him the elixir of life--he has still a flaw at heart, he still has his
business habits. Now, there is no time when business habits are more
mitigated than on a walking tour. And so during these halts, as I say,
you will feel almost free.

But it is at night, and after dinner, that the best hour comes. There
are no such pipes to be smoked as those that follow a good day's march;
the flavour of the tobacco is a thing to be remembered, it is so dry and
aromatic, so full and so fine. If you wind up the evening with grog, you
will own there was never such grog; at every sip a jocund tranquillity
spreads about your limbs, and sits easily in your heart. If you read a
book--and you will never do so save by fits and starts--you find the
language strangely racy and harmonious; words take a new meaning; single
sentences possess the ear for half-an-hour together; and the writer
endears himself to you, at every page, by the nicest coincidence of
sentiment. It seems as if it were a book you had written yourself in a
dream. To all we have read on such occasions we look back with special
favour. "It was on the 10th of April, 1798," says Hazlitt, with amorous
precision, "that I sat down to a volume of the new 'Heloise,' at the Inn
at Llangollen, over a bottle of sherry and a cold chicken." I should
wish to quote more, for though we are mighty fine fellows nowadays, we
cannot write like Hazlitt. And, talking of that, a volume of Hazlitt's
essays would be a capital pocket-book on such a journey; so would a
volume of Heine's songs; and for "Tristram Shandy" I can pledge a fair
experience.

If the evening be fine and warm, there is nothing better in life than to
lounge before the inn door in the sunset, or lean over the parapet of
the bridge, to watch the weeds and the quick fishes. It is then, if
ever, that you taste Joviality to the full significance of that
audacious word. Your muscles are so agreeably slack, you feel so clean
and so strong and so idle, that whether you move or sit still, whatever
you do is done with pride and a kingly sort of pleasure. You fall in
talk with any one, wise or foolish, drunk or sober. And it seems as if a
hot walk purged you, more than of anything else, of all narrowness and
pride, and left curiosity to play its part freely, as in a child or a
man of science. You lay aside all your own hobbies, to watch provincial
humours develop themselves before you, now as a laughable farce, and now
grave and beautiful