ly real pleasures. We all like to be free of responsibilities. There
is no rent-day coming round with dread certainty and irritating monotony
to the nomads. No rate collector irritates them with his imperious
"demand note." No school-board officer rouses them to a sense of duty by
his everlasting efforts to force their children to school. No butcher,
no baker, no milkman duns them for payment of bills long overdue!
They escape the danger of furniture on the "hire system." For them no
automatic gas meter grudgingly doles out its niggardly pennyworths of
gas. They are not implored to burden themselves with the ENCYCLOPAEDIA
BRITANNICA.

They are free from the seductions of standard bread; paper-bag cookery
causes them no anxious thought. Even "sweet peas" do not enter into
their simple calculations. Finally no life assurance agent marks them
for his prey, and no income-tax tempts them to lie! From all these
things they are free, and I would like to know who would not wish to
be free of them and a thousand other worries I would escape them if I
could, but alas I cannot.

Decidedly there is much to be said for the life of a nomad, but whether
or not I should place him among the inhabitants of the underworld I
am not sure; for he toils not, neither does he spin, and his bitterest
enemies cannot accuse him of taking thought for the morrow. I had almost
forgotten one great advantage he possesses: he need not wash; and when
this distasteful operation becomes, for sanitary reasons, absolutely
necessary, why then he can take a month in one of our great sanatoria,
either prison or workhouse will do, and be thoroughly cleansed!

The idea of such free and easy folk being saved by a shelter and
wood-chopping is very funny.

But we are all tramps, more or less; it is only a question of degree!
Who would not like to tramp with George Borrow through Spain or Wales
I would like the chance! Who does not feel and hear the "call of the
wild"? Most certainly all Britons thrill with it. Who does not like to
feel the "wind on the heath" beat on his face and fill his nostrils!
Who does not love the sweetness of country lanes, or the solitude of
mountains, or the whispering mystery of the wood, or the terrors of the
sea, or the silence of midnight?

All these things are ingrained in us, part and parcel of our very
selves; we cannot get away from them if we would, and woe betide us if
we did! For this is a grand quality in itself, one that h