One of the most unprofitable modes of visiting the country is to go to a watering-place; in other words, to go from one large town to another. Yet this kind of travelling, if so it may be called, is not altogether without its use. The change, even, from one town to another, is of some effect; many persons move thus who would not otherwise move at all; their bodies and minds are refreshed by change of scene and occupation; some knowledge is gained, and some prejudices are loosened or effaced.

The art of travelling, as practised by the English gentleman in former times, whether at home or abroad, was to get over the greatest quantity of space in the least quantity of time. And even now those among us, who have more money than time or wit, are addicted to the same habit. A more certain method of engendering confusion of head, and of seeing enough of the outside of everything to be sure of forming the wrong opinion, could not be prescribed. The son who travels in this manner is, however, less likely to be injured than his father. The old gentleman's taste for novelty is gone, and a continuance of bodily motion and noise gives him annoyance. What he sees, or rather what passes before his eyes, is new and strange, and therefore foolish or bad; and he is wedded to many little habits and comforts which travelling impedes. He consequently returns a worse man than when he went forth, excepting that he rates a little higher the pleasures of home. The young man enjoys noise and bustle, his spirits rise as he is shaken about; variety and novelty are as yet his delight; he sees much, mistakes half that he sees, and laughs at every thing; his rest is not to be broken by a poor bed; his appetite is proof against indifferent or strange food; he rather enjoys than suffers from a change of habits. And if he, too, returns at last not much wiser than when he started, he has passed his few weeks or months in pleasurable excitement, which is something; and he can afterwards look back to the past without pain or uncharitableness.

Pedestrian tours or excursions may be prescribed to young men on the score of health, pleasure, and knowledge. In this country great facility of procuring conveyances to agreeable centres for commencing any tour is seldom wanting. It is by no means uncommon now for young men to go to the boundaries of Wales, or to the commencement of the fine country about the Cumberland Lakes, and then to travel on foot through the most beautiful parts, sending on their luggage from place to place, as opportunity offers. The pedestrian will find it most to his advantage to reside for a few days in a good centrical spot, and then remove to another, by which means every place is well examined and thoroughly enjoyed. Over a monotonous tract, a lift may be occasionally obtained by a stage or car; but the rule should be to trust to one's legs.

The quantity of walking that a man of average strength can

perform with pleasure, is much greater than is usually supposed. Amid fine scenery, there are few men under fifty who will not walk twelve or fifteen miles in a summer's day with pleasure; and by increasing the daily distance gradually, twenty or thirty miles may soon be attained by any young man in ordinary health, with great satisfaction and with scarce any feeling of fatigue. If, indeed, the pedestrian will walk as if he were blindfolded, he may feel tired at the end of a mile, as he certainly would at the end of an hour if he were to sit still doing nothing; but a moderate appreciation of the beauties of fine scenery will necessarily dispel this fatigue of indolence. A love of nature, though wanting, (which is sometimes the case with the indweller of cities,) is fortunately soon acquired by the pedestrian. Two or three persons of accordant tastes walking together, will greatly enhance each other's pleasures; but even when alone much pleasure may be enjoyed by an active pedestrian. Occasionally one ought to be alone; one should dare to be alone; though, as a general rule, it is better for the social animal that his pleasures should be taken in company with his kind. One advantage of being alone is, that the wayfarer is thrown exclusively upon external nature and chance society, and has a strong inducement to examine them thoroughly; though, on the other hand, occasional tedium is prevented by social travelling, and each one profits by the mental resources of the rest.

Wild and visionary as the scheme may appear, and impracti cable theorists as those may seem who advocate the habit of using the legs, it is notorious to all who have been in Wales or Cumberland, that the impracticable theory is there reduced to practice by many persons every year, with much satisfaction; and nothing is more common in Germany and Switzerland than for young men to take long tours of this description as a part of their education. Some of the German schoolmasters make a point of taking a number of their pupils on walking tours in the holidays, and of stopping to examine minutely whatever is worthy of notice in their progress. And some who have proceeded on these school-walking. tours describe this as the most interesting and instructive portion of their education.

