CHAPTER I.
_ON THE WING._
It is, perhaps, rather a subject for reproach to English people that the
swallows and butterflies of our social system are too apt to forsake
their native woods and glens in the summer months, and to fly to 'the
Continent' for recreation and change of scene; whilst poets tell us,
with eloquent truth, that there is a music in the branches of England's
trees, and a soft beauty in her landscape more soothing and gracious in
their influence than 'aught in the world beside.'
Whether it be wise or prudent, or even pleasant, to leave our island in
the very height of its season, so to speak--at a time when it is most
lovely, when the sweet fresh green of the meadows is changing to bloom
of harvest and gold of autumn--for countries the features of which are
harder, and the landscape, if bolder, certainly less beautiful, for a
climate which, if more sunny, is certainly more bare and burnt up, and
for skies which, if more blue, lack much of the poetry of cloud-land--we
will not stay to enquire; but admitting the fact that, for various
reasons, English people _will_ go abroad in the autumn, and that there
is a fashion, we might almost say a passion, for 'flying, flying south,'
which seems irresistible--we will endeavour in the following pages to
suggest a compromise, in the shape of a tour which shall include the
undoubted delight and charm of foreign travel, with scenery more like
England than any other in Europe, which shall be within an easy distance
from our shores, and within the limits of a short purse; and which
should have one special attraction for us, viz.
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