The Fellowship of the Ring (The Lord of the Rings, #1)

by J.R.R. Tolkien

It was a fine night, and the black sky was dotted with stars. He looked up, sniffing the air. ‘What fun! What fun to be off again, off on the Road

I would give them Bag End and everything else, if I could get Bilbo back and go off tramping in the country with him. I love the Shire.

Look out for me, especially at unlikely times! Good-bye!’

and to the amazement of sensible folk he was sometimes seen far from home walking in the hills and woods under the starlight.

Frodo himself, after the first shock, found that being his own master and the Mr. Baggins of Bag End was rather pleasant.

He found himself wondering at times, especially in the autumn, about the wild lands, and strange visions of mountains that he had never seen came into his dreams.

Gandalf was thinking of a spring, nearly eighty years before, when Bilbo had run out of Bag End without a handkerchief. His hair was perhaps whiter than it had been then, and his beard and eyebrows were perhaps longer, and his face more lined with care and wisdom; but his eyes were as bright as ever, and he smoked and blew smoke-rings with the same vigour and delight.

‘So do I,’ said Gandalf, ‘and so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.