Walking is one of the many things whose history is not to be found in the historians. Even since they constituted themselves a distinct class of writers and began to see themselves in the part—that is, ever since Herodotus—history has been mainly a catalogue of abstractions, interesting and even thrilling, but (to the walker) mostly irrelevant. It is no doubt a good thing to have the wars and political convulsions and trade movements and Gunpowder Plots and Acts of Parliament and executions of the various periods accurately recorded; it is probably a good thing to have the pots and hair-ornaments and tombs of our distant ancestors excavated and labelled. But the moment we begin to ask about the ordinary man of each period, what he was doing and what he was thinking and whether he liked walking, we are answered only in abstract terms. The archaeologist can only say that he used pots of the Protomycenean period; the historian can only say that about seven thousand of him were killed in battles, and that most of him began about this time to grasp the first principles of commerce, and that all of him was subject to several conflicting economic tendencies not yet completely disentangled. The man himself is still hidden from our gaze.

Literature is our only help. Once a man sits down not to record facts and analyse tendencies in what he conceives to be a scientific historical spirit, but to write about the things which really interest him, to imagine and moralise and sentimentalise, we begin to learn some history. It is not only that he shows us something of the normal man’s habits and ways of life: even better, he shows us his thoughts, his prejudices, his unconscious presuppositions, what he takes for granted and cannot imagine not to be so. History is probably the worst record of the ordinary man, and memoirs the second worst; letters are more trustworthy, because letter-writers do not always confine themselves to facts and frequently become excited; poetry, rhetoric, drama, philosophy, and fiction are best of all, since in these men are really saying what they think. If we want to know what Athens was really like in her decline, we turn not to the scientific and accurate record of Thucydides, but to contemporary comedy, acted to the partly drunk by the completely drunk. If we want to know our great-grandfathers, we turn not to Lecky but to Miss Austen.

Walking, being above all things human and intimate, is naturally neglected by the historians: it cannot be shown to have caused any political convulsions, or to have had any economic effects; it is therefore ruled out. If we want to know whether men walked in the past, and how much they walked, and, above all, in what spirit and with what object they walked, we must turn to literature. If there is any history of walking, it will be there. What follows is a brief and wholly inadequate attempt to review literature from this standpoint—to see what part walking plays in the largely unconscious record of facts and wholly unconscious record of ideas which we find in literature.

It is well at once to prepare for a disappointment. It is fairly clear that in all ages men have walked, more or less: indeed, this could be proved a priori from the anatomical structure of the leg. But it is equally clear that up to very recent times they have done so without the least knowledge of the value and purpose of walking. They have walked in a utilitarian spirit, to get somewhere; they have walked in a medical spirit, to improve their digestions; they have very rarely walked for the sake of walking, to realise themselves in a fine activity. No doubt the men of old were ignorant and unenlightened, and too much must not be expected of them; no doubt the habit of riding on horses (introduced quite early and still existing) diverted men’s attention from the possibilities of walking. But when all allowances are made, the unprejudiced walker, reviewing all the centuries B.C. and at least eighteen of the centuries since, must pronounce them one long disappointment.

The first disappointment comes in classical literature: among all the figures of the Graeco-Roman civilisation we look in vain for a walker. The Homeric heroes occasionally took a walk by the sea, but only from bad temper (?? ???? ?at?d??) or to interview their divine mothers. Aeneas is a little more promising: the lines—

raise considerable hopes of a proper walk, but the poet proceeds to dash these hopes by the damning admission in the next line—

In all classical literature it is hard to find a single instance of a walk undertaken for its own sake, without some base ulterior motive. Worse than this, a great philosopher goes out of his way to insult walking. In illustrating his doctrine of final cause, Aristotle remarks that the final cause of walking is health. For a moment the reader is struck dumb with the thought that once again Aristotle has overleapt the centuries and found out something never again discovered until after 1870. But it is clear that he misunderstands health: he is speaking from a grossly medical standpoint. For he interposes between the two a middle term, consisting of digestion viewed in its most revolting and mechanical aspect: and the reader sinks back with a sigh of regret.

