s head
on occasion to look around the corner of a hill, which will seek out
obscure villages even though it requires a zigzag course up a hillside,
which follows a river for the very love of its company and humors its
windings, which trots alongside and listens to its ripple and then
crosses, sans bridge, like a schoolboy, with its toes in the water. I love
a road which goes with the easy, rolling gait of a sailor ashore. It has
no thought of time and it accepts all the vagaries of your laziness. I
love a road which weaves itself into eddies of eager traffic before the
door of an inn, and stops a minute at the drinking trough because it has
heard the thirst in your horse's whinny; and afterwards it bends its head
on the hillside for a last look at the kindly spot. Ah, but the vagabond
cannot remain long on the hills. Its best are its lower levels. So down it
dips. The descent is easy for roads and cart wheels and vagabonds and much
else; until in the evening it hears again the murmur of waters, and its
journey has ended.

[Illustration]

There is of course some fun in a map that is all wrong. Those, for
example, of the early navigators are worth anybody's time. There is
possibility in one that shows Japan where Long Island ought to be. That
map is human. It makes a correct and proper map no better than a
molly-coddle. There can be fine excitement in learning on the best of
fourteenth century authority that there is no America and that India lies
outside the Pillars of Hercules. The uncharted seas, the _incognova terra_
where lions are (_ubi leones erunt_, as the maps say), these must always
stir us. In my copy of Gulliver are maps of his discoveries. Lilliput lies
off the coast of Sumatra and must now be within sight of the passengers
bound from London to Melbourne if only they had eyes to see it.
Brobdingnag, would you believe it, is a hump on the west coast of America
and cannot be far from San Francisco. That gives one a start. Swift,
writing in 1725 with a world to choose from, selects the Californian coast
as the most remote and unknown for the scene of his fantastical adventure.
It thrusts 1725 into a gray antiquity. And yet there are many buildings in
England still standing that antedate 1725 by many years, some by
centuries. Queen Elizabeth had been dead more than a hundred years.
Canterbury was almost as old and probably in worse repair than it is now,
when Frisco was still Brobdingnag. Can it be that the gian