that such a man could not go walking about for ever, for the benefit of people who are not gifted with legs so stout and eyes so discerning," I mean that erudite nomad, George Borrow[9]; of Senancour, who in his journeys afoot experienced _illusions imposantes_[10]; of Sir Leslie Stephen[11]--of these and many another lover of outdoor Nature it is needless to speak. IV My Earliest Walks § 4 The earliest walks which my own memory recalls were rather curious ones. We were in Burma, a country in which, in the dry season, exercise must be taken about daybreak or sundown, or not at all. We walked--and before breakfast; and always we were accompanied by a pet cat, a sharp-nosed "toddy-cat" (so they called him), indigenous to the country, and not unlike the American raccoon, very affectionate and very cleanly. But the cat was not our only companion, for just overhead, screaming threateningly, were always also, and all the way, a flock of kites--the mortal enemies, so I must suppose, of Hokey-Pokey (thus was named our 'coon-cat pet).--Now I come to think of it, it must have been a funny sight: a family afoot; in the rear an impudent cat with tail erect; overhead irate and clamorous kites. V India § 5 My next walks were on the Nilgiris, the Blue Mountains of India. Ah, they were beautiful! The seven or eight thousand feet of altitude tempered the tropical sun, the mornings were fresh and invigorating--your cold bath was really cold, and spring seemed perennial. Hedges of cluster-roses bloomed the whole year round; on the orange-trees were leaf, bud, bloom and ripening fruit, also the whole year round. Heliotrope grew in gigantic bushes that were pruned with garden clippers. Through the grounds about the house flowed a babbling brook, widening here and there into quiet ponds, from the sedgy edges of which green-stemmed arums raised their graceful cups. In the deep valleys grew the tree-fern; here and there a playful waterfall gushed from the hill; and everything was green.--No; two things were not green: the one, the hot and hazy plains, shimmering in yellow dust as seen from the shoulder of a hill; the other, the gigantic Droog, a mighty mountain mass rearing its head, sombre and silent, on the other side of a deep ravine. The Droog was purple: not with the pellucid purple of a petal, but with the misty blue-black purple of the bloom of a plum.--Ah, it was all very good. Never shall I forget the convolvulus that decorated the northern verandah before the heat of day shrivelled the delicate corollas. There were rich bass purples that stirred one like the tones of an organ. There were soprano pinks so exquisite that a _pianissimo_ trill on a violin seemed crude in comparison. Their beauty was all but audible: it penetrated the senses and reached in to some inner subtile psychic centre, there to move emotions which must remain unsaid.--This was in India.--There is something perfervid in the fascination of the East.