How to do it
(Page 1 of 2)

by Rev. Edward Everett Hale, &c.

The following advice by Rev. Edward Everett Hale is so good that I have appropriated it. You will find more good advice in the same book.[27]

"First, never walk before breakfast. If you like you may make two breakfasts, and take a mile or two between; but be sure to eat something before you are on the road.

"Second, do not walk much in the middle of the day. It is dusty and hot then; and the landscape has lost its special glory. By ten o'clock you ought to have found some camping-ground for the day,—a nice brook running through a grove; a place to draw, or paint, or tell stories, or read them or write them; a place to make waterfalls and dams, to sail chips, or build boats; a place to make a fire and a cup of tea for the oldsters. Stay here till four in the afternoon, and then push on in the two or three hours which are left to the sleeping-place agreed upon. Four or five hours on the road is all you want in each day. Even resolute idlers, as it is to be hoped you all are on such occasions, can get eight miles a day out of that; and that is enough for a true walking-party. Remember all along that you are not running a race with the railway-train. If you were, you would be beaten certainly; and the less you think you are, the better. You are travelling in a method of which the merit is that it is not fast, and that you see every separate detail of the glory of the world. What a fool you are, then, if you tire yourself to death, merely that you may say that you did in ten hours what the locomotive would gladly have finished in one, if by that effort you have lost exactly the enjoyment of nature and society that you started for!"

The advice to rest in the heat of the day is good for very hot weather; young people, however, are too impatient to follow it unless there is an apparent necessity. The feeling at twelve o'clock that you have yet to walk as far as you have come is not so pleasant as that of knowing you have all the afternoon for rest. For this reason nearly every one will finish the walk as soon as possible; still Mr. Hale's plan is a good one—the best for very hot weather.

 

[27] How to Do It. Published by Roberts Brothers, Boston.