happened, for reasons of State, that you did not go, after all. Still, you had had your hour. Pro tem., at any rate, you had divinely lived. To put it at the lowest, you had, like the three famous sportsmen of song, powler't up and down a bit and had a rattling day with the home railway time-tables, tasting, as you looked up train by train, the delights of passing the hedged closes of tasselled hops in Kent or the blue bloom of the moors about your home in Yorkshire. Well, if that was better than nothing, why not go in for such fragments of joy, on a system? The plan is to say to yourself in a firm tone that on such or such a date you are going to some longed-for place; then to make all the fond mental preparations of good travellers, tracking every mile on the map, forming conjectural visions of what you would see from this point and from that; and then, at the last moment, not to go at all, being quite unable to afford it, as you had always known. One solid merit in this sort of travel is that the fares cannot be raised against you, as has so often and so lamentably been done to the impoverishment or immobilisation of those who travel in the flesh. Another advantage is that it overcomes the difficulty which so many of us find in leaving our work for more than a month, perhaps even a fortnight, at a time. From the journey over the Andes, for instance, from the Argentine to the Chilean coast, most of us are inexorably barred by iron laws of time, space and finance. Yet is it evidently a delectable passage; and by a proper use of South American time-tables you can adjust consummately the timing of your transit across the spacious place of origin of bully beef to the iced spike of Aconcagua or the snowy dome of Chimborazo; freely you choose the hour at which it will give you the most exquisite vibrations to stare for the first time at the Pacific; sagaciously you distribute your time between the Arctic, the sub-Arctic, the temperate, the sub-tropical and the tropical zones of the rapid western slope, right down from the high ice to the palms and the warm surf. Much valuable time, again, may doubtless be saved, when visiting New Zealand and crossing her Alps from the side which streams with glaciers to the side tangled with almost tropical jungle, if you have disengaged yourself in time from the conventional impression that your mere bodily presence is required. And yet, yet I fear I am a carnal man; the homeliest meal of new places seen with the vulgar bodily eye-a mere dish of herbs-allures me more than the lordliest of Barmecide banquets, even the stalled oxen of fancy. And yet, again, there may be something in it if all actual travel, the positive transport of the rejoicing tenement of clay, be wholly precluded. It may be better to have counted visionary chickens, and not hatched them out, than never to have counted chickens at all. And perhaps it is what we may all have to come to, in time, however stoutly we have preferred the heard melody, while we could get it, to any unheard superior. T CHAPTER III UP TO THE ALPS to reside In thrilling region of thick-ribbed ice! I HE evil that wars do may live on long after the good has been duly interred at Versailles or some other 66 seemly necropolis. Here, as I write, is another August slipping away to its close; morning and evening, sure as dayspring and Vesper, a boat train is steaming away out of Victoria station. And I not there! And I not there!" as "Ionica " Cory sang of the fun that would still be going when he was dead. The gods or devils that rule over dollar and sterling and mark, as wanton boys over flies, killing one for their sport and preserving and fattening another, have once more settled our hash. Supreme as the roll of this planet, that stonily keeps down the rations of comfort for marmots and men, some remote Force to which we have not been wittingly rude has posted Cherubims to head us off from the Alps. It feels as if the earth had taken a heavy list to one side so as not to hold us up the right way to the sun. This morning, if currencies had not gone to the dogs, partner and self might have been ringing the bell, so to speak, at the front door of heaven. The jocund dawn might have seen us leap from the train at Pontarlier, Vallorbes-the very names of the junctions are tuneful and fair; like Fontarabia, Vallombrosa, Bendemeer, they set horns blowing; they make roses swing in your mind. Our material part would be flinging itself in force on the buffet's thick-lipped white cups of hot coffee, our subtler essences would be drinking as deep of the outward-rippling folds of the forested Jura all round us, its pines kneaded up with the clouds; in the slow expulsive puffs of our engine, now shunting the Berne or Bâle bit of the train away from the other bit, a new timbre would make itself heard, a kind of percipient sniff, a salute to the nimble high air. Lives there a man with nose so dead that, on one of those fine scenting mornings on which a holiday always begins, he could not smell the Alps from Mulhouse or Grenoble? very engines of this world would shame him. The And then those lobbies and ante-rooms of the mansion of joy-the Swiss towns. Ten years! And to my waking eye Once more the roofs of Berne appear! 66 If only they did! Or those of Lucerne, or of Interlaken! Give us any the veriest seat of the "tourist industry whichever may be its Black Country's champion black diamond, its counterpart of our Widnes or Wigan. "Just let me get up again on to the earth," says a distinguished dead person in Homer; better a sweated farm hand on a poky farm there than king of all the dead that ever died." Faint and far the Jungfrau snows may be, as seen from the terrace at Berne; yet they are there; the beloved, if not in the room, is still in the house, a presence diffused and irradiant, animating the air of its chambers. But give 66 us, if any choice between the dear seats of Philistine joy be permitted us, the Lake of Geneva. "Without my William," the enamoured maiden asks, in Scott's early poem, what were heaven?" A gap even greater than Williamlessness-because it affects the happiness of a larger number of persons-is to be noted in many extant descriptions of Paradise. Nothing is said of a site for the Lake of Geneva. If this be no false alarm, many good Britons are in for a serious disappointment. On some the blow will have fallen already. You may have seen the lake first on your way to Zermatt or Arolla or some other seat of the inner and major joys of the Alps. Perhaps you were apt at the time, in the pride of your youth, to speak a little cavalierly of Nyon and Vevey, Clarens and Montreux, with their Babylonish hotels, their pensionnaires and dress baskets, and cohorts of counts disguised as hall porters, and iron garden chairs beyond number, scrunching the dry greyish pebbles of terraces hot with massed magnolias and dahlias. Still, the train journey from Paris that day had been dusty and long: now, your first holiday dinner consumed, you possessed your soul in cool freshness and peace, smoking perhaps in the garden, lately laid waste, where Gibbon completed his stout attempt to put up something as durable as the opposite hills of Savoy. With a good show of stars overhead, and the glow-worms alight in the grass all around, and the lake, far below, all a-twinkle with lights fixed or shifting, it seemed pretty good to be there, even then. Or you had climbed hard for a month and came back, with all your exultant fitness astir in your muscles |