“This is particularly humiliating, because it happens to be true. We certainly do trudge, and are therefore properly, though rather unceremoniously, called trudgers, or ‘trodgers.’ But we sink to a lower depth yet a little further on. We are viewed as objects of pity. It is a fine evening. We stop and lean against a bank by the road‐side to look at the sunset. An old woman comes tottering by on high pattens, very comfortably and nicely clad. She sees our knapsacks, and instantly stops in front of us, and begins to moan lamentably. Not understanding at first what this means, we ask respectfully if she feels at all ill? ‘Ah! poor fellows, poor fellows!’ she sighs in answer, ‘obliged to carry all your baggage on your own backs! very hard! poor lads! very hard indeed!’ and the good old soul goes away groaning over our evil plight, and mumbling something which sounds very like an assurance that she has no money to give us. “In another part of the county we rise again gloriously in worldly consideration. We pass a cottage; a woman looks out after us over the low garden wall, and rather hesitatingly calls us back. I approach her first, and am thus saluted: ‘If you please, sir, what have you got to sell?’ Again, an old man meets us on the road, stops, cheerfully taps our knapsacks with his stick, and says, ‘Aha! you’re tradesmen, eh! things to sell? I say, have you got any tea?’ (pronounced _tay_). Further on we approach some miners breaking ore. As we pass by we hear one asking amazedly, ‘What have they got to sell in those things on their backs?’ and another answering, in the prompt tones of a guesser who is convinced that he guesses right, ‘Guinea‐pigs!’ “It is, unfortunately, impossible to convey to the reader any adequate idea by mere description of the extraordinary gravity of manner, the looks of surprise, and the tones of conviction which accompanied these various popular conjectures as to our calling and station in life, and which added immeasurably at the time to their comic effect. Curiously enough, whenever they took the form of questions, any jesting in returning an answer never seemed either to be appreciated or understood by the country people. Serious replies fared much the same fate as jokes. Everybody asked whether we could pay for riding, and nobody believed we preferred walking, if we could. So we soon gave up any idea of affording any information at all, and walked through the country comfortably as mappers, trodgers, tradesmen, guinea‐pig mongers, and poor back‐burdened vagabond lads, altogether, or one at a time, just as the peasantry pleased.”