A morning walk is worth the effort of getting up. Much would I give to have been of that party which, in sixteen hundred and something, "stretched their legs up Tottenham Hill towards the Thatched House in Hoddesdon on that fine fresh May morning"--I mean Messrs _Piscator_, _Venator_, and _Auceps_. I should have been _Peregrinator_; and whereas _Piscator_ praised the water, and _Venator_ the land, and _Auceps_ the air, as the element in which each respectively traded, I should have praised all three, for the pedestrian's pleasures derive from no single one. And to walking I should have applied dear old Izaak Walton's own phrase, that it, like angling, was "most honest, ingenious, quiet, and harmless."[13] Upon quiet, Walton sets extraordinary stress. Quoting with approbation the learned Peter du Moulin, he tells us that "when God intended to reveal any future events or high notions to his prophets, he then carried them either to the deserts or the sea-shore, that having so separated them from amidst the press of people and business, and the cares of the world, he might settle their mind in a quiet repose, and there make them fit for revelation."[14] It is strange that Izaak Walton, himself apparently a most quiet and contented old man (he lived to be ninety-one), should, writing at sixty years of age, and two hundred and fifty years ago--when I suppose there was no faster or noisier thing than a galloping horse--should so insistently preach and teach quiet. Yet, perhaps we must remember that he lived through the Great Rebellion. The last words of his book--and he puts them into his own, _Piscator's_, mouth--are: "And [let the blessing of St Peter's Master be] upon all that are lovers of virtue, and dare trust in his providence, and be quiet, and go a-angling. Study to be Quiet.--1 Thess. iv. 11." Why, I do not exactly know, but there is to me something straightforward, honest, and simple-minded in the idea of ending a book with the words "and go a-angling." This and the quotation from 1 Thess. iv. 11 sum up for me the character of the man and the book. § 20 Walking rivals angling in demanding and engendering quiet. "To make a walk successful," says another dear old gentleman, writing at the same time of life but in modern times, "mind and body should be free of burthen."[15] The true and abiding joy of walking is in calm. "The mood," says John Burroughs, "in which you set out on a spring or autumn ramble or a sturdy winter walk ... is the mood in which your best thoughts and impulses come to you.... Life is sweet in such moods, the Universe is complete, and there is no failure or imperfection anywhere."[16] Only Nature can induce such moods-- "Dear Nature is the kindest mother still,"