rewarded in the sequel; and so pleasure leads on to pleasure in
an endless chain.

*****

Nor does the scenery any more affect the thoughts than the thoughts
affect the scenery. We see places through our humours as through
differently-coloured glasses. We are ourselves a term in the equation, a
note of the chord, and make discord or harmony almost at will. There is
no fear for the result, if we can but surrender ourselves sufficiently
to the country that surrounds and follows us, so that we are ever
thinking suitable thoughts or telling ourselves some suitable sort of
story as we go. We become thus, in some sense, a centre of beauty; we
are provocative of beauty, much as a gentle and sincere character is
provocative of sincerity and gentleness in others.

*****

There is nobody under thirty so dead but his heart will stir a little
at sight of a gypsies' camp. 'We are not cotton-spinners all;' or, at
least, not all through. There is some life in humanity yet; and youth
will now and again find a brave word to say in dispraise of riches, and
throw up a situation to go strolling with a knapsack.

*****

I began my little pilgrimage in the most enviable of all humours: that
in which a person, with a sufficiency of money and a knapsack, turns his
back on a town and walks forward into a country of which he knows only
by the vague report of others. Such an one has not surrendered his will
and contracted for the next hundred miles, like a man on a railway. He
may change his mind at every finger-post, and, where ways meet, follow
vague preferences freely and go the low road or the high, choose the
shadow or the sunshine, suffer himself to be tempted by the lane that
turns immediately into the woods, or the broad road that lies open
before him into the distance, and shows him the far-off spires of some
city, or a range of mountain-tops, or a run of sea, perhaps, along a low
horizon. In short, he may gratify his every whim and fancy, without a
pang of reposing conscience, or the least jostle of his self-respect.
It is true, however, that most men do not possess the faculty of free
action, the priceless gift of being able to live for the moment only;
and as they begin to go forward on their journey, they will find that
they have made for themselves new fetters. Slight projects they may have
entertained for a moment, half in jest, become iron laws to them, they
know not why. They will be led by the nose by these vague reports