playing before it.

The Victorians were great walkers. Railways were but striplings; inns
were at their prime. Hark to the great names in the walker's Hall of
Fame: Tennyson, FitzGerald, Matthew Arnold, Carlyle, Kingsley, Meredith,
Richard Jefferies. What walker can ever forget the day when he first
read "The Story of My Heart?" In my case it was the 24th of August,
1912, on a train from London to Cambridge. Then there were George
Borrow, Emily Brontë on her Yorkshire moors, and Leslie Stephen, one of
the princes of the clan and founder of the famous Sunday Tramps of whom
Meredith was one. Walt Whitman would have made a notable addition to
that posse of philosophic walkers, save that I fear the garrulous
half-baked old barbarian would have been disappointed that he could not
dominate the conversation.

There have been stout walkers in our own day. Mr. W.H. Davies (the
Super-Tramp), G.M. Trevelyan, Hilaire Belloc, Edward Thomas who died on
the field of honour in April, 1917, and Francis Ledwidge, who was killed
in Flanders. Who can forget his noble words, "I have taken up arms for
the fields along the Boyne, for the birds and the blue sky over them."
There is Walter Prichard Eaton, the Jefferies of our own Berkshires. One
could extend the list almost without end. Sometimes it seems as though
literature were a co-product of legs and head.

Charles Lamb and Leigh Hunt were great city ramblers, followed in due
course by Dickens, R.L.S., Edward Lucas, Holbrook Jackson, and Pearsall
Smith. Mr. Thomas Burke is another, whose "Nights in Town" will delight
the lover of the greatest of all cities. But urban wanderings, delicious
as they are, are not quite what we mean by walking. On pavements one
goes by fit and start, halting to see, to hear, and to speculate. In the