PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
CONTENTS
Chapter Headings by R. H. Hull
| CHAPTER | PAGE | |
| [I] | We Set Out | 1 |
| [II] | Boots | 7 |
| [III] | The Knapsack | 15 |
| [IV] | Clothes | 22 |
| [V] | Carrying Money | 32 |
| [VI] | The Companion | 38 |
| [VII] | Whither Away? | 47 |
| [VIII] | The Art of Idleness | 78 |
| [IX] | Emblems of Tramping | 88 |
| [X] | The Fire | 97 |
| [XI] | The Bed | 103 |
| [XII] | The Dip | 114 |
| [XIII] | Drying after Rain | 121 |
| [XIV] | Marching Songs | 128 |
| [XV] | Scrounging | 135 |
| [XVI] | Seeking Shelter | 142 |
| [XVII] | The Open | 152 |
| [XVIII] | The Tramp as Cook | 160 |
| [XIX] | Tobacco | 173 |
| [XX] | Books | 179 |
| [XXI] | Long Halts | 189 |
| [XXII] | Foreigners | 195 |
| [XXIII] | The Artist’s Notebook | 208 |
| [XXIV] | Maps | 233 |
| [XXV] | Trespassers’ Walk | 240 |
| [XXVI] | A Zigzag Walk | 251 |
THE GENTLE ART
OF TRAMPING
CHAPTER ONE
WE SET OUT
IT is a gentle art; know how to tramp and you know how to live. Manners makyth man, and tramping makyth manners. Know how to meet your fellow wanderer, how to be passive to the beauty of Nature and how to be active to its wildness and its rigor. Tramping brings one to reality.
If you would have a portrait of Man you must not depict him in high hat and carrying in one hand a small shiny bag, nor would one draw him in gnarled corduroys and with red handkerchief about his neck, nor with lined brow on a high bench watching a hand that is pushing a pen, nor with pick and shovel on the road. You cannot show him carrying a rifle, you dare not put him in priest’s garb with conventional cross on breast. You will not point to King or Bishop with crown or miter. But most fittingly you will show a man with staff in hand and burden on his shoulders, striving onward from light to darkness upon an upward road, shading his eyes with his hand as he seeks his way. You will show a figure something like that posthumous picture of Tolstoy, called “Tolstoy pilgrimaging toward eternity.”