most days tristran was content - or as content as a seventeen-year-old youth with his world ahead of him can ever be - and when he daydreamed in the fields , or at the tall desk at the back of monday and brown 's , the village shop , he fancied himself riding the train all the way to lon-don or to liverpool , of taking a steamship across the grey atlantic to america , and making his fortune there among the savages in the new lands .