rampant within her: there was the road, urging her like an impatient comrade to be gone; there was her errand of good-will giving purpose to her journey; and the facts that she was homeless, penniless, breakfastless, a stranger in a strange country, mattered not a whit. So thoroughly had she always believed in good fortune that somehow she always managed to find it; and out of this she had evolved her philosophy of life.

[Pg 50]

“Ye see, ’tis this way,” she would say; “the world is much like a great cat—with claws to hide or use, as the notion takes it. If ye kick and slap at it, ’twill hump its back and scratch at ye—sure as fate; but if ye are wise and a bit patient ye can have it coaxed and smoothed down till it’s purring to make room for ye at any hearthside. And there’s another thing it’s well to remember—that folks are folks the world over, whether they are wearing your dress and speaking your tongue or another’s.”

And as Patsy was blessed in the matter of [Pg 51]philosophy—so was she blessed in the matter of possessions. She did not have to own things to possess them.

[Pg 51]

There was no doubt but that Patsy had a larger share of the world than many who could reckon their estates in acreage or who owned so many miles of fenced-off property. She held a mortgage on every inch of free roadway, rugged hilltop, or virgin forest her feet crossed. She claimed squatters’ rights on every bit of shaded pasture, or sunlit glade, or singing brook her heart rejoiced in. In other words, everything outside of walls and fences belonged to her by virtue of her vagabondage; and she had often found herself pitying the narrow folk who possessed only what their deeds or titles allotted to them.

And yet never in Patsy’s life had she felt quite so sure about it as she did this morning, probably because she had never before set forth on a self-appointed adventure so heedless of means and consequences.

“Sure, there are enough wise people in the world,” she mused as she tramped along; “it needs a few foolish ones to keep things happening. And could a foolish adventuring body be bound for a better place than Arden!”

She rounded a bend in the road and came upon a stretch of old stump fencing. From one of the [Pg 52]stumps appeared to be hanging a grotesque figure of some remarkable cut; it looked both ancient and romantic, sharply silhouetted against the iridescence of the dawn.

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