Ruts
THERE are at least two strains in walking. One makes itself felt in leg-weariness and soreness of muscle, and the other brings in its train eye-weariness, and the warier the eye the wearier it is at the end of a long day's trudging and tramping.
I find the City streets excessively productive of weari- ness of limb and eye, for walking in them strains my patience over people who will not walk straight forward on their way or who go slowly and stop and stare, and turn to stare again, at things they must have seen a thousand times. That is why I walk rustic-like, as my friends tell me, on the street itself, just where the horses go. I feel I can get forward there and see myself make headway, and that is at once consolation and inspiration in higher and deeper progresses than along a city street.. Perhaps I don't come any speedier to the end of a day's work thus, but I feel I am making my own pace, and therein find that secret satisfaction which we all share and enjoy when we are going prosperously and at our own pace. Agreeable people, after all, are those who agree with us, and who fit their pace to ours.
Well, well, in the country I do much solitary walking —solitary save for my old grey dog " Colin of the Misty Isle " as I sometimes call him, or " Cohn the beggar ? when another mood is on him and on me. In wet weather I march on begaitered and careless, and I excuse my carelessness by reflecting how, at the end of the day, a careful walker on such a road will be well-nigh as be- spattered and bemired as his more careless brother, and he will have missed that utter and human satisfaction of puddling on and making a glorious mess that reveals itself so early, and in such perfection in our earliest years. Of late I have had days of supreme and superb puddling on the rainfilled, oozy roads ; every step was a squelch, till the frost came, and now the grip of the frost is on everything, and my puddles are iced over, and the runlets and ruts are hard and flinty, and my foot rings on the unyielding road. I love a smooth, hard road, but a " runletting " road with its deep-cut ruts annoys me, keeps me always on the watch, on my guard against a stumble or a turned ankle, and I find myself wishing at times that someone—I am not sure whose business I could make it out to be—would roll the roads just before frost and make them all plain and easy for me—a desire that at some time or other visits us all even on roads that no frosts ever harden and no rains ever soak !
That " Someone " of my hopes is, however, as unattain- able and unreachable by me as Baal by his priests or the Clerk of the Weather by the summer excursionists. The ruts are there and Baal is silent, and the summer excursionists, being human, like the rest of us, took the weather as it came last year, and should have been very thankful for it.
So much- for the ruts, but what of the wheels that made them ? All the world and his gear go on wheels, and the fact that there are airships and aeroplanes, carries no weight with me, for their wheels are internal, and the ruts they make are in the air, and these airy ruts are filled as smoothly and as quickly as I would the ruts of my frost-bound roads.
In the roads' ruts I see written the patience and the perseverance of our race, the ingenuity and endeavour of mankind. I step out and forget my little annoyances in memory and realization of all I owe to the generations that are gone and to the generation of to-day. I find myself wondering if I am doing my-duty, as those 'are whose trafficking shows in the carven roads. The world goes on apace and is full of ruts. Rivers, valleys, high- ways and by-ways, ditches and dykes and drains and channels and runlets—everywhere there is a coming, a being, a passing-away. The thaw will come, and its mildness will ease the sides of the ruts, and puddling and splashing will be again a delightful vogue for me. The ruts will be smoothed and gone, but their memory will remain with me, and every evening when I look back- ward over my little rut of living, I shall think of the Master Designer whose wheels we are. • • • A. C,
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