The best way of escape from this
TAEDIUM VITAE is through a recreation like angling, not only because it
is so evidently a matter of luck, but also because it tempts us into a
wilder, freer life. It leads almost inevitably to camping out, which is
a wholesome and sanitary imprudence.

It is curious and pleasant, to my apprehension, to observe how many
people in New England, one of whose States is called "the land of Steady
Habits," are sensible of the joy of changing them,--out of doors. These
good folk turn out from their comfortable farm-houses and their snug
suburban cottages to go a-gypsying for a fortnight among the mountains
or beside the sea. You see their white tents gleaming from the
pine-groves around the little lakes, and catch glimpses of their
bathing-clothes drying in the sun on the wiry grass that fringes the
sand-dunes. Happy fugitives from the bondage of routine! They have found
out that a long journey is not necessary to a good vacation. You may
reach the Forest of Arden in a buckboard. The Fortunate Isles are within
sailing distance in a dory. And a voyage on the river Pactolus is open
to any one who can paddle a canoe.

I was talking--or rather listening--with a barber, the other day, in
the sleepy old town of Rivermouth. He told me, in one of those easy
confidences which seem to make the razor run more smoothly, that it had
been the custom of his family, for some twenty years past, to forsake
their commodious dwelling on Anchor Street every summer, and emigrate
six miles, in a wagon to Wallis Sands, where they spent the month of
August very merrily under canvas. Here was a sensible household for
you! They did not feel bound to waste a year's income on a four weeks'
holiday. They were not of those foolish folk who run across the sea,
carefully carrying with them the same tiresome mind that worried them
at home. They got a change of air by making an alteration of life. They
escaped from the land of Egypt by stepping out into the wilderness and
going a-fishing.

The people who always live in houses, and sleep on beds, and walk on
pavements, and buy their food from butchers and bakers and grocers, are
not the most blessed inhabitants of this wide and various earth. The
circumstances of their existence are too mathematical and secure
for perfect contentment. They live at second or third hand. They are
boarders in the world. Everything is done for them by somebody else.

It is almost impossible for a