a number of counties that, although there are occasional evidences
of local invention, or at least of local modification, in certain
districts, the same set of types which prevails in one county serves
pretty well for all the rest.

It is well therefore to guard against disappointment. Pilgrimages
like ours, having for their real purpose healthy exercise and physical
enjoyment, are not to be counted failures when their ostensible errand
seems to have borne no result. It is necessary for the pilgrim to
be armed with some such reflection as this against the shafts of
discomfiture. There have been occasions when, at the close of the
day, conscious as I might be of the pleasant hours past, the freshened
brain and the body reinvigorated, I have yet covetously mourned the
scanty and valueless additions to my note-book. Other pilgrims may
therefore take warning, be prepared for blank days in barren coverts,
and sully not their satisfaction with regrets. But it will be a blank
day indeed which does not carry its pleasures with it and store the
mind with happy recollections. One walk on a winter's day over the
hills from High Barnet to Edgware I reckoned sadly unproductive of the
special novelties I sought, but it afforded me the contemplation of
some landscapes which I can never forget, and it printed on my brain a
little _papier-maché_-like church at Totteridge which was worth going
miles to see. Better fortune next time should be the beacon of the
gentle tramp. The long jaunt I had from Chigwell Lane Station through
the pretty but unpopulous country west of Theydon Bois, uneventful as
it was, made an ineffaceable mark on my memory. I picture now the long
and solitary walk across fields and woodlands, with never a soul to
tell the way for miles and miles, crossing and recrossing the winding
Roden, startling the partridges from the turnips, and surprising, at
some sudden bend in the footpath, the rabbits at their play. It is