provocative of sincerity and gentleness in others.

*

There is nobody under thirty so dead but his heart will
stir a little at sight of a gypsies' camp. 'We are not
cotton-spinners all;' or, at least, not all through. There
is some life in humanity yet; and youth will now and again
find a brave word to say in dispraise of riches, and throw
up a situation to go strolling with a knapsack.

*

I began my little pilgrimage in the most enviable of all
humours: that in which a person, with a sufficiency of
money and a knapsack, turns his back on a town and walks
forward into a country of which he knows only by the vague
report of others. Such an one has not surrendered his will
and contracted for the next hundred miles, like a man on a
railway. He may change his mind at every finger-post, and,
where ways meet, follow vague preferences freely and go the
low road or the high, choose the shadow or the sunshine,
suffer himself to be tempted by the lane that turns
immediately into the woods, or the broad road that
lies open before him into the distance, and shows him the
far-off spires of some city, or a range of mountain-tops,
or a run of sea, perhaps, along a low horizon. In short,
he may gratify his every whim and fancy, without a pang
of reposing conscience, or the least jostle of his
self-respect. It is true, however, that most men do not