_I have wrought upon this work for many months, in storm and shine; and always, when this crowded hive was most dreary, the sapphire seas, the bland airs, the wild moors of that western land have presented themselves to memory, and at the same time have both cheered and filled with regrets one who works indeed amid the shoutings and the tumults of the streets, but whose wish is for the country-side. You reside in mitigated rusticity; I, in expiation of some sin committed, possibly, in by-past cycles and previous incarnations, in midst of these roaring millions; and truly I love not so much company._ _Yours very faithfully_, CHARLES G. HARPER. PREFACE [Illustration] _Before I set about the overhauling of my notes made on this tour--afoot, afloat, awheel--from London to Land’s End, I confided to an old friend my intention of publishing an account of these wanderings. Now, no one has such a mean idea of one’s capacities as an old friend, and so I was by no means surprised when he flouted my project. I have known the man for many years; and as the depth of an old friend’s scorn deepens with time, you may guess how profound by now is his distrust of my powers._ _“Better hadn’t,” said he._ _“And why not?” said I._ _“See how often it has been done,” he replied. “Why should you do it again, after Elihu Burritt, after Walter White, and L’Estrange, and those others who have wearied us so often with their dull records of uneventful days?”_ _“I do it,” I said, “for the reason that poets write poetry, because I must. Out upon your Burritts and the rest of them; I don’t know them, and don’t want to--yet. When the book is finished, then they shall be looked up for the sake of comparison; at present, I keep an open mind on the subject.”_ _And I kept it until to-day. I have just returned from a day with these authors at the British Museum, and I feel weary. Probably most of them are dead by this time, as dead as their books, and nothing I say now can do them any harm; so let me speak my mind._ _First I dipped into the pages of that solemn Yankee prig, Burritt, and presently became bogged in stodgy descriptions of agriculture, and long-drawn parallels between English and American husbandry. Stumbling out of these sloughs, one comes headlong upon that true republican’s awkward raptures over titled aristocracy. The rest is all a welter of cheap facts and interjectional essays in the obvious._ _Then I essayed upon Walter White’s_ “Londoners Walk to the Land’s End”--_horribly informative, and with an appalling poverty of epithet. This dreadful tourist was used (he says) to sing and recite to the rustics whom he met._ _“’Tis a dry day, master,” say the thirsty countrymen to him; while he, heedless of their artful formula, calls not for the flowing bowl, but strikes an attitude, and recites to them a ballad of Macaulay’s!_