Seven Miles to Arden

Patsy O’Connell leaves the free ward of a New York hospital with eight dollars, a crooked sixpence, and a trunk she cannot pay to reclaim: the Irish National Players went bankrupt mid-tour and sailed home without her. Calling on a wealthy friend, she overhears the friend’s fiancé confess to cashing a check forged in his father’s name, and hears the engagement broken on the spot. Certain he is shielding someone weaker, Patsy sets out after a man she has never met. Arden stays stubbornly seven miles off however far she walks, and a ragged, near-silent tinker falls into step beside her, so she recasts the whole tramp as As You Like It, herself as Rosalind and him as the fool. Sawyer wrote it in 1916, twenty years before Roller Skates.