The proper requisites for a journey of this description are seldom known to the young pedestrian until he has made at least one tour, and suffered inconvenience from the want of them. The just medium is rarely preserved; he often encumbers himself with things he does not want, and omits things which are very desirable. The mountainous parts of this country are very subject to heavy showers even in the middle of summer, which renders a change of clothes essentially requisite. A frock-coat or shooting-jacket, with large pockets, cannot be too strongly recommended as the general attire, and the former in preference to the latter, as possessing many of the advantages of a great coat. Two pairs of

very strong shoes are quite indispensable. Very strong cloth boots are perhaps better still; but leather boots are not to be endured, they tire the ancles very soon. Many and many a suckling pedestrian has suffered much, and been put to great shifts in regions where cobblers are few and far between,' by acting on the belief that one pair of light shoes would protect his feet and hold together several weeks among the sharp rocks and wet hill-sides of Wales and Cumberland. For tender feet lamb's wool stockings are strongly recommended; and worsted socks are to be preferred to cotton stockings, as the latter often blister the feet. A strong umbrella, with a comfortable handle, and an unusually long and strong stick with an iron ferule, is a great treasure in climbing and descending mountains, and in warding off the short sharp showers that are so frequent in mountainous regions. A very moderate supply of shirts and stockings will suffice; with these the young traveller usually overstocks himself, not reflecting or not knowing that his clothes may always be washed in a night.

The best map of the district that can be found should be the pedestrian's constant companion; it will prove his guide and comforter on many occasions; long before he has done with it he will deem it well worth its weight in gold. In addition to the above requisites, a pocket compass and an amusing book for reading in an evening or in wet weather, will almost complete the stock of our pedestrian. The sketcher must, however, be allowed his book and pencils, the geologist his hammer, and the botanist his paper and determining book.

A small travelling bag or coat-bag will hold every thing that the pedestrian can need; and it may be sent on from centre to centre by coach, cart, or boy, or will be carried by a guide. The large pockets of the frock-coat or shooting-jacket will stow away conveniently all that is wanted between the centres, although several days should intervene.

Having chosen the country he means to visit, and consulted his acquaintance who have already travelled there, and moreover looked through a few guide-books, our pedestrian should lay down a general plan of operations and fix on his centres. The guide-books, however, must be consulted cautiously, as they are almost always incorrect and incomplete. Hence the necessity of being in the centre and examining for oneself, for a district may contain many sights worth seeing, though it is not frequented by ordinary sight-seers. The grandest scenes are frequently the property of none but the active pedestrian. They are inaccessible to carriage, gig, or horse company, and are therefore unnoticed by guide-books and guides. In proportioning the country to be gone over with the time we can command, allowing two, three, or four days to each of the centres, according to their apparent merits, we must not forget to allow several days in every month as a reserve for unforeseen contingencies and rain. The great error

of travellers is to attempt too much. A quarter of the district well seen will do more good to the traveller than the whole district merely glanced at. Many a traveller has set out with the deter mination to see the whole of North Wales in a fortnight. If he persists in his attempt, walking is altogether out of the question; a few roads are passed over rapidly and uneasily, a few towns are glanced at, and the memory of the journey soon passes away. North Wales would well repay a two months' excursion, or three or four tours of a fortnight. But, says the young tourist, if I do not see North Wales now, I may never have another opportunity. An opportunity of doing what? Not of seeing all North Wales, because, in the limited time, that is impossible, but an opportunity of saying that you have been in half a dozen roads, towns, and villages, extra, and have seen, or rather have whirled by without seeing, a dozen crack views; and have missed seeing well, or understanding or enjoying any one thing or any one district in the progress of the journey. Travelling in the usual superficial mode is always fatiguing, and becomes tiresome and unbearable after the first novelty is worn off. You glide by mountains, and valleys, and lakes, and are delighted; you pass more, and are pleased; but in a little while the novelty is off, and you care no longer for the almost identical and everlasting mountains, lakes, and valleys. The pedestrian does not dash through a country; he dwells in it and on it; and, contemplating at leisure every scene, he not only seizes its beauties, characteristics, and resemblances to kindred spots, but its differences from these, and its remarkable differences at times from itself. He sees something more than a line of filmy forms flitting by, each one a repetition of the rest; and thus his appetite, instead of palling, grows by what it feeds on. He sinks the mere sight-seer into the student of nature, her admirer and friend; his faculties are excited, his soul is raised, and he is storing up rich and lasting adornments and treasures in his mind.

