dark alleyway behind the sheds in which lived the cows and pigs.

For a half hour he stayed in the alleyway, smelling the strong smell of animals too closely housed and letting his mind play with the strange new thoughts that came to him.  The very rankness of the smell of manure in the clear sweet air awoke something heady in his brain.  The poor little houses lighted by kerosene lamps, the smoke from the chimneys mounting straight up into the clear air, the grunting of pigs, the women clad in cheap calico dresses and washing dishes in the kitchens, the footsteps of men coming out of the houses and going off to the stores and saloons of Main Street, the dogs barking and the children crying—­all of these things made him seem, as he lurked in the darkness, oddly detached and apart from all life.