In concluding this chapter, let me just add that of all modes of enjoying life in summer and autumn I consider—speaking after a somewhat lengthy experience—caravan travelling the healthiest and the best.
Chapter Twenty Nine.
The Cycle as Tender to the Caravan.
“When the spring stirs my blood
With the instincts of travel,
I can get enough gravel
On the old Marlborough road.”
Thoreau.
I begin to think, reader, that the plan of putting headlines or verses to chapters, although a very ancient, time-honoured custom, is not such a very excellent one after all.
The verses are written subsequently, of course, after you have finished the chapter, and the difficulty is to get them to fit; you may have some glimmering notion that, once upon a time, some poet or other did say something that would be apropos, but who was it? You get off your easy-chair and yawn and stretch yourself, then lazily make your way to the bookshelf and commence the search among your favourite poets. It is for all the world like looking for a needle in a bundle of hay, and when you do find it, it isn’t half so bright as you thought it would be, only down you jot it in a semi-reckless kind of a way, feeling all the while as if you were a humbug, or committing some sort of a deadly sin.
If this good poet Thoreau had said,—
“When the spring stirs my blood
With the instincts of travel,
I can get enough exercise
On my Marlborough tricycle.”