Is there a right and a wrong in
the matter, an advisability or an inadvisability, an expediency or
an inexpediency? I do not think so. Travelling is a pleasure, if it
is anything, and a pleasure pursued from a sense of duty is a very
fatuous thing. I have no good reason to give, only an accumulation
of small reasons. Dr. Johnson once said that any number of
insufficient reasons did not make a sufficient one, just as a
number of rabbits did not make a horse. A lively but misleading
illustration: he might as well have said that any number of
sovereigns did not make a cheque for a hundred pounds. I suppose
that I do not like the trouble, to start with; and then I do not
like being adrift from my own beloved country. Then I cannot
converse in any foreign language, and half the pleasure of
travelling comes from being able to lay oneself alongside of a new
point of view. Then, too, I realise, as I grow older, how little I
have really seen of my own incomparably beautiful and delightful
land, so that, like the hero of Newman's hymn,
"I do not ask to see
The distant scene; one step enough for me.
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