As a rather less strenuous form of exercise than eighteenth-century cricket many men kept themselves fit by walking. Wordsworth points out that “in 1799 Daniel Wilson writes to his father, that very few days passed when he did not walk for about an hour.” This exceedingly gentle form of pedestrianism was only an end of century hobby. Earlier on men seem to have been made of sterner stuff. The Greek Professor at Aberdeen, Dr Thomas Blackwell, wrote to Warburton at Oxford in 1736 to beg him to accompany Middleton and their common friend, Mr Gale, in a tour in Scotland for two months in the summer during the long vacation. “In 1742 Tho. Townson started for a three years’ tour in France, Italy, Germany, and Holland, with Dawkins, Drake, and Holdsworth. On his return from the continent,” the quotation is from Christopher Wordsworth, “he resumed in College (Magdalen) the arduous and respectable employment of tuition, in which he had been engaged before he went abroad. William Wordsworth took walking tours in France 1790-91 (at a time no less awfully interesting than that which the country has now been passing through) before and after taking his degree.” In the first instance he was accompanied by his college friend Robert Jones, with about twenty pounds apiece in their pockets. “Our coats which we had made light on purpose for that journey are of the same piece,” he wrote, “and our manner of carrying our bundles which is upon our heads, with each an oak stick in our hands, contributes not a little to the general curiosity which we seem to excite.” [Illustration: A DUCK HUNT.] Had they but carried more money and travelled in luxury they would not have been unlike the present-day Rhodes men, whose custom it is during vacation to scour the ends of the earth.