the follies that press the charm of existence out of the hearts of thousands, and make the country often a purgatory where it might be a paradise. There is another cause which diminishes in a great degree the enjoyment that might be found in the country, and that is, the almost total cessation of walking amongst the wealthy. Since the universal use of carriages, for anything I can see, thousands of people might just as well be born without legs at all. It would be easy to move them from the bed to the carriage,--thence to the dinner-table, and again to bed. In the country, and especially in the country not far from towns, how rarely do you see the rich except in their luxurious carriages! How rarely do you meet them walking, or even on horseback, as you used to do! Sir Roger de Coverley rode on horseback to the assizes in his day--were he living now, he would roll there in his carriage--lest some one should imagine that he had mortgaged his estate, and laid down his carriage in retrenchment. During the twelve months that I have resided in this neighbourhood--a neighbourhood studded all over with wealthy houses, nothing has surprised me, and the friends who have visited me here, so much as the great rarity of seeing any of the wealthy classes on their legs. With the exception of the Queen and her attendant ladies, who during the then Princess’s abode at Claremont, might be every day met in the winter, walking in frost and snow, and facing the sharpest winds of the sharpest weather, I scarcely remember to have met half-a-dozen of the wealthy classes on foot a mile from their residences. And yet what splendid, airy heaths, what delicious woods, what nooks of bowery foliage, what views into far landscapes, are there all around! It is true, as some of them have observed, that they walk in their own grounds; but what grounds, however beautiful, can compensate for the fresh feeling of the heath and the down; for the dim solemnity of the wild wood; for open, breezy hills, the winding lane, the sight of rustic cottages by the forest side, the tinkle of the herd or the sheep-bell, and all the wild sounds and aspects of earth and heaven, to be met with only in the free regions of nature? They who neglect to walk, or confine their strolls merely to the lawn and the shrubbery, lose nine-tenths of the enjoyment of the country. Those young men, whom it is a pleasure to see with their knapsacks on their backs ranging over moor and mountain, by lake or ocean, in Scotland or Wales, taste more of the life of life in a few summer months than many dwellers in the country ever dream of through their whole existence. I speak advisedly, for I traverse the country in all directions, let me be where I will; and if any _ladies_ think themselves too delicate for walking, I can point them out delicate ladies too that have made excursions on foot through mountain regions of five hundred miles at a time, and recur to