And remember, this is a legitimate remedy, preposterous though it may sound. So many prescriptions for the heartache are illegitimate--stimulants, or narcotics, or stimulant-narcotics: sport, work, play, hazardous adventure, the gaming-table or the betting-ring, to say nothing of the cup that inebriates but does not cheer. A country walk is but "letting Nature have her way," is but giving an opportunity for the _vis medicatrix naturæ_. Try it; do not, like Naaman, prate of Abana and Pharpar, rivers of Damascus, but go wash in Jordan seven times. XXVII Is Walking Selfish? § 68 But is it not a selfish pleasure, this that is to be gained by rural peregrination, I shall be asked. Bluntly I answer, No. A country walk makes one blithesome; and than blithesomeness there is no greater foe to selfishness. Had Bacon not declared that gardening was the purest of human pleasures, I should be inclined to give the palm to walking. We are too gregarious. We live too much in herds, and we consider too much what the herd will think of our petty individual ways. Civilisation is not an unmixed boon, and artificial combinations of men taint the natural simplicity of the race. In combining together for mutual protection against a common foe we forget that sometimes a man's foes are those of his own household. Each feels that the eyes of the world are upon him, and always he is subconsciously occupied in conforming himself to the world. A political community not only curtails the individual's freedom of action for the good of the whole, it curtails also his freedom of thought and manner. What is the result? The result is that "self-consciousness" has taken on a new and sinister meaning. Instead of denoting the especial and distinguishing characteristic of emancipated reason, self-consciousness has come to denote a painful cognisance of the fetters that our fellow-reasoners have put upon reason. We are the slaves of ourselves. Only the child and the savage are free to "live deliberately," to "live deep and suck out all the marrow of life." Long before the child has developed into the grown, and the savage into the civilised, man, that silent and unseen but tireless architect, Convention, builds about him an invisible but infrangible wall of reserve: his spontaneous emotions, his natural affections, his aspirations and ambitions, must filter through crevices and peepholes instead of exhaling from him as a rich and original aura.