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THE TRUE TRAVELLERS AIM happens is to be had at a distance only—a picture gallery, a gaming-table, or a good climate in January— but they would like it as well or better if they could find it nearer home, whilst as for the excursionist, who in the course of a single holiday is ' personally conducted' through India, Japan, and America, it can hardly be said that he has ever left home at all. He has virtually sat still and looked at a moving peep-show. The globe has gone round before him, he has not gone round the globe. But the true traveller seeks precisely what the excursionist dreads, and what those who travel with a definite object are indifferent to. It is a sense of escape from all that is homely and habitual—from an earth and a heaven grown sordid with the dust of vain associations. It is the refreshment like that felt by a fevered cheek when a pillow is turned and the touch of the linen is cool again, produced in the mind by new colours on the mountains, new scents in the atmosphere, forests with unknown borders, roads that lead into mystery, castles that rise from the mists of an enchanted past, and men whose aims and characters one cannot despise, not knowing them. Amongst influences such as these there steals upon the true traveller a delightful sense of being born again to youth. Once more, for the time, he is buoyant with bright illusions ; the world is once more fresh to him as it was to the eyes of twenty ; life is once more a bubble iridescent with all the colours of hope. Is the reader a person who can understand this ? Β 2

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