Page:Adams - A Child of the Age.djvu/30

18 my legs more tired and more tired, and I couldn't hold my shoulders up. Then I saw a man coming along on the left side of the road under the trees and was afraid: then forgot that and went on up to him, but, when I saw him nearer and, at last, what an old man he was, with bleared eyes and a red neck-cloth tied round his throat, although I was almost sure I'd lost the way, I was afraid he was going to catch hold of me: so how dare I stop and say to him: 'Can you tell me, please, which is the road to Glastonbury?' He went on by me, and I went on by him, and under the trees, and on along the road, and he did nothing.

It was almost dark, black I mean, when I came to a farm. I had met no one else but the old man with the bleared eyes and the red neck-cloth. I was very tired.

I stopped at a gate and looked into the farm-yard, where the pond was frozen over and a light shone in one of the small farm windows. I did not like to go in and ask anyone to tell me the way: besides, I had begun to think about some of the fellows and what they had done to me till I hated almost everybody, and could have lain down in the snow and gone to sleep and died and been carried up by angels past the moon into heaven.

All at once a woman ran out with a flutter in her dress, across the yard into a dark outhouse. I did not stir: I stood thinking about dying and being buried.—And so, in a little, coming back more slowly, she saw me standing there with bent head looking through the second gate-bar.

She stopped. Then came and asked me what I wanted? And then, somehow, she had the gate open, and was trying to get me in by the hand and I pulling back a little.

Well, the end of it was that we went together up the yard to the door by the small window with the light in it, and in, into the light warm kitchen: and she sat me down in a chair by the fire, and, when I wouldn't answer anything to her but turned away my head, I don't know quite why (but I still wished I were dead and buried and no one knew anything about me), she got up again, and cut a thick piece of bread, and put a lot of butter upon it and then sugar, and went