was more than three parts spent; I fell ill with drinking and grew
dull with remorse: need I add that my comrades left me to myself? A
fit of the spleen, especially if accompanied with duns, makes one
wofully misanthropic; so, when I recovered from my illness, I set out
on a tour through Great Britain and France,--alone, and principally on
foot. Oh, the rapture of shaking off the half friends and cold
formalities of society and finding oneself all unfettered, with no
companion but Nature, no guide but youth, and no flatterer but hope!"

"Well, my young friend, I travelled for two years, and saw even in
that short time enough of this busy world to weary and disgust me with
its ordinary customs. I was not made to be polite, still less to be
ambitious. I sighed after the coarse comrades and the free tents of
my first associates; and a thousand remembrances of the gypsy
wanderings, steeped in all the green and exhilarating colours of
childhood, perpetually haunted my mind. On my return from my
wanderings I found a letter from my sister, who, having become a
widow, had left Wales, and had now fixed her residence in a well
visited watering-place in the west of England. I had never yet seen
her, and her letter was a fine-ladylike sort of epistle, with a great
deal of romance and a very little sense, written in an extremely
pretty hand, and ending with a quotation from Pope (I never could
endure Pope, nor indeed any of the poets of the days of Anne and her
successors). It was a beautiful season of the year: I had been inured
to pedestrian excursions; so I set off on foot to see my nearest
surviving relative. On the way, I fell in (though on a very different
spot) with the very encampment you saw last night. By heavens, that
was a merry meeting to me! I joined, and journeyed with them for
several days: never do I remember a happier time. Then, after many
years of bondage and stiffness, and accordance with the world, I found