With two of those roads I had made myself thoroughly familiar; but the third remained to be explored.
"So now for 'fresh fields and pastures new,'" I said to myself as I quickened my pace, and walked briskly along my unknown road.
Ah, surely there is some meaning in the fluctuations of the mental barometer.

What but an instinctive consciousness of approaching happiness could have made me so light-hearted that morning?
I sang as I hastened along that undiscovered road.

Fragments of old Italian serenades and barcarolles came back to me as if I had heard them yesterday for the first time.

The perfume of the few lingering wild-flowers, the odour of burning weeds in the distance, the fresh autumn breeze, the clear cold blue sky,--all were intensely delicious to me; and I felt as if this one lonely walk were a kind of renovating process, from which my soul would emerge cleansed of all its stains.
"I have to thank George Sheldon for a great deal," I said to myself, "since through him I have been obliged to educate myself in the school of man's best teacher, Solitude.

I do not think I can ever be a thorough Bohemian again.