Explore "The Crystal Planetoids" by Stanton A. Coblentz on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
There are some grave disadvantages in being invisible. So, at least, Gates concluded as he went groping through the woods in the effort to find his bearings. It is disconcerting, to say the least, to ask a passer-by the way, and to be greeted with a shriek, and watch the man turn and dash away frantically, as from a ghost. It is aggravating to reach an automobile road and find every car trying to drive full-tilt through one. Gates felt like a man returning from the dead as he picked his way out of the woods, and, reaching a village, began to make a few civil inquiries.... Inevitably, he found, his hearers would flee the vicinity of his voice; and the harder he tried to call them back the faster they would run.
He passed the night in an open field under a haystack -- which, considering the heat, was not at all a hardship. In the morning, driven by hunger, he strolled into a farmhouse; and while the family stampeded like sheep from the sound of his footsteps, he calmly helped himself to some ham and biscuits from the kitchen table. Having thus satisfied his needs, he wandered away along a railroad track, and after about an hour's walk reached a junction, where a sign on the station showed him that he was two hundred miles from home. "God! How'm I ever going to make the distance? " he wondered, reflecting that he had not a penny in his pockets.