The story of Dick Whittington was
another ideal, and one could well understand the village boys who lived
near the great road routes, when they saw the well-appointed coaches
passing on their way up to London, being filled with a desire to see
that great city, whose streets the immortal Dick had pictured to himself
as being paved with gold, and to wish to emulate his wanderings, and
especially when there was a possibility of becoming the lord mayor.

The bulk of the travelling in the country was done on foot or horseback,
as the light-wheeled vehicles so common in later times had not yet come
into vogue. The roads were still far from safe, and many tragedies were
enacted in lonely places, and in cases of murder the culprit, when
caught, was often hanged or gibbeted near the spot where the crime was
committed, and many gallows trees were still to be seen on the sides of
the highways on which murderers had met with their well-deserved fate.
No smart service of police existed; the parish constables were often
farmers or men engaged in other occupations, and as telegraphy was
practically unknown, the offenders often escaped.

The Duke of Wellington and many of his heroes were still living, and
the tales of fathers and grandfathers were chiefly of a warlike nature;
many of them related to the Peninsula War and Waterloo, as well as
Trafalgar, and boys were thus inspired with a warlike and adventurous
spirit and a desire to see the wonders beyond the seas.

It was in conditions such as these that the writer first lived and moved
and had his being, and his early aspirations were to walk to London, and
to go to sea; but it was many years before his boyish aspirations were
realised. They came at length, however, but not exactly in the form he
had anticipated, for in 1862 he sailed from Liverpool to London, and in
1870 he took the opportunity of walking back from London to Lancashire
in company with his brother. We walked by a circuitous route, commencing
in an easterly direction, and after being on the road for a fortnight,
or twelve walking days, as we did not walk on Sundays, we covered the
distance of 306 miles at an average of twenty-five miles per day.

We had many adventures, pleasant and otherwise, on that journey, but on
the whole we were so delighted with our walk that, when, in the
following year, the question arose. "Where shall we walk this year?" we
unanimously decided to walk from John o' Groat's to Land's End, o