timacies, I should fail, because, as I have just said,
you know me well. In your private judgments, I believe, I am allocated
among those who are destined to set the Thames on fire. In plainer
words, you believe that I have an ambition. This is true, and so I
make no attempt to conceal from you the ulterior design of these
essays. Ere you have read one of them, you will perceive that I am
writing a book.

I shall take no umbrage at the failure of my communications to call
forth replies. I know you to be a bad correspondent, but a valuable
friend. I know that your attitude toward a letter addressed to you is
that of a mediaeval prince toward a recalcitrant prisoner--viz., get
all the information possible out of him, and then commit him to the
flames. Possibly, when I have attained to a deeper knowledge of the
spirit of the Middle Ages, I shall also have discovered the motives
for this curious survival of barbarism in your character. I can only
hope humbly that these papers, armed with their avowed literary
import, will not share the fate of the commoner envoys passing through
your hands, but will be treated as noble ambassadors rather than as
hapless petitioners, not merely escaping the flames of oblivion, but
receiving safe conduct, courteous audience, and honourable lodging.

II

I suppose we may say of everyone, that he sooner or later falls a
victim to the desire to travel, with as much truth as we say, far more
often, that he falls a victim to love. However that may be, I claim no
special destiny when I say that I have been mastered by both passions,
except perhaps that they culminated in my case simultaneously.

I must go back to the time when I was some six years old to find the
first faint evidences of the rover in me. At that time we lived almost
at the foot of that interminable thoroughfare, the Finsbury Park Road,
next door to a childless dame whose sole companion was a pug of
surpassing hideousness of aspect, and whose sole recreation was a
morning stroll in Finsbury Park with this pug. How I came to form a
third person in these walks I cannot quite remember but I can imagine.
At the age of six I was a solemn child, unclean in habits, consorting
with "grown-ups," and filled with an unsocial hatred for the baby
whose matutinal ablutions were consummated at the same hour at which
the old lady usually took her walk. I can remember that I was supposed
to assist in some way at those ablutions, probably