the great desert, where there is no tree and no fountain. As I don't
want my wreck to be washed up on one of the beaches in company with
devil's-aprons, bladder-weeds, dead horse-shoes, and bleached
crab-shells, I turn about and flap my long narrow wings for home.
When the tide is running out swiftly, I have a splendid fight to get
through the bridges, but always make it a rule to beat,--though I
have been jammed up into pretty tight places at times, and was caught
once between a vessel swinging round and the pier, until our bones
(the boat's, that is) cracked as if we had been in the jaws of
Behemoth. Then back to my moorings at the foot of the Common, off
with the rowing-dress, dash under the green translucent wave, return
to the garb of civilization, walk through my Garden, take a look at
my elms on the Common, and, reaching my habitat, in consideration of
my advanced period of life, indulge in the Elysian abandonment of a
huge recumbent chair.

When I have established a pair of well-pronounced feathering-
calluses on my thumbs, when I am in training so that I can do my
fifteen miles at a stretch without coming to grief in any way, when
I can perform my mile in eight minutes or a little less, then I
feel as if I had old Time's head in chancery, and could give it to
him at my leisure.

I do not deny the attraction of walking. I have bored this ancient
city through and through in my daily travels, until I know it as an
old inhabitant of a Cheshire knows his cheese. Why, it was I who,
in the course of these rambles, discovered that remarkable avenue
called Myrtle Street, stretching in one long line from east of the
Reservoir to a precipitous and rudely paved cliff which looks down
on the grim abode of Science, and beyond it to the far hills; a
promenade so delicious in its repose, so cheerfully varied with
glimpses down the northern slope into busy Cambridge Street with
its iron river of the horse-railroad, and wheeled barges gliding
back and forward over it,--so delightfully closing at its western
extremity in sunny courts and passages where I know peace, and
beauty, and virtue, and serene old age must be perpetual tenants,
--so alluring to all who desire to take their daily stroll, in the
words of Dr. Watts,--

"Alike unknowing and unknown,"--

that nothing but a sense of duty would have prompted me to reveal
the secret of its existence. I concede, therefore, that walking is
an immeasurably fine invention