We next passed through some woods, when we emerged into a broad, sunlit, fertile-looking valley, called Oxen Run.  We stooped down and drank of its clear white-pebbled stream, in the veritable spot, I suspect, where the oxen do.  There were clouds of birds here on the warm slopes, with the usual sprinkling along the bushy margin of the stream of scarlet grosbeaks.  The valley of Oxen Run has many good-looking farms, with old picturesque houses, and loose rambling barns, such as artists love to put into pictures.

But it is a little awkward to go east.  It always seems left-handed.  I think this is the feeling of all walkers, and that Thoreau’s experience in this respect was not singular.  The great magnet is the sun, and we follow him.  I notice that people lost in the woods work to the westward.  When one comes out of his house and asks himself, “Which way shall I walk?” and looks up and down and around for a sign or a token, does he not nine times out of ten turn to the west?  He inclines this way as surely as the willow wand bends toward the water.  There is something more genial and friendly in this direction.

Occasionally in winter I experience a southern inclination, and cross Long Bridge and rendezvous for the day in some old earthwork on the Virginia hills.  The roads are not so inviting in this direction, but the line of old forts with rabbits burrowing in the bomb-proofs, and a magazine, or officers’ quarters turned into a cow stable by colored squatters, form an interesting feature.  But, whichever way I go, I am glad I came.  All roads lead up to the Jerusalem the walker seeks.  There is everywhere the vigorous and masculine winter air, and the impalpable sustenance the mind draws from all natural forms.

II.  THE EXHILARATIONS OF THE ROAD

Afoot and light-hearted I take to the open road. 
Walt Whitman.

Ocasionally on the sidewalk, amid the dapper, swiftly moving, high-heeled boots and gaiters, I catch a glimpse of the naked human foot.  Nimbly it scuffs along, the toes spread, the sides flatten, the heel protrudes; it grasps the curbing, or bends to the form of the uneven surfaces,—­a thing sensuous and alive, that seems to take cognizance of whatever it touches or passes.  How primitive and uncivil it looks in such company,—­a real barbarian in the parlor!  We are so unused to the human anatomy, to simple, unadorned nature, that it looks a little repulsive; but it is beautiful for all that.  Though it be a black foot and an unwashed foot, it shall be exalted.  It is a thing of life amid leather, a free spirit amid cramped, a wild bird amid caged, an athlete amid consumptives.  It is the symbol of my order, the Order of Walkers.  That unhampered, vitally playing piece of anatomy is the type of the pedestrian, man returned to first principles, in direct contact and intercourse with the earth and the elements, his faculties unsheathed, his mind plastic, his body toughened, his heart light, his soul dilated; while those cramped and distorted members in the calf and kid are the unfortunate wretches doomed to carriages and cushions.