"Traveling afoot"--the very words start the imagination out upon the road! One's nomad ancestors cry within one across centuries and invite to the open spaces. Many to whom this cry comes are impelled to seek the mountain paths, the forest trails, the solitudes or wildernesses coursed only by the feet of wild animals. But to me the black or dun roads, the people's highways, are the more appealing--those strips or ribbons of land which is still held in common, the paths wide enough for the carriages of the rich and the carts of the poor to pass each other, the roads over which they all bear their creaking burdens or run on errands of mercy or need, but preferably roads that do not also invite the flying automobiles, whose occupants so often make the pedestrian feel that even these strips have ceased to be democratic. My traveling afoot, for many years, has been chiefly in busy city streets or in the country roads into which they run--not far from the day's work or from the thoroughfares of the world's concerns. Of such journeys on foot which I recall with greatest pleasure are some that I have made in the encircling of cities. More than once I have walked around Manhattan Island (an afternoon's or a day's adventure within the reach of thousands), keeping as close as possible to the water's edge all the way round. One not only passes through physical conditions illustrating the various stages of municipal development from the wild forest at one end of the island to the most thickly populated spots of the earth at the other, but one also passes through diverse cities and civilizations. Another journey of this sort was one that I made around Paris, taking the line of the old fortifications, which are still maintained, with a zone following the fortifications most of the way just outside, inhabited only by squatters, some of whose houses were on wheels ready for "mobilization" at an hour's notice. (It was near the end of that circumvallating journey, about sunset, on the last day of an old year, that I saw my first airplane rising like a great golden bird in the aviation field, and a few minutes later my first elongated dirigible--precursors of the air armies). I have read that the Scotch once had a custom of making a yearly pilgrimage or excursion around their boroughs or cities--"beating the bounds", they called it, following the boundaries that they might know what they had to defend. It is a custom that might profitably be revived. We should then know better the cities in which we live. We should be stronger, healthier, for such expeditions, and the better able and the more willing to defend our boundaries.