But in justice to Aristotle it must be remembered that he himself went far to wipe out this insult by one of those curious, half-conscious, inspired reaches of divination which make the Greeks so unlike other philosophers. In his analysis of the psychology of action he constructs what is known as the Practical Syllogism—a train of feeling leading to action comparable to the train of thought in the syllogism leading to a conclusion. There is the major premise—things that wake a certain kind of feeling in me are to be sought or avoided; there is the minor premise—this is a thing waking the kind of feeling. A lesser man would have been drawn on by the charms of his own analogy to add a conclusion—this is to be sought or avoided, but Aristotle will allow no theoretical conclusion to the practical syllogism. ‘In this case,’ he says in words which make our hearts leap, ‘the conclusion from the two premises is the act, as when one thinks—Every man ought to walk, I am a man, and at once—he walks.’[3] The major premise with its fine grasp of the meaning and purpose of human life, the minor premise with its simple but splendid assertion of humanity, lead straight to the conclusion—a walk.

The Middle Ages, as far as can be judged, were densely unenlightened on the subject of walking. I have no wish to decry the Canterbury pilgrims, but they were obviously not walkers: they talked too much, and were too much immersed in the bare particulars of actuality. Indeed, the pilgrims as a whole took a low view of walking; not only did they regard it in itself as a penance, but they utilised this penance for a grossly material object—namely, the writing off of some of the heavy list of entries on the wrong side of their moral pass-book, which prejudiced their solvency in the future life. Further, they had no eye for country; the Pilgrims’ Way from Winchester to Canterbury, after leaving St. Martha’s Church, with the magnificent line of the chalk to the north and the no less magnificent hills to the south, takes the relatively tame valley-way between,[4] presumably because there were more facilities for drink in the valley, and the purgation of the pilgrims’ miserable souls could be shortened by an hour or so. Judged by all the evidence, the pilgrims were men of low motives and obscurated vision, and quite unworthy of a place in the company of walkers.

The Elizabethans seem little better. There is no trace in Shakespeare of a proper regard for the meaning and purpose of walking. In As You Like It both parties of travellers arrive at the Forest of Arden in a state of extreme fatigue, without any apparent appreciation of the charming walk they have had through the county of Warwick. In the same way Lysander and Hermia, though they met in a wood only a league without the town—and that a wood with which they were both familiar—promptly lose their way and ‘faint with wandering in the wood’—a fearful confession of incompetence and weakness. Only Demetrius and Helena, spurred on by the pangs of unrequited love, are able to achieve five miles or so without fainting. Walking is regarded by Portia as one of the most distressing symptoms of Brutus’s condition: she notes with amazement how he suddenly rose and walked about, and how he walks unbraced and sucks up the humours of the dank morning. (Portia’s views on hygiene show the true old spirit.) Polonius in the same way advises Hamlet in the interests of his health to walk out of the air—that is, into the nice comfortable palace where the King had caroused overnight and an embassy had been received that morning; and the chilling reply ‘Into my grave?’ is the first hint we get of modern views on ventilation. If only Hamlet had acted up to his views—if only he had taken one good walk in the air to shake together all those errant spirits that warred in his capacious brain—the philosopher, the gallant, the good fellow, the calf-lover of Ophelia, the true lover of his father—and weld them into a concrete whole! What a man he would have been, and what a play we should have missed!

The eighteenth century, being both the Age of Reason and the Age of Port, was clearly no time for proper walking. None the less, the century is important as producing the literary form in which walking first became self-conscious, namely, the novel. The emergence of walking was a long business: for many years the writers of fiction were preoccupied with duels and elopements and moral crises and sudden deaths—all the things which conspicuously do not happen to walkers. But as the romantic revival drew on, men became more whole and concrete; and at last we begin to find in novels that walking is coming to its own. If we review the fiction of the last hundred and twenty years, among much irrelevancy and many abstractions, we can discover a few real walkers; and the fact that they occur in novels makes them immensely more significant. If a person is recorded in history as walking, it only means that one person walked: if in a novel, it means that walking has a real place in the ideas of the age.

The first true walker is unquestionably Elizabeth Bennet. Relatively to her age, she was even a good walker. Her three-mile tramp across the fields to Netherfield was evidently thought something quite sensational. Her time is not given; she left home after breakfast, and reached Netherfield before the family had finished breakfasting: allowing for the probable difference between Mr. Bennet’s habits and Mr. Hurst’s, we may estimate it at an hour; and three miles an hour is no break-neck pace in the twentieth century. But for the first mile to Meryton she was with Kitty and Lydia, who were obviously bad walkers, so that on the whole her pace was not to be despised. Further, it may be noted that she was the only person in the whole book who ever walked these three miles. Mrs. Bennet and Kitty and Lydia drove; Mr. Bingley and Mr. Darcy invariably rode; Jane had to ride (owing to the careful dispositions of Mrs. Bennet), and, as might be expected, caught a cold in the rain.

