e it not for maps! If I
chance on the name of a town I have visited, I locate it on a map. I may
not actually get down the atlas and put my finger on the name, but at
least I picture to myself its lines and contour and judge its miles in
inches. And thereby for a thing of ink and cardboard I have banished from
the world its immensity and mystery. But if there were no maps--what then?
By other devices I would have to locate it. I would say that it came at
the end of some particular day's journey; that it lies in the twilight at
the conclusion of twenty miles of dusty road; that it lies one hour
nightward of a blow-out. I would make it neighbor to an appetite gratified
and a thirst assuaged, a cool bath, a lazy evening with starlight and
country sounds. Is not this better than a dot on a printed page?

[Illustration]

That is the town, I would say, where we had the mutton chops and where we
heard the bullfrogs on the bridge. Or that town may be circumstanced in
cherry pie, a comical face at the next table, a friendly dog with
hair-trigger tail, or some immortal glass of beer on a bench outside a
road-inn. These things make that town as a flame in the darkness, a flame
on a hillside to overtop my course. Many years can go grinding by without
obliterating the pleasant sight of its flare. Or maybe the town is so
intermingled with dismal memories that no good comes of too particularly
locating it. Then Tony Lumpkin's advice on finding Mr. Hardcastle's house
is enough. "It's a damn'd long, dark, boggy, dirty, dangerous way." And
let it go at that.

Maps are toadies to the thoroughfares. They shower their attentions on the
wide pavements, holding them up to observation, marking them in red, and
babbling and prattling obsequiously about them, meanwhile snubbing with
disregard all the lanes and bypaths. They are cockney and are interested
in showing only the highroads between cities, and in consequence neglect
all tributary loops and windings. In a word, they are against the jog-trot
countryside and conspire with the signposts against all loitering and
irregularity.

As for me, I do not like a straight thoroughfare. To travel such a road is
like passing a holiday with a man who is going about his business. Idle as
you are, vacant of purpose, alert for distraction, _he_ must keep his eyes
straight ahead and he must attend to the business in hand. I like a road
that is at heart a vagabond, which loiters in the shade and turns it