names, with halts as long under the shadow of still nobler
churches and fairer castles, getting to know the people and their ways
and how pleasant life is in the land where beauty and thrift, gaiety and
toil, courtesy and wit, go ever hand in hand.

And again it was work that sent us still further south, to Italy which
in my younger years I had longed for the more because I fancied it as
inaccessible to me as Lhassa or the Grande Chartreuse. And again down
the beautiful vista of work I see J. and myself still on the neat
compact Humber, but now pushing up long white zigzags to grim
hill-towns, rushing down the same zigzags into radiant valleys of fruit
and flowers, winding between vineyards where the vines were festooned
from tree to tree, and fields where huge, white, wide-horned oxen pulled
the plough, bumping over the stones of old Roman roads, parting with the
wonderful tandem only for the long stay in wonderful Rome and wonderful
Venice.

And again it was work that sent us, now each on a safety bicycle--a
change that explains how time was flying--by the canals and on the flat
roads of Belgium and Holland; into Germany, through the Harz with Heine
for guide, by the castled Rhine and Moselle that may have lost their
reputation for a while but that can never lose their loveliness; into
Austria, on to Hungary, up in the Carpathians and to those heights from
which the Russian Army but the other day looked down upon the Hungarian
plain; into Spain, to sun-burnt Andalusia, for weeks in the Alhambra, to
windy Madrid, for days in the Prado; into Switzerland, the "Playground
of Europe," where our work must have seemed more than ever like play as
we climbed, on our cycles and on foot, over the highest of the high
Alpine passes, one after the other; again into Italy; again into France;
again through England; again--but they were too numerous to count, all
those journeys that claimed so many of my days and taught me, while I
worked, all I have learned of Europe.

Of such well-travelled roads anyway, it may be said people have heard as
much as people can stand, and therefore I am wise to hold my peace about
days spent upon them. But on the best-travelled road adventure lies in
wait for the traveller who seeks it, chance awaits the discoverer who
knows his business. Why, to this day J. and I are appealed to for facts
about Le Puy because a quarter of a century ago we made our discovery of
the town as the Most Picturesque Place