IN WHICH I DECIDE TO GO ON PILGRIMAGE
Though I have this bad habit of soliloquising, and indeed am absurd
enough to attempt conversation with a house, yet the reader must
realise from the beginning that I am still quite a young man. I talked
a little just now as though I were an octogenarian. Actually, as I
said, I am but just gone thirty, and I may reasonably regard life, as
the saying is, all before me. I was a little down-hearted when I wrote
yesterday. Besides, I wrote at the end of the afternoon, a melancholy
time. The morning is the time to write. We are all--that is, those of
us who sleep well--optimists in the morning. And the world is sad
enough without our writing books to make it sadder. The rest of this
book, I promise you, shall be written of a morning. This book! oh,
yes, I forgot!--I am going to write a book. A book about what? Well,
that must be as God wills. But listen! As I lay in bed this morning
between sleeping and waking, an idea came riding on a sunbeam into my
room,--a mad, whimsical idea, but one that suits my mood; and put
briefly, it is this: how is it that I, a not unpresentable young man, a
man not without accomplishments or experience, should have gone all
these years without finding that
"Not impossible she
Who shall command my heart and me,"--
without meeting at some turning of the way the mystical Golden
Girl,--without, in short, finding a wife?
"Then," suggested the idea, with a blush for its own absurdity, "why
not go on pilgrimage and seek her? I don't believe you'll find her.
She isn't usually found after thirty. But you'll no doubt have good
fun by the way, and fall in with many pleasant adventures."
"A brave idea, indeed!" I cried. "By Heaven, I will take stick and
knapsack and walk right away from my own front door, right away where
the road leads, and see what happens." And now, if the reader please,
we will make a start.