of which he has been the victim, from a little pedestrianism? Do
American men and boys ever walk? Drive, it is known they do; they can
always get time for that. But to walk, certainly to scramble and to
climb, must be added by Mr. Phillips, in the new editions of his
exquisite and inexhaustible Lecture, to the catalogue of the "Lost
Arts."

Yet Nature never grows outworn,--is unwearied in the bounty which she
bestows on the seeker. I said a strip of sandy beach, just now. For that
I beg leave to refer the reader to Mr. Kingsley's fascinating "Glaucus,"
and to the delightful papers which appeared in "Blackwood" a year or two
ago. My business is with the woods and fields. Certainly some who read
my pages will have leisure to climb a stone wall now and then, and for
them the following sketches of New England wood-walks may serve to show
how much enjoyment may be got with but little outlay of appliances. Of
course the most tempting thing to seek is sport. But the gun and the
fishing-rod are useless in many towns, from the disappearance of all
worthy objects for their exercise. The birds are wild and shy; the trout
have been _coculus-indicused_ out of the mountain-brooks to supply
metropolitan hotel-tables and Delmonican larders. Let us go after more
attainable things. And first, being a true nemophilist, I protest
against botany. A flower worth a five-mile walk and a wet foot is worthy
of something better than dissection with the Linnaean classification,
afterward adding insult to injury. The botanist is not a discoverer; he
is only a pedant. He finds out nothing about the plant; he serves it
as we might fancy a monster doing, who should take this number of the
"Atlantic" and sit down, not to read it, not to inhale the delicate
fragrance of its thought, but to count its articles, examine their
titles, and, having compared them with the newspaper advertisement,
sweep the whole contentedly into the dust-heap. To study the plant, to