Nor must I forget to say a word on bivouacs.You come to a milestone on a hill, or some place where deep ways meet under trees; and off goes the knapsack, and down you sit to smoke a pipe in the shade.You sink into yourself, and the birds come round and look at you; and your smoke dissipates upon the afternoon under the blue dome of heaven; and the sun lies warm upon your feet, and the cool air visits your neck and turns aside your open shirt.If you are not happy, you must have an evil conscience.You may dally as long as you like by the roadside.It is almost as if the millennium were arrived, when we shall throw our clocks and watches over the housetop, and remember time and seasons no more.Not to keep hours for a lifetime is, I was going to say, to live for ever.
You have no idea, unless you have tried it, how endlessly long is a summer's day, that you measure out only by hunger, and bring to an end only when you are drowsy.I know a village where there are hardly any clocks, where no one knows more of the days of the week than by a sort of instinct for the fete on Sundays, and where only one person can tell you the day of the month, and she is generally wrong; and if people were aware how slow Time journeyed in that village, and what armfuls of spare hours he gives, over and above the bargain, to its wise inhabitants, I believe there would be a stampede out of London, Liverpool, Paris, and a variety of large towns, where the clocks lose their heads, and shake the hours out each one faster than the other, as though they were all in a wager.And all these foolish pilgrims would each bring his own misery along with him, in a watch-pocket! It is to be noticed, there were no clocks and watches in the much-vaunted days before the flood.It follows, of course, there were no appointments, and punctuality was not yet thought upon.
"Though ye take from a covetous man all his treasure," says Milton, "he has yet one jewel left; ye cannot deprive him of his covetousness." And so I would say of a modern man of business, you may do what you will for him, put him in Eden, give him the elixir of life - he has still a flaw at heart, he still has his business habits.Now, there is no time when business habits are more mitigated than on a walking tour.
And so during these halts, as I say, you will feel almost free.
But it is at night, and after dinner, that the best hour comes.There are no such pipes to be smoked as those that follow a good day's march; the flavour of the tobacco is a thing to be remembered, it is so dry and aromatic, so full and so fine.If you wind up the evening with grog, you will own there was never such grog; at every sip a jocund tranquillity spreads about your limbs, and sits easily in your heart.If you read a book - and you will never do so save by fits and starts - you find the language strangely racy and harmonious;words take a new meaning; single sentences possess the ear for half an hour together; and the writer endears himself to you, at every page, by the nicest coincidence of sentiment.It seems as if it were a book you had written yourself in a dream.To all we have read on such occasions we look back with special favour."It was on the 10th of April, 1798,"says Hazlitt, with amorous precision, "that I sat down to a volume of the new HELOISE, at the Inn at Llangollen, over a bottle of sherry and a cold chicken." I should wish to quote more, for though we are mighty fine fellows nowadays, we cannot write like Hazlitt.And, talking of that, a volume of Hazlitt's essays would be a capital pocket-book on such a journey; so would a volume of Heine's songs; and for TRISTRAMSHANDY I can pledge a fair experience.
