Just over the top of the hill, they came on the patch of fir-wood.
Leaving the road they went into the deep resin-scented darkness of
the trees, and gathered dead sticks and cones to make a fire. Soon
they had a merry crackle of flame at the foot of a large fir-tree and
they sat round it for a while, until they began to nod. Then, each in
an angle of the great tree’s roots, they curled up in their cloaks and
blankets and were soon fast asleep. They set no watch; even Frodo
feared no danger yet, for they were still in the heart of the Shire. A
few creatures came and looked at them when the fire had died away.
A fox passing through the wood on business of his own stopped
several minutes and sniffed.
‘Hobbits!’ he thought. ‘Well, what next? I have heard of strange
doings in this land, but I have seldom heard of a hobbit sleeping out
of doors under a tree. Three of them! There’s something mighty
queer behind this.’ He was quite right, but he never found out any
more about it.
The morning came, pale and clammy. Frodo woke up first, and
found that a tree-root had made a hole in his back, and that his neck
was stiff. ‘Walking for pleasure! Why didn’t I drive?’ he thought, as
he usually did at the beginning of an expedition. ‘And all my beautiful
feather beds are sold to the Sackville-Bagginses! These tree-roots
would do them good.’ He stretched. ‘Wake up, hobbits!’ he cried.
‘It’s a beautiful morning.’
‘What’s beautiful about it?’ said Pippin, peering over the edge of
his blanket with one eye. ‘Sam! Get breakfast ready for half-past nine!
Have you got the bath-water hot?’
Sam jumped up, looking rather bleary. ‘No, sir, I haven’t, sir!’ he
said.
Frodo stripped the blankets from Pippin and rolled him over, and
then walked off to the edge of the wood. Away eastward the sun was
rising red out of the mists that lay thick on the world. Touched with
gold and red the autumn trees seemed to be sailing rootless in a
shadowy sea. A little below him to the left the road ran down steeply
into a hollow and disappeared.
When he returned Sam and Pippin had got a good fire going.
‘Water!’ shouted Pippin. ‘Where’s the water?’
‘I don’t keep water in my pockets,’ said Frodo.
‘We thought you had gone to find some,’ said Pippin, busy setting
out the food, and cups. ‘You had better go now.’
‘You can come too,’ said Frodo, ‘and bring all the water-bottles.’
There was a stream at the foot of the hill. They filled their bottles
and the small camping kettle at a little fall where the water fell a few feet over an outcrop of grey stone. It was icy cold; and they spluttered and puffed as they bathed their faces and hands. When their breakfast was over, and their packs all trussed up again, it was after ten o’clock, and the day was beginning to turn fine and hot. They went down the slope, and across the stream where it dived under the road, and up the next slope, and up and down another shoulder of the hills; and by that time their cloaks, blankets, water, food, and other gear already seemed a heavy burden. The day’s march promised to be warm and tiring work. After some miles, however, the road ceased to roll up and down: it climbed to the top of a steep bank in a weary zig-zagging sort of way, and then prepared to go down for the last time. In front of them they saw the lower lands dotted with small clumps of trees that melted away in the distance to a brown woodland haze. They were looking across the Woody End towards the Brandywine River. The road wound away before them like a piece of string. ‘The road goes on for ever,’ said Pippin; ‘but I can’t without a rest. It is high time for lunch.’ He sat down on the bank at the side of the road and looked away east into the haze, beyond which lay the River, and the end of the Shire in which he had spent all his life. Sam stood by him. His round eyes were wide open – for he was looking across lands he had never seen to a new horizon. ‘Do Elves live in those woods?’ he asked. ‘Not that I ever heard,’ said Pippin. Frodo was silent. He too was gazing eastward along the road, as if he had never seen it before. Suddenly he spoke, aloud but as if to himself, saying slowly:
The Road goes ever on and on Down from the door where it began. Now far ahead the Road has gone, And I must follow, if I can, Pursuing it with weary feet, Until it joins some larger way, Where many paths and errands meet. And whither then? I cannot say.