Great importance is attached by some rational travellers to a journal of the scenes they have visited, and of the impression which these scenes have produced, which journal should be written at the earliest possible moment after the scenes have been respectively visited. Not merely regarding the journal as an amusement for friends and as a memento afterwards to themselves of what they have seen, they hold this translation of visual impressions and the coexistent thoughts and feelings into clear language, to be an important incitement to future exertion and excellence. We thus become, as it were, two; for we pass under the review of one calm state of mind, our transactions in a very different condition; we resolve and ruminate over the past; we view objects external and intellectual in new though less vivid. colours; and we strengthen and sharpen our faculties so as to improve still more our future opportunities. At first, however,

our journal is scanty and feeble; we are discontented that we can fix so little of what we have observed and experienced. But we persevere; and floods soon pour from the pen to renew the past and fix it more vividly and permanently in the mind. That which was first a trouble, soon ceases to annoy, and afterwards becomes a delight. The drawing-book becomes another journal for those who can sketch, recalling place and time more vividly than any other.

There can seldom be difficulty in finding the way when the neighbourhood is populous; but this is not the case in thinlypeopled districts; there the traveller has to rely entirely on himself. He must therefore learn that important branch of pedestrianism, the art of always knowing where he is, by carefully studying his map, examining and learning the bearings of the country, keeping in remembrance the forms of the mountains and eminences with due allowance for change of position; and though he must expect to be sadly wrong at first, he will eventually acquire great facility in finding his way through the most trackless wastes with bold and joyous self-reliance, and will thereafter dispense with that great and expensive nuisance, a guide. But if he will not take pains, either from indolence, or from ignorance of the proper mode of setting about it, he will frequently lose himself every half-hour. Some men, though in a new country, never lose themselves; they seem to find their way, as it were, by instinct; yet they are masters of an art that any one, with a little trouble, may attain.

We may take North Wales for the exemplication of some of the above remarks. If the pedestrian enters North Wales by the Holyhead road, and is restricted in time, he may proceed by stage to Llangollen, which will form an admirable centre for three or four days, from its very striking situation. Capel Cerrig, (or Bettws Bridge,) which is in the neighbourhood of the most magnificent of the Welsh mountains, should be the next centre for at least three days. From thence the pedestrian will be well repaid by walking through the vale of Llanrwst to Conway, which will occupy a day or two pleasantly. Bangor and the Menai Bridge form the next good centre. The bridge should be crossed; and the pedestrian will be repaid by continuing his path through Lord Anglesey's park, and then crossing the ferry into the Carnarvon road. Carnarvon will occupy a day at least. Our traveller will then march to Bethgelert by Bettws and Llyn Cwellyn, and, if possible, will go half down the Drws y Coed. Bethgelert is a good centre for several days. The next point, for a day or so, is Tremadoc. After this the embankment should be crossed; and either the Tan y Bwlch or Ffestiniog will form another centre for a few days. Barmouth is worth one day; and Dolgelly well merits three or four. Machynlleth, Aberystwith, Devil's Bridge, and Rhyader are also worthy of being made centres, according to the time which the pedestrian can bestow. An active pedestrian