was long ago set up in the suburbs of Astoria City, and our boundaries have literally been run to the South Sea, according to the old patents.  But the lives of men, though more extended laterally in their range, are still as shallow as ever.  Undoubtedly, as a Western orator said, “Men generally live over about the same surface; some live long and narrow, and others live broad and short”; but it is all superficial living.  A worm is as good a traveller as a grasshopper or a cricket, and a much wiser settler.  With all their activity these do not hop away from drought nor forward to summer.  We do not avoid evil by fleeing before it, but by rising above or diving below its plane; as the worm escapes drought and frost by boring a few inches deeper.  The frontiers are not east or west, north or south, but wherever a man fronts a fact, though that fact be his neighbor, there is an unsettled wilderness between him and Canada, between him and the setting sun, or, farther still, between him and it.  Let him build himself a log-house with the bark on where he is, fronting ^it^, and wage there an Old French war for seven or seventy years, with Indians and Rangers, or whatever else may come between him and the reality, and save his scalp if he can.

We now no longer sailed or floated on the river, but trod the unyielding land like pilgrims.  Sadi tells who may travel; among others, “A common mechanic, who can earn a subsistence by the industry of his hand, and shall not have to stake his reputation for every morsel of bread, as philosophers have said.”  He may travel who can subsist on the wild fruits and game of the most cultivated country.  A man may travel fast enough and earn his living on the road.  I have at times been applied to to do work when on a journey; to do tinkering and repair clocks, when I had a knapsack on my back.  A man once applied to me to go into a factory, stating conditions and wages, observing that I succeeded in shutting the window of a railroad car in which we were travelling, when the other passengers had failed.  “Hast thou not heard of a Sufi, who was hammering some nails into the sole of his sandal; an officer of cavalry took him by the sleeve, saying, Come along and shoe my horse.”  Farmers have asked me to assist them in haying, when I was passing their fields.  A man once applied to me to mend his umbrella, taking me for an umbrella-mender, because, being on a journey, I carried an umbrella in my hand while the sun shone.  Another wished to buy a tin cup of me, observing that I had one strapped to my belt, and a sauce-pan on my back.  The cheapest way to travel, and the way to travel the farthest in the shortest distance, is to go afoot, carrying a dipper, a spoon, and a fish-line, some Indian meal, some salt, and some sugar.  When you come to a brook or pond, you can catch fish and cook them; or you can boil a hasty-pudding; or you can buy a loaf of bread at a farmer’s house