But Elizabeth was something more than a good walker: she was clearly responsive to the spiritual influences of walking and the open air. Her relations with Darcy are a striking illustration of this. She meets him first at a dance, and naturally forms her Prejudice at once: she continues her acquaintance at several evening-parties and at Netherfield, the most important conversation taking place in a room in which Bingley had just spent half an hour in piling up the fire to prevent Jane taking cold: (it would, of course, have been unthinkable to open a window). She is then bamboozled by Wickham in the drawing-room of Uncle Philips, who is himself described as ‘stuffy’; and then, after another dance, the first stage of the acquaintance ends. At Hunsford things improve: there is no more dancing, and Fitzwilliam and Darcy walk the half-mile from Rosings to the Parsonage. But all the important interviews, culminating in the first proposal and general back-talk, take place either at Rosings or in that room at the Parsonage which Charlotte specially selected, because it did not look out on the road and would therefore not attract Mr. Collins. Then, after this climax, the change at once begins. The first thing next morning Elizabeth takes a walk: she meets Darcy, foot to foot at last, and in the open: she reads his letter, walking, and continues her walk for two hours: the first blow at the Prejudice is struck. They meet again, in the grounds of Pemberley: they walk together (Mrs. Gardiner requiring her husband’s support); almost at once the past is wiped out, and truth begins to emerge. Then comes the last phase at Longbourn. Elizabeth engages and slaughters Lady de Bourgh, on her feet, in the prettyish kind of a little wilderness. Darcy arrives, and after a few fruitless skirmishes in parlours and at evening-parties, they take the road together one fine morning, and when once Kitty has gone to pay her call at the Lucases’, there is but one way. The further walk to Oakham Mount (which is too far for Kitty this time) settles the business, and Mrs. Bennet is free to exercise the virtuosity of her imagination on the theme of ten thousand a year.

The relation of Dickens to walking is somewhat peculiar. There is plenty of good walking in his works, just as there is plenty of eating and drinking and romantic eloquence, and other natural processes; but it is nearly all of an unconscious or even mechanical kind. Most of the big walking is undertaken from reasons of economy—the walk of Nicholas and Smike from Dotheboys Hall to London, and on to Hindhead or wherever it was that Mr. Crummles dawned upon the scene; the walk of Nelly Trent and her grandfather through the industrial districts of England, and on to the village which contained the blameless schoolmaster; the walk of Traddles to Devonshire and back to see Sophy; or David Copperfield’s walk to Dover, when the long-legged young man had stolen his money. None of these would have taken the walk for its own sake, except possibly Traddles, who says generally that he had ‘the most delightful time.’ They seem to have been blind to the beauties of walking, and to have borne it only as a disagreeable necessity. They have not even the purely sensuous appreciation of the beauty of a walk which is found in Mr. Pickwick and his friends, when they walk to the Leather Bottel at Cobham to see if Mr. Tupman is still alive. It is not unfitting that the greatest pronouncement on the Dover road should have been made, not by David Copperfield, who plodded every inch of it, but by that dread Sibyl, Mr. F.’s aunt.

There is only one place in which Dickens rises to a conscious appreciation of the fact of walking itself—in the description of Martin and Tom Pinch walking into Salisbury to dine with John Westlock. Even here the main theme is that walking keeps a man warm on a cold day, and gives him an appetite for dinner—a view which is very little above the grovelling opinions of Aristotle in the Posterior Analytics. The fact that Martin and Tom walked when they might have driven, and actually found it pleasanter, is flaunted in the reader’s face as a novel and startling paradox. Any idea that walking can do something more than keep us warm or make us hungry seems as far from the mind of Dickens the writer as the fact, to which the modern world is awaking, that driving is, with the exception of waltzing and croquet, one of the most despicable of human activities.

