“So I am beginning this evening, exactly a fortnight after my first start from Chester. I purchased the caravan there from a morose individual with one eye, who had had it built with a view to the exhibition of a Wild Man of Patagonia, but said Wild Man having taken it into his head to return to County Cork, where he was born, and the morose individual having no definite idea of a novelty to take his place, the caravan came into the market. Having secured this travelling palace, duly furnished with window-blinds, a piece of carpet, a chair bedstead, a table, a stove, cooking utensils, not to speak of my own artistic paraphernalia, I sent over to Mulrany, Co. Mayo, for my old servant, Tim-na-Chaling, or Tim o’ the Ferry--otherwise Tim Lenney; and with his assistance, when he arrived, I purchased a strong mare at Chester Fair. All these preliminaries being settled, we started one fine morning soon after daybreak, duly bound for explorations along the macadamized highways and byways of North Wales. “I am pleased to say that Tim, after he had recovered the first shock of seeing a peripatetic dwelling-house, took to the idea wonderfully. ‘Sure, it’s just like the ould cabin at home,’ he averred, ‘barrin’ the wheels, and the windies, and the chimley, and the baste to pull it along;’ and I think the resemblance would have been complete in his eyes, if there had only been two or three pigs to trot merrily behind the back door. As for myself, I took to the nomad life as naturally as if I had never in my life been in a civilized habitation. To be able to go where one pleased, to dawdle as one pleased, to stop and sleep where one pleased, was certainly a new sensation. My friends, observing my sluggish ways, had often compared me to that interesting creature, the snail; now the resemblance was complete, for I was a snail indeed, with my house comfortably fixed upon my shoulders, crawling tranquilly along. “Of course the caravan has its inconveniences. Inside, to quote the elegant simile of our progenitors, there is scarcely room enough to swing a cat in; and when my bed is made, and Tim’s hammock is swung just inside the door, the place forms the tiniest of sleeping-chambers. Then our cooking arrangements are primitive, and as Tim has no idea whatever of the culinary art, beyond being able to boil potatoes in their skins, and make very doubtful ‘stirabout,’ there is a certain want of variety in our repasts. To break the monotony of this living I endeavour, whenever we come to a town with a decent hotel in it, to take a square meal away from home.