Good will be found in the man whose recreation is walking. The moralist means certainly subathletic walking, a true exercise of this form of progress, a test which hopes to be marked high. Results of it can only be compared in their productivity of good. While you experience the pleasant muscular soreness for which you have waited only after the twelfth mile, your mother may be satisfied for the day when she has reached the eighth. A walk in the sense indicated seems to connote for a lady twelve, for a man twenty, flat miles in Great Britain.

Restorative exercise, nay, prophylactic, for fatigues must needs be dispersed and ease insured, cannot, when there is hardly an acceptable substitute to propose, suffer seasonal restriction, accept hyemation. Why should they? On the contrary.

External dispositions fit you rather for winter walking. You are becomingly shod by the very circumstance; and even legal clothing may seem too much in summer. Winter allays; and the walker is not without persecutors. ‘No heat, no dust, no flies’ you will hear your hobnails sing upon the frost-resilient road. And the eyes find more than variety in the winter scene; they learn to choose dead-bracken-clothed steeps and pronounce their food ‘incomparable’ when the blue of the mist deepens to the desired concord.

The Things Required by the walker are two; if the plurality of boots be admitted. These are loose, heavy, best reached-me-down; they are hard and uncouth until copiously anointed with neatsfoot oil. If for the tread be desired pure leather, as the phrase is, let them be fitted with a clump sole; yet who but the exquisite so desire?