AT last I lost patience, and answered perhaps somewhat curtly, "Sir, if you must know, I travel in Scarabæi." Now, in the estimation of my persistent acquaintance, it was clear that no one had a right to be away from home unless travelling travelling "in" something. Dry goods and groceries are great powers. Let this be granted.

But

Two

there are other springs to locomotion, and the commercial traveller is not to be countenanced in the notion that he is the only human being who can give valid reasons for vagabondism. minutes earlier a couple of parsons had come out of the Clifton House door, and, after a word or two with the huge black porter, who was sitting on the steps in the evening sun, had gone down towards

the Falls. I had met them in Canada. One was on his way to a great gathering of Evangelical persons, somewhere in the States; the other, to visit emigrants whom he had helped out to Upper Canada from the east of London, and to consider the most hopeful outlet for future cargoes. Practical and theoretical philanthropy had set these two wandering. A group of ladies in a neighbouring balcony may probably have started on their travels from the desire to display their delicate upholsteries to the largest possible number of the human race. Sport, curiosity, idleness, science, diploNo. 142.-VOL. XXIV.

macy, health, had each its share in gathering the company which met for four daily meals in our long feeding chamber. It may be matter for curious inquiry whether the world is not at least as much profited by the wanderings of any of these classes, as by those of either of my two interlocutors. The object of the first is to inspire mankind with a desire for A.'s pickles,-of the second to clothe the human race in stockings from B.'s looms. Neither Tobit, nor Ulysses, nor Herodotus, nor Livingstone, nor any other traveller that I know of, who has left his mark, is supposed to have sold goods on commission. I myself am a vagabond who cannot be classed under either of the above categories. My motive is neither sport, curiosity, idleness, science, diplomacy, philanthropy, nor a desire to sell pickles. If a man can be held to know what prompts him to do anything, which I doubt, I should say that want of imagination is the gad-fly which has driven me over much of the earth's surface.

Lowell says, somewhere,—

"He needs no ship to cross the tide,
Who in the lives around him sees
Fair window prospects opening wide
O'er history's fields on every side,

To Ind and Egypt, Rome and Greece."

But how if one has not Lowell's "study