have been a blank. At last, on a stoppage at
some station, I remarked desperately, scraping
the gelid rime from the carriage window,
that ''it froze:" whereupon, speaking for the
first and last time, he responded solemnly
"Hard;" immediately afterwards, drew from
underneath the seat a black cowskin travelling-
bag, as hard, cold, and silent as himself;
and slid out of the carriage. Some stony
female drapery, surmounted by the ugliest
bonnet that ever existed, was waiting for him
on the platform; and my hard friend went on
his way, and I saw him no more. I would
rather not dine with him and the drapery,
next Christmas day.

Yet there is much virtue in twenty miles.
Along the dreariest railway; up to the
loneliest turnpike road; across the darkest,
barrenest rainiest sea; there are to the observant
twenty score of lessons in every mile of the
twenty. To bring this enjoyment to every door
I would have all travellers taught to draw.
I would not insist that they should become
proficients in Poonah painting, or that they
should attend Mr. Grant's lectures upon
anatomy: I would not make it a sine qua non
that they should visit Rome, and copy all the
frescoes in the Loggie and Stanze of the
Vatican; but some rudimentary education in
design and colour, I would have given to
every man, woman, and child (able and willing
to learn) intending to travel twenty miles.
He who can draw, be it ever so badly, has a
dozen extra preference shares in every
landscape—shares that are perpetually paying
golden dividends. He can not only see the
fields, and the mountains, the rivers and the
brooks, but he can eat and drink them. The
flowers are a continual feast; and when the
rain is on them, and after that the sun, they
may be washed down with richest wines,
hippocras, hydromel, aqua-d'oro, what you will.
Every painter is, to a certain extent, a poet;
and I would have every poet taught to paint.
Charles Lamb asked, "why we should not say
grace, and ask a blessing before going out for
a walk, as before sitting down to dinner?"
Why should we not? The green meat of
the meadows is as succulent a banquet to the
mind, as ever the accloyed Lucullus stretched
himself upon his couch to devour. To the
artistic eye there are inexhaustible pleasures
to be found in the meanest objects. There
are rich studies of colour in a brick wall; of
form in every hedge and stunted pollard; of
light and shade in every heap of stones on
the Macadamised road; of Pre-Raphaelite
stippling and finish in every tuft of herbage
and wild flowers. The shadow cast by a pig-
stye upon a road, by an omnibus driver's
reins on his horses' backs; the picturesque
form of a donkey cart; the rags of a travelling
tinker; the drapery folds in a petticoat
hung out to dry on the clothes' line in the
back yard; the rugged angularities of the
lumps of coal in the grate; the sharp lights
upon the decanter on the table at home, all
these are fruitful themes for musing and
speculative pleasure. The fisherman who can
draw, has ten times more enjoyment in his
meditative pursuit than the inartistic angler.
An acquaintance with art takes roods,
perches, furlongs from the journey; for
however hard the ground may be; however
dreary the tract of country through which
we journey; though our twenty miles lie in
the whole distance between two dead walls;
have we not always that giant scrap-book,
the sky above us?—the sky with its clouds
that sometimes are dragonish; with its
vapours sometimes—

Like a bear or lion,
A tower'd citadel or a pendant rock,
A forked mountain or blue promontory
With trees upon 't that nod unto the world,
And mock our eyes with air.

—the sky with all its glorious varieties of
colour, its rainy fringes, its changing forms
and aspects? I would not have a man look
upon the heavens in a purely paint-pot
light. I would not have him consider
every sky as merely so much Naples
yellow, crimson lake, and cobalt blue,
with flake-white clouds spattered over it by
a dexterous movement of the pallet-knife;
but I would have him bring an artist's eye
and an artist's mind to the heavens above.
So shall his twenty miles be one glorious
National Gallery of art, and every square
plot of garden-ground a Salon Carré, and
every group of peasant children a
Glyptothek.

There are many many twenty miles that
have left green memories to me, and that
have built themselves obelisks surmounted by
immortelles in the cemetery of my soul.
Twenty miles through the fat green flats of
Belgium, enlivened by the horn of the
railway guard, the sour beer, the lowly pipe, the
totally incomprehensible, but no less humorous,
Low Dutch jokes of Flemish dames in
lace caps and huge gold ear-rings, and bloused
farmers, and greasy curés. Twenty miles
through that God's garden, that delicious
lake country of England, in the purple
shadow of the great crags and fells. Twenty
miles along the dusty roads of Picardy with
the lumbering diligence, the loquacious
conducteur, the flying beggars, the long, low
stone cottages, the peasantry in red night-
caps and sabots, singeing pigs in the wide
unhedged fields. Twenty miles along the trim
English Queen's highway; on the box-seat of
the Highflier coach, with the driver who knew
so much about every gentleman's seat we
passed, and had such prodigious stories to tell
about horses present and past; with the
comfortable prospect of the snug hotel and
the comfortable dinner at our journey's end.
Twenty miles through the Kentish hop-
gardens and orchards radiant with their
spring-snow of blossoms. Twenty miles
through the grim black country round