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8. The mountaineers of all countries are always the strongest, and the most energetic and famous for longevity; not so much, as it is erroneously asserted, owing to the purity and rarity of the air, but because their more distant habitations oblige them to walk many miles up and down, and because they cannot make use of any carriages whatever, restricted at all times to the sliding and surefooted mule, chiefly serviceable for descending steep declivities.

9. For those, again, who prefer, and can command, the delight of horse exercise, little exception can be taken against a mode of travelling which indubitably stands very high in general estimation, both in matters of health and convenient exercitation, and which hath been duly lauded and prescribed in olden times, by many an old medical worthy, particularly Celsus. The cost of outfit and supporting these noble animals, being the chief drawback to the more general practice of riding on horseback;-though there are other disadvantages, not to be entirely passed over, (such as the manifold inconveniences to which, in a broken, boggy, or mountainous district, the cavalier is, as such, inevitably exposed,) the members of every grade of society are constrained to admit, that, on the whole, by walking they can best maintain themselves in good health and elastic spirits.

10. Finally, then to that numerous, respectable, and exercise-needing class, whose limited means may exclude, or whose habits and tastes seek not, either of the preceding methods of locomotion, the subjoined directions are respectfully offered in the way of "Hints," medical and general, in the humbie hope that they may prove of some little service in the shape of advice as to the preparation, management, and fair exertion of those locomotives, of such unspeakable value, and which are emphatically, at all times and seasons, their own.

CHAPTER II.

SEASONS, PREPARATIONS PROVISIONAL, VARIOUSLY NEEDFUL AND NEEDFULLY VARIOUS, TOUCHING THE LOCOMOTIVES.

11. All men have not the same tastes and feelings, and happy is it for us that diversity characterises as much the phases of our minds as it most certainly does our bodily faces; yet on the point of selecting periods of the year for pedestrian excursions,

12. Summer has, for several obvious reasons, been almost unanimously chosen as the favourite season, presenting nature, as she does, wearing a perpetual smile; or, when chequered by a bursting cloud, only so obscured to brighten and dazzle again the more, adding "length of days" to her other charms and witchery of existence. The Queen of Seasons she must ever be, though her noonday ardour invites to a listless repose, so usually at once the opprobrium and the luxurious accident of summer

tours.

13. Spring has also many claims to be considered. The fresh and bracing winds-the sharp frosty morning -the early birds and their gladdening matin song-the burst of renewed vegetable life- the fragrant odours of the young leaves as they escape from their winter's hardcased envelope-the shining floweret on the hedge bank, loading the air with its balmy fragrance, all the sweeter and more intoxicating for having been long locked up under miserly snow and frost. The leaping rill and the sparkling dew urge their loud yet sweet appeal, and that never in vain, to the man who has a single particle of the 'ideal' in his mind, without which man is at best but a calculating animal. The invigorating freshness of spring

tide may not, must not, be underrated; our own compound nature drinks in, by a manifold sympathy of life, all the renewing energies which are astirring on every side -around, below, and above us. Indisputably, as far as health is concerned, this season must bear away the palm; for there are periodicities in our nature having a correspondence sometimes manifest, often occult, with the animate and inanimate groupings around us: and much might be urged in a striking way on the tone and mystic keeping of these sweet harmonies, but that it would lead us away from our immediate task. To the valetudinarian then, we commend the "opening day" of the year," the merry, merry month of May." April has often lustrous weather, bright and sunny, but fleeting often, and delusive, which called forth poor Kirke White's graphic lines "What is this passing scene?

A peevish April day!

A little sun-a little rain,

And then night sweeps along the plain."

14. Autumn, too, has its enthusiastic admirers: it is the season chiefly worshipped by poetic temperamentsthat "genus irritabile vatum," whose keen sensibilities, tastes, and feelings, nursed so carefully and often capriciously, give it a colour of their own; their

-"Eyes see all around, in gloom or glow

Hues of their own, fresh borrow'd from the heart;"

and thus this season of "calm decay".

"When idly droops

The fading chaplet of the year,"

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is made to acquire a moody character, as though she were the personification of melancholy, whereas, mind of more common and cheerful tone passes through the rich colours, the laden trees, the bird's ever joyous song, the falling leaf even, without reading painfully the lesson of silently-operating change, without

being startled with the echo of Spring, reverberating less and less from approaching winter's icy cape! And so should the cheerful equal mind relish every season, each tracing its own significant and appropriate emblems of life, rehearsing in beauteous types the corresponding ages of man, until the revolution of the year-circle has completed and pointed the moral of our life-circle.

"Red o'er the forest peers the setting sun,
The line of yellow light dies fast away

That crown'd the eastern copse: and chill and dun
Falls on the moor the brief November day.
Now the tir'd hunter winds a parting note,
And echo bids good night from every glade.

Yet wait awhile, and see the calm leaves float

Each to his rest beneath their parent shade."-Keble. Thus sings a cheerful poet; and we are landed in

15. Winter-wherein short days make short work, and nipping frosts bind earth and water into one iron-faced resistance to man's busy-handed industry: yet may, nevertheless, even here, the enterprising footsteps of active man, procure judicious and glowing exercise, in robust play of the limbs.

16. Having paid our court to the seasons, in the most seasonable manner we could, let us then now descend to look into some of the dry and matter of fact details of preparation for a pedestrian trip, which, though somewhat at first uninviting, yet we promise thus much to every and all-poet or naturalist-philosopher or man of business-that the poetry of nature's changing garb and features, -the science of her thousand ways of wonder-working life-the tone of her sweet influence on the mind and body-will be promoted in no trifling degree, by our securing, as far as practicable and foreseen, those conditions actually essential to the comfort and success of a pedestrian ramble; for if great things are only the summing up of small things-as, in the fable, the grateful ant stung

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