te. In the
country one captures the true ecstasy of the long, unbroken swing, the
harmonious glow of mind and body, eyes fed, soul feasted, brain and
muscle exercised alike.

Meredith is perhaps the Supreme Pontiff of modern country walkers: no
soft lover of drowsy golden weather, but master of the stiffer breed who
salute frost and lashing rain and roaring southwest wind, who leap to
grapple with the dissolving riddles of destiny. February and March are
his months:

For love we Earth then serve we all;
Her mystic secret then is ours:
We fall, or view our treasures fall,
Unclouded, as beholds her flowers.

Earth, from a night of frosty wreck,
Enrobed in morning's mounted fire,
When lowly, with a broken neck,
The crocus lays her cheek to mire.

I suppose every walker collects a few precious books which form the
bible of his chosen art. I have long been collecting a Walker's Breviary
of my own. It includes Stevenson's "Walking Tours," G.M. Trevelyan's
"Walking," Leslie Stephen's "In Praise of Walking," shards and crystals
from all the others I have mentioned. Michael Fairless, Vachel Lindsay,
and Frank Sidgwick have place in it. On my private shelf stands
"Journeys to Bagdad" by Mr. Charles Brooks, who has good pleasantry to
utter on this topic; and a manly little volume, "Walking as Education,"
by the Rev. A.N. Cooper, "the walking parson," published in England in
1910. On that same shelf there will soon stand a volume of delicious
essays by one of the most accomplished of American walkers, Mr. Robert
Cortes Holliday, the American Belloc, whose "Walking Stick Papers" has
beckoned to the eye of a far-seeing publisher. Mr. Holliday it is who
has bravely stated why so few of the fair sex are able to participate in
walking tours:

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 twilight, and, talking (let us suppose) of
men's given names, agrees that if either should have a son he shall
be named after the other. Walking in the gathering dusk, two and
two, since the world began, there have always been young men who
have thus to one another plighted their troth. If one is not still
one of these, then, in the sense here used, journeys are over for
him. What is left to him of life he may enjoy, but not journeys.
Mention should be m