Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: AN OLD ROAD. Methinks here one may, without much molestation, be thinking what he is, whence he came, what he has done, and to what the King has called him. Bhutan. I FALL in with persons, now and then, who profess to care nothing for a path when walking in the woods. They do not choose to travel in other people's footsteps, nay, nor even in their own, but count it their mission to lay out a new road every time they go afield. They are welcome to their freak. My own genius for adventure is less highly developed; and, to be frank, I have never learned to look upon affectation and whim as synonymous with originality. In my eyes, it is nothing against a hill that other men have climbed it before me ; and if their feet have worn a trail, so much the better. I not only reach the summit more easily, but have company on the way, company none the less to my mind, perhaps, for being silent and invisible. It iswell enough to strike into the trackless forest once in a while; to wander you know not whither, and come out you know not where; to lie down in a strange place, and for an hour imagine yourself the explorer of a new continent: but if the mind be awake (as, alas, too often it is not), you may walk where you will, in never so well known a corner, and you will see new things, and think new thoughts, and return to your house a new man, which, I venture to believe, is after all the main consideration. Indeed, if your stirring abroad is to be more than mere muscular exercise, you will find a positive advantage in making use of some well-worn and familiar path. The feet will follow it mechanically, and so the mindthat is, the walker himself will be left undistracted. That, to my thinking, is the real tour of discovei-y wherein one keeps to the beaten road, looks at the cust...