But Dickens the writer was not quite the same as Dickens the man. The writer may have taken a low view of walking; the man was first and last a walker. He was a walker of a peculiar kind; in this as in everything else he was a Londoner. But among London walkers he was one of the greatest. Streets and lamps and human beings, the dim glare and muffled din of London by night, were to him what seas and mountains have been to other poets; they were the food, perhaps the stimulants, of his imagination. And his intimacy with them was not merely the feeling of one who had lived among them. It was that of one who had walked among them, at full stretch, with every muscle taut and every nerve astrain, the feverish reality without answering to the feverish fancy within. It was no doubt by an instinct rather than by conscious purpose that he sought his inspiration in the sights and sounds of the city; his pathetic cry from among the glories of Italy that he cannot be happy without streets, shows only the simple and uncomprehended craving of a child. For the same reason, there is not much patent trace in his works of the compelling influence which London had upon him. Only here and there—in the lonely walks of Neville Landless ‘to cross the bridges and tire himself out,’ in the stern chase of David Copperfield and Mr. Peggotty after Martha, or the deadly pursuit of Eugene Wrayburn by Bradley Headstone—do we catch hints of that tremendous vision as revealed to the night-walker, which suffuses every stone of Dickens’s London with the glow of excitement and romance.

There is one walker in Dickens who deserves mention for a special reason. This is Canon Crisparkle, one of the three or four clergymen of the Established Church who figure among the thousand or so characters of Dickens; the blameless athlete who bathes before breakfast on a frosty morning, spars at the looking-glass, and is obviously destined to be rewarded by the hand of Helena. Dickens, conscious perhaps that he had hitherto slighted the Church, and anxious to make amends, intended to be as kind as possible to the Canon; but he builded better than he knew. In those days when Kingsley was yet living, and muscular Christianity only beginning to dawn upon the popular consciousness, Dickens, with the wild divination of genius, adds one little touch to the Canon’s portrait which stamps him indelibly as the forerunner of all that hearty and back-slapping orthodoxy which devastated the ’eighties and ’nineties, and turned to gall the milk of reverence in many a young breast. ‘I have not lived in a walking country, you know,’ says Neville Landless. ‘True,’ says Mr. Crisparkle, ‘get into a little training and we will have a few score miles together. I should leave you nowhere now.’ And thus the author, carried beyond himself by his own creative genius, marks his hero unmistakably as a braggart and a liar.

When we reach Meredith we are in daylight at last, and walking is comprehended as no mere mechanical process, but a great activity of the whole being of man. Passage after passage, phrase after incomparable phrase, call to the walker with the sound of trumpets. ‘He jumped to his feet ... and attacked the dream-giving earth with tremendous long strides, that his blood might be lively at the throne of understanding.’ ‘He was a man of quick pace, the sovereign remedy for the dispersing of the mental fen-mist. He had tried it, and knew that nonsense is to be walked off.’ ‘The taking of rain and sun alike befits men of our climate, and he who would have the secret of a strengthening intoxication must court the clouds of the south-west with a lover’s blood.’ ‘Carry your fever to the Alps, you of minds diseased: not to sit down in sight of them ruminating, for bodily ease and comfort will trick the soul and set you measuring our lean humanity against yonder sublime and infinite; but mount, rack the limbs, wrestle it out among the peaks; taste danger, sweat, earn rest; learn to discover ungrudgingly that haggard fatigue is the fair vision you have run to earth, and that rest is your uttermost reward.’

It would be a pleasing task to recall in detail all the walkers of Meredith: Richard Feverel in the storm in the forest; Evan Harrington on the road to his father’s funeral; Carinthia and Chillon in the mountains; Gower Woodseer; Arthur Rhodes on the night walk to Epsom and Denbies; Harry Richmond and Temple, made free of romance by the first touch of their feet on German soil, marching inevitably to find the fairy princess. But I must pass them by in order to linger awhile on the greatest of them all, the living embodiment of the best that is in walking, Vernon Whitford.

At the outset the author wins our sympathy for Vernon by a single bold stroke: he comes before us first in ‘the electrical atmosphere of the dancing room’ crossing himself, and crossing his bewildered lady (LÆtitia), and ‘extorting shouts of cordial laughter from his cousin Willoughby.’ It was only a square dance, so that Vernon is free from the suspicion of having contaminated himself, even from a sense of duty, with waltzing. The rest of his story is mainly composed of walks. He meets Clara and Crossjay on his way back from a long walk on the evening of Clara’s arrival, when she is wrestling with the repugnance which she thought was ended, but was really only beginning; they walk together, and at once he takes his place somewhere in the back of her head, so that in her reflections she ‘puts another name for Oxford.’ They walk again after she has found him sleeping under the double-blossom wild cherry-tree; they talk of the Alps—clearly the beginning of the end. Then follow two of the only three important interviews between them which take place under cover. First Clara, instructed by Willoughby to sound Vernon on the project of marrying LÆtitia, ‘casts aside the silly mission’ and gives him the truth; immediately he goes off for a walk, returning late at night. Then comes the interview in the inn parlour, but this is only after both have had a wild scurry across country in the rain of the south-west. (See Note A below.) All through the crisis of the book Vernon is scouring the country in pursuit of Crossjay, and returns in time to deliver (in the open air) the decisive blow at Willoughby. Then follows the fateful walk with Clara, when he talks of Switzerland, Tyrol, the Iliad, Antigone, Political Economy—anything, we may add, to save poor Clara’s face. Last comes the short interview at night, which might have reached the climax, had not both by an instinct reserved it for a more fitting place ‘between the Swiss and Tyrol Alps over the Lake of Constance.’ It is not only they of minds diseased who carry their fever to the Alps.

