Quote script along the outer foot

Mr Ashdown has finally put his boots on the wrong feet, which he says proves he has learnt to walk backwards and is therefore too clever for the shop. You will remember he keeps a wooden board of chalk routes on the back wall, each one drawn in his cramped hand and each ending at the same ink-black cross marked "home". I told him a map is no use to a man who has walked off the edge of it. He told me that was rather the point.

Last Thursday a surveyor's boy came in off the Morrow road, soaked to the knees and crying about a lost mule. Ashdown sat him by the stove, gave him a heel of bread, and unrolled the great sheet of the coast across the counter. He pressed one thumb on the marsh and said, "There. That is where everybody thinks they are going wrong." The boy laughed, then stopped, because the marsh was not on the chart at all, only a grey smudge where the paper had been wet and dried again.

I expect you are thinking what I thought: that the old man is mad, or sentimental, or both. But when the boy left at dusk with a lantern and the mule's bell ringing somewhere out past the dunes, Ashdown took up a pen and wrote along the bottom margin in his crabbed hand, Not all those who wander are lost. Beneath it, smaller, he added, but some are merely late.

Thought you should have it. Come home at Michaelmas if the coach allows.

Yours, Tom