of khaki.

All the humors of the road are yours. In fact, you yourself contribute
to them, by your unexpected appearance on the scene and the novelty of
your "make-up," if I may be pardoned the expression. At the hotel bar,
you drink a glass of beer with the local celebrity and thus come into
immediate touch with, the oldest inhabitant." After dinner, seated on a
bench on the sidewalk, you smoke a pipe and discuss the affairs of the
nation or of the town - usually the latter - with the man who in the
morning offered to give you a lift and never will understand why you
declined. Invariably you receive courteous replies and in kindly
interest are met more than half way.

The early romances, the prototypes of the modern novel, from "Don
Quixote" to "Tom Jones" and "Joseph Andrews," were little more than
narratives of adventures on the road. "Joseph Andrews" in particular -
perhaps Fielding's masterpiece - is simply the story of a journey from
London to a place in the country some hundred and fifty miles distant.
In these books all the adventures are associated with inns and the
various characters, thrown together by chance, there assembled. Dickens
unquestionably derived inspiration from Smollett and Fielding; nor is
there any doubt but that Harte made a close study of Dickens.

From which preamble we come to the statement; if you would study human
nature on the road, you must simply go where men congregate and exchange
ideas. The plots of nearly all Bret Harte's mining stories are thus
closely associated with the bar-rooms and taverns of the mining towns of
his day. What would remain of any of Phillpott's charming stories of
rural England, if you eliminated the bar-room of the village inn? In
hospitality and generous living, the inns of the mining towns still keep