The Daily News. FRIDAY, JANUARY 10, 1913. THE VAGROM MAN.

Taranaki Daily News, Volume LV, Issue 198, 10 January 1913, Page 4

The Daily News. FRIDAY, JANUARY 10, 1913. THE VAGROM MAN.

In these days of motor ears and electric trams people are rapidly beginning to forget that there is such an art as walking, and it threatens to become before very jong as lost as the Tales of Miletus or those of little Jio-peep's 'sheep. In the gathering tide of amuse- ' ments—for walking, after all. is really less an art than an amusement —walking perhaps has a greater claim upon our consideration than all other divev»ions. It is a double-barrelled pleasure, recreative for the mind as well as for the body, and yet we are rapidly allowing it to fall into desuetude. In the general chase after artificial pleasure and the search for something stimulating and pii|uanL—however short in duration—we highly-strung and sensitive folk of to-day display an increasing tendency to divorce Dame Nature from her simplicity. In this we are aided and abetted to a certain extent by the ease and rapidity of modern forms of transit, but the fact remains that we seem to no longer see eye to eye with lluskin in his statement that to any person who has all his senses about him. ;i. quiet walk along not more than ten or twelve miles of road a day is the most invigorating of a'il forms of travelling. Walking is usually associated with the country, and it is from this happy asso-

eiation that one derives true relaxation—peace of mind, body and soul. But the average citizen is becoming every day more and more like the individual 0. Henry had in mind when he wrote: "He was a man who hud trod asphalt all his life, and who had never looked on 'bucolic scenes except with sensations of disgust from the windows of express trains." Our great essayists alive, doubtless, to the modern tiend, have written much of the exquisite joys of walking and of walking tours, and, quoting at random, Thoroau and Stevenson might be mentioned, or, to go farther back, Haz'iitt. "Give me," remarks Tlazlitt in his "On Going a Journey," "the clear .blue sky over my head and the green turf beneath my feet, a winding road before mo. and a three hours' march to dinner—and then to thinking. It is hard if I cannot start some game on those lone heaths. I laugh, I run, I leap, I sing for joy!" Indeed, one can scarce read a treatisa from the pen of one of these writers on walking, without becoming an enthusiastic convert, at least for the time being, and in theory, if not in practice, to the fast-dwindling army of walkers. Now if only Nature lovers "caught on" to the idea, their first move would be to form walking clubs and organise ambitious tours in company with a number of their fel'.ows, and endeavor to break records, and thus lose more than half the subtle, pleasures of walking. Stevenson put it aptly when he says that, to be properly enjoyed, a walking tour should be undertaken alone. "If you go in a company, or even in pairs, it is," he says, "no longer a walking tour in anything but name. A walking tour should be undertaken alone, because freedom is of the essence; because you should be able to stop and go on, and follow this way or that; and because you make your own pace, and neither trot alongside a champion walker, nor mince in time with a girl. You must be open to all impressions and let your thoughts take color from what you can see. There should be no cackle of voices at your elbow, to jar on the meditative silence of the morning. And so long as a man is reasoning he cannot surrender" himself to that fine intoxication that eomes of much emotion in the open air, that begins in a sort of dazzle and sluggishness of the brain, and ends in a peace that passes comprehension." Again, the same writer remarks that there is no time when business habits, at times so hard to shake off, arc more mitigated than on a walking tour. There are no pipes to be smoked such aa those that follow a good day's march; no meal so appetising; no book so harmonising. Your muscles are so agreeably slack, you feel so clean and strong and so idle, that whether you move or sit still, whatever you do is done with pride and a kingly sort of pleasure. You fall in talk with anyone, wise or foolish. diunk or sober! The surface only of the joys and exhilarations of walking has been skimmed. To be appreciated they must be tasted of, and it is to be regretted that we are so blind to what walking, in the true sense of the word, holds for us. But the "city has gobbled us up," and cut us too exactly to its pattern and stamped us with its brand. As has been said before, it is an evil age for the gipsily inclined among men, and the vagrom man, despite the immense opportunities that Taranaki offers him, is really quite a rara avis in our midst.