Vernon makes such a claim upon our sympathy that we are driven to decide in his favour what would be with a lesser man a very doubtful point. When he meets Clara on the occasion of their first walk, he tells her that he has just walked nine-and-a-half hours to get rid of the temper caused by Crossjay. Now breakfast at Patterne on a normal morning (see Note A below) ended at a quarter to ten, and it must have taken some little time for Crossjay to rouse Vernon’s temper to the walking off point. After he meets Clara they walk for some little time before returning to the hall for dinner, for which presumably they dressed. Dinner at that epoch at the very most cannot have been later than half-past seven, or possibly eight. It is thus very difficult to see where Vernon’s nine-and-a-half hours come in. But Vernon was no Canon Crisparkle, and it is hard to think that he lied to Clara at such a time and on such a matter: we therefore shut our eyes and asseverate blindly that he walked exactly nine-and-a-half hours.

Further, he walked at a pace of something over four-and-a-half miles an hour. If any one wishes to contest this statement, he will have to read Note A below.

After Meredith come professed essayists on the subject of walking—notably Stevenson and Leslie Stephen. I do not propose to treat them at any length, partly because it would be presumptuous and partly because I carefully postponed reading them until seven-eighths of this work were completed. On looking through their essays I am abased, but not disheartened: they say most of what can be said on the subject much better than any one else can say it, but what of that? There is never any harm in repeating a thing, especially when it is important. Stevenson says the essential things about walking once and incomparably; and just for that reason people are apt to overlook them. For example, he says that the traveller ‘becomes more and more incorporated with the material landscape, and the open-air drunkenness grows upon him with great strides’; the ordinary Stevensonian exclaims, ‘How charming!’ and promptly forgets all about it. But when later writers make seven or eight incompetent attempts at the same idea, the reader begins to think there is really something there, and to explore the meaning for himself. It is like passing seven or eight inaccurate sign-posts all pointing to the same place; it is hard to resist turning up by one of them, and when the road leads you nowhere you become all the more anxious to find the place, and all the more impressed when you reach it; whereas, if you are planted there suddenly and miraculously, you say, ‘How charming!’ and pass on. The right course is to read these essays first, then go several walks, and then read Stevenson. Therefore no more of him.

Some interesting but perverse treatment of walking is to be found in Ibsen. His characters walk a good deal, but it never seems to have a proper effect on them; they return from their walks without one string of their nervous temperament loosened, or one facet of their personality rounded. Johannes Rosmer is out for a walk on Kroll’s first visit, and Rebecca remarks that he has stayed out longer than usual. He returns, not dirty, not hungry, not mentally equable and idea-proof, but just the same as when he started out; he begins talking at once, and in ten minutes is arguing about politics, and in twenty is inaugurating a life-long breach with his brother-in-law; finally, at the end of the act, he goes to bed without any supper. He cannot really have been much of a walker. In the third act Rebecca particularly impresses upon him twice that he is to take ‘a good long walk’ to give her time for her interview with Kroll. The good long walk lasts exactly eight pages in the English translation, and he comes back fresh enough to take a lively part in the overwhelming scene which finally brings his house toppling about his ears. Surely Rebecca herself, the incomparable heroine for whose sake we throw over all moral judgments and tear up all commandments, the serene wielder of a concrete purpose, vanquished only by herself, the most attractive murderess who ever drove a rival by lies into a mill-dam—surely she was a better walker than Rosmer.

