There is something about foreign travel, my dear Brethren, which seems, as it were, a positive physical necessity to our eager and high-wrought generation. At specified times of the year we hunt, or debate; we attend to our affairs in the city, or we occupy our minds with the guidance of State. The ball-room, the drawing-room, the club, each have their proper season. In our games football gives place to cricket, and the deep bay of the faithful hound yields with the advancing season to the sharp crack of the Winchester, as the grouse, the partridge, or the very kapper-capercailzie itself falls before the superior intelligence of man. One fashion also will succeed another, and in the mysterious development of the years--a development not entirely under the guidance of our human wills--the decent croquet-ball returns to lawns that had for so long been strangers to aught but the fierce agility of tennis. So in the great procession of the times and the seasons, there comes upon us the time for travel. It is not (my dear Brethren), it is not in the winter when all is covered with a white veil of snow--or possibly transformed with the marvellous effects of thaw; it is not in the spring when the buds begin to appear in the hedges, and when the crocus studs the spacious sward in artful disorder and calculated negligence--no it is not then--the old time of Pilgrimage,[69] that our positive and enlightened era chooses for its migration.[70] It is in the burning summer season, when the glare of the sun is almost painful to the jaded eye of the dancer, when the night is shortest and the day longest, that we fly from these inhospitable shores and green fields of England. And whither do we fly? Is it to the cool and delicious north, to the glaciers of Greenland, or to the noble cliffs and sterling characters of Orkney? Is it to Norway? Can it be to Lapland? Some perhaps, a very few, are to be found journeying to these places in the commodious and well-appointed green boats of Mr. Wilson, of Tranby Croft. But, alas! the greater number leave the hot summer of England for the yet more torrid climes of Italy, Spain, the Levant and the Barbary coast. Negligent of the health that is our chiefest treasure, we waste our energies in the malaria of Rome, or in Paris poison our minds with the contempt aroused by the sight of hideous foreigners. Let me turn from this painful aspect of a question which certainly presents nobler and more useful issues. It is most to our purpose, perhaps, in a certain fashion; it is doubtless more to our purpose in many ways to consider on an occasion such as this the moral aspects of foreign travel, and chief among these I reckon those little points of mere every day practice, which are of so much greater importance than the rare and exaggerated acts to which our rude ancestors gave the name of Sins.