Lake in Central Africa. The
White Horse Vale, remember, was traversed by no great road--nothing but
country parish roads, and these very bad. Only one coach ran there, and
this one only from Wantage to London, so that the western part of the
Vale was without regular means of moving on, and certainly didn't
seem to want them. There was the canal, by the way, which supplied the
country-side with coal, and up and down which continually went the long
barges, with the big black men lounging by the side of the horses along
the towing-path, and the women in bright-coloured handkerchiefs standing
in the sterns steering. Standing I say, but you could never see whether
they were standing or sitting, all but their heads and shoulders being
out of sight in the cozy little cabins which occupied some eight feet of
the stern, and which Tom Brown pictured to himself as the most desirable
of residences. His nurse told him that those good-natured-looking women
were in the constant habit of enticing children into the barges, and
taking them up to London and selling them, which Tom wouldn't
believe, and which made him resolve as soon as possible to accept the
oft-proffered invitation of these sirens to "young master" to come in
and have a ride. But as yet the nurse was too much for Tom.

Yet why should I, after all, abuse the gadabout propensities of my
countrymen? We are a vagabond nation now, that's certain, for better
for worse. I am a vagabond; I have been away from home no less than five
distinct times in the last year. The Queen sets us the example: we are
moving on from top to bottom. Little dirty Jack, who abides in Clement's
Inn gateway, and blacks my boots for a penny, takes his month's
hop-picking every year as a matter of course. Why shouldn't he? I'm
delighted at it. I love vagabonds, only I prefer poor to rich ones.
Couriers and ladies'-maids, imperials and travelling carriages, are an
abomination unto me; I cannot away with them. But for dirty Jack, and
every good fellow who, in the words of the capital French song, moves
about,

"Comme le limacon,
Portant tout son bagage,
Ses meubles, sa maison,"

on his own back, why, good luck to them, and many a merry roadside
adventure, and steaming supper in the chimney corners of roadside inns,
Swiss chalets, Hottentot kraals, or wherever else they like to go. So,
having succeeded in contradicting myself in my first chapter (which
gives me great hopes that you will