Hilda Wangel, too—what the plague had she to do with a walking-tour? If she had really walked from her home to the Solness’ house, would there have been much left of her abstract purpose? Would she have come in with her eyes sparkling to demand the redemption of the ten-year pledge? Surely twenty miles of Norwegian country, if properly walked, would have warned her to leave Solness alone, and continue her walk somewhere else. It is the same with Gregers Werle: if he had really gone for a walk with Hialmar, he could not have kept the cutting-edge of his ideal sharp enough to sever all Hialmar’s roots: they would have begun to talk about the weather, and would have had a large tea and returned smoking pipes with their ideals filed for future reference.

Elsewhere in modern literature there are signs, though only a few, that walking is coming to its own. The most cheering example is Mr. Belloc, who not only records walks, but writes in the true walking mood, with plenty of irrelevancy, plenty of dogmatism, and thorough conviction on the matter of eating and drinking. Mr. Wells also sends his young people out for walks occasionally, with the best results. But the best description of walking, or rather Walking Out, in modern literature outside Meredith is in Browning’s ‘Last Ride Together.’ It is true that he wrote it about riding, but I am sure that this was really a mistake. Any one who has ever started on a walk after a hard week’s work can only admit one interpretation to the lines:

It may have been simply a printer’s error: by adding two letters we can set the matter right:

This at least was what the young gentleman was saying to the young lady that afternoon, when I overtook them just short of Newland’s Corner. It is a grassy track, and it was well that I stepped on a stick.

NOTE A
On the Rates of Walking of Various Persons in the Egoist, Chapters 25 sqq.

It will be remembered that Clara and Crossjay walked to the station after breakfast, followed first by Vernon and later by De Craye. A close scrutiny of the details given produces some very interesting information.

The first point is the time of the train. Willoughby says that ‘eleven is the hour,’ but as he adds airily that there is ‘a card in the smoking-room,’ we cannot trust this evidence alone. But Vernon, we are told, timed himself to reach the station at ten minutes to eleven, and this before he met Dr. Corney, who drove him part of the way. On getting to the station he tells Clara that she has ‘full fifteen minutes, besides fair chances of delay.’ It seems fairly clear then that the train was due at just about eleven, that Vernon reached the station at 10.44 or so, and Clara some time earlier.

If the train was due at eleven, the distance to the station can be approximately fixed. When Clara starts the drive back, she passes her own train ‘eighteen minutes late by her watch.’[5] She arrives at the Hall just as twelve is striking. The drive consequently took just over forty-two minutes. The roads were wet, and Flitch’s horse probably decrepit: the distance by road may therefore be fixed at about four miles. By taking the footpath, according to Crossjay, ‘you save a mile.’ Crossjay may be trusted on a point like this, and we may thus estimate the field way at three miles.

Now the field way passed through the West Lodge Park Gate. This was clearly not far from the Hall. Clara left the breakfast-room at 9.45. She then had to get her hat and meet Crossjay behind the pheasantry, and, on the lodge-keeper’s wife’s statement to De Craye, they were through the gate before ten. We infer that the distance was at most half a mile, leaving two and a half miles to the station. Clara and Crossjay cannot have been through the gate much before ten, and after meeting the tramp and sending Crossjay back, she was still at the station before Vernon—i.e. before 10.44. The inference is that in wet clothes and over bad ground—even Vernon found the footpath slippery—she went nearly four miles an hour. In dry clothes and on a good ground, she had to fall into a special kind of trot to keep up with Vernon, reminding him of the Piedmontese Bersaglieri, and that at the end of a nine-and-a-half-hour day. It is clear, therefore, that Vernon’s pace cannot have been much below five miles an hour.

His own timing on the morning of the flight is not very exactly given. The lodge-keeper’s wife told De Craye that he was through the gate half an hour after Clara. If this is accurate, the time would be about 10.25. He then, after meeting Crossjay, timed himself to be at the station at 10.50—twenty-five minutes for two and a half miles. But he clearly intended to run: and although this shows his running pace to be creditable, we cannot safely infer from it to his walking pace.

One further interesting point emerges, namely, that De Craye’s watch, after setting everybody right at breakfast, went hopelessly wrong in the course of the morning. It was ten minutes past eleven by his watch when he left the Park gate: yet he was at the station in time to meet Clara, and, after some discussion, to drive back with her (11.17 or at most 11.21—see above). It is not stated where he picked up Flitch’s cab, but even Flitch can hardly have driven in from five to ten minutes a distance which, with a short piece added, took him forty-two minutes on the return journey. A frivolous observer might suggest that the author was not very careful in his timing: but, apart from the hideous blasphemy, this would invalidate most of the previous argument. We therefore shut our eyes once more, and affirm that De Craye’s watch went wrong.