s. "Export trade fair," he says; "good demand from South
America."
II
ON GOING A JOURNEY
One of the pleasantest things in the world is "going a journey"--but
few know it now. It isn't every one that can go a journey. No doubt
one that owns an automobile cannot go. The spirit of the age has got
him fast. Begoggled and with awful squawks, feverish, exultant,
ignorant, he is condemned to hoot over the earth. Thus the wealthy
know nothing of journeys, for they must own motors. Vain people and
envious people and proud people cannot go, because the wealthy do not.
Silly people do not know enough to go. The lazy cannot, because of
their laziness. The busy hang themselves with business. The halt nor
the aged, alas! cannot go. In fine, only such as are whole anywise and
pure in heart can go a journey, and they are the blessed.
"We arrive at places now, but we" (most of us) "travel no more." The
way a journey is gone, to come to the point, is walking. Asking many
folks' pardon, to tear through the air in an open car, deafened,
hilariously muddled by the rush and roar of wind, is to drive
observation from the mind: it is to be, in a manner, complacently,
intellectually unconscious; is to drink an enjoyment akin to that of
the shooters of the chute, or that got on the very latest of this sort
of engine of human amusement called the "Hully-Gee-Whizz," a pleasure
of the ignorant, metaphorically, a kind of innocents' rot-gut whiskey.
The way a journey is gone, which is walking, is a wine, a mellow
claret, stimulating to observation, to thought, to speculation, to the
flow of talk, gradually, decently warming the blood. Rightly taken
(which manner this paper attempts to set forth), walking is among the
pleasures of the mind. It is a call-boy to wit, a hand-maiden to
cultivation. Sufficiently indulged in, it will make a man educated, a
wit, a poet, an ironist, a philosopher, a gentleman, a better Christian
(not to dwell upon improving his digestion and prolonging his life).
And, too, like true Shandyism "it opens the heart and the lungs."
Whoso hath ears, let him hear! Once and for all, if the mad world did
but know it, the best, the most exquisite automobile is a
walking-stick; and one of the finest things in life is going a journey
with it.
No one, though (this is the first article to be observed), should ever
go a journey with any other than him with whom one walks arm in arm, in
the evening, the tw
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