The school year was not yet up, but I didn’t want to graduate.

* * * * *

At that time I had a passion for meeting well-known people.

It was then my only avenue of literary publication, so to speak.  The magazines were steadily returning my deluge of poems—­I sent at least three a week to them ... but to those who had established themselves I could show my work, and get their advice and notice....

* * * * *

Walking along the main street, I ran into Jack Travers, the young reporter who had dubbed me the “Vagabond Poet,” the “Box-car Bard."...

“Well, what are you up to now, Gregory?”

“Nothing, only I’m thinking of a trip south to Osageville to pay a visit to Mackworth, the Kansas novelist.”

“That’s the stuff ...  I need another good story for the Era.”

“I’m going to make it a sort of pilgrimage a-foot.”

“Great!  ‘Vagabond Poet’ Pilgrims to Home of Celebrated Kansan.  It’s only ninety miles to Osageville from here ... still rather cold of nights ... but you’ll find plenty of shelter by the way ... start to-day and I can get the story in in time for this Sunday’s Era....”

Travers got a camera from a fraternity brother.

“Come on, we’ll walk up an alley and I’ll snap you just as if you were on the way....”

“No, I won’t do that!”

—­“won’t do what?”

—­“won’t fake it ... if you want a picture of me on the way, it will have to be on the way!”

“Of all the fools!  Ain’t the alleys muddy enough to be like the gumbo you’ll have to plough through?” he teased.  But I wouldn’t allow him to take a fraudulent picture.  He had to come with me, through the mud, grumbling, to the edge of town.

There, on the country road that led in the direction of Osageville, my feet rooted in gumbo, a sort of thick composite of clay and mud that clings to the feet in huge lumps, I had my photograph taken ... actually on the march toward my destination ... no hat on ... a copy of Keats in my hand.

Travers waved me good-bye.  “You’ll see the story in the Era Sunday sure,” he shouted, in a tone half affection, half irony.  I was nettled at the irony.  I wanted it to be looked on as a quest entirely heroic.

* * * * *

It began to rain.  Far off, like a high, great ship riding on the horizon, rode the hill, with its cluster of university buildings.

My first impulse was to turn back, to quit.  That is always my first impulse.  The instincts of my bourgeois ancestry against the unusual, the impractical,—­the safe-and-sane conservatism of the farmers and clerks and small business men bred in my people for generations!...

I pushed on through the clinging, maddening gumbo, slithering and sliding.  Fortunately, I wore an overcoat, which, after it had reached the saturation point, shed most of the steady, oblique-driving rain that came for miles over the plains in a succession of grey, windy sheets.  But my wrists and hands were aching, wet, and my thin, plying legs, to my knees.  And the “squash-squish!” of my soaked feet in the mud plodded a steady refrain of misery.