The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 08, No. 50, December, 1861: A Magazine of Literature, Art, and PoliticsVarious
History
The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 08, No. 50, December, 1861: A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics
Various
American periodicals
Francis Galton, Explorer, and Secretary to the Royal Geographical
Society, we thank you sincerely for teaching us how to travel! Few
persons know the important secrets of how to walk, how to run, how to
ride, how to cook, how to defend, how to ford rivers, how to make rafts,
how to fish, how to hunt, in short, how to do the essential things that
every traveller, soldier, sportsman, emigrant, and missionary should
be conversant with. The world is full of deserts, prairies, bushes,
jungles, swamps, rivers, and oceans. How to "get round" the dangers of
the land and the sea in the best possible way, how to shift and contrive
so as to come out all right, are secrets well worth knowing, and Mr.
Galton has found the key. In this brief article we shall frequently
avail ourselves of the information he imparts, confident that in these
war-days his wise directions are better than fine gold to a man who is
obliged to rough it over the world, no matter where his feet may wander,
his horse may travel, or his boat may sail.
Wherewithal shall a man be clothed? We begin at the beginning with
flannel always. Experience has taught us that flannel next the skin is
indispensable for health to a traveller, and the sick- and dead-lists
always include largely the names of those who neglect this material.
Cotton stands Number Two on the list, and linen nowhere. Only last
summer jolly Tom Bowers got his _quietus_ for the season by getting hot
and wet and cold in one of his splendid Paris linen shirts, and now he
wears calico ones whenever he wishes to "appear proper" at Nahant or
Newport.
"The hotter the ground the thicker your socks," was the advice of an old
traveller who once went a thirty-days' tramp at our side through the
Alp country in summer. We have seen many a city bumpkin start for a
White-Mountain walk in the thinnest of cotton foot-coverings, but we
never knew one to try them a second time.
Stout shoes are preferable to boots always, and a wise traveller never
omits to grease well his leather before and during his journey. Don't
forget to put a pair of old slippers into your knapsack. After a hard
day's toil, they are like magic, under foot. Let us remind the traveller
whose feet are tender at starting that a capital remedy for blistered
feet is to rub them at night with spirits mixed with tallow dropped
from a candle. An old friend of ours thought it a good plan to soap the
inside of the stocking before setting out, and we have seen him break a
raw egg into his shoes before putting them on, saying it softened the
leather and made him "all right" for the day.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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