that well-dressed people are mostly fools, that servants are dishonest, that whoever wears a ready-made tie is not a gentleman, that doctors are ignoramuses, that eating smoked herring is vulgar. But these are prejudices. Not at all; by any fair test they better deserve the name of ultimate convictions than the ambitious articles of faith with which we began. And the test is simply this: on which set of convictions do men act? Plainly on the second. Your believer in immortality will cheerfully imperil his soul through a long lifetime, your fanatic of the relativity of knowledge will be completely irate in discussion with a dogmatist, your advocate of the unknowable, if entrusted with power, would conscientiously proclaim, 'The Unknowable or the sword.'

In short, these ambitious categories are not, properly speaking, convictions at all, but mere simulacra thereof. They are emblems, not principles. We would willingly die for them, just as the predatory politician will honestly yearn to die for his country's flag; but Heaven keep us from the folly of living by our ultimate convictions! Such is the unspoken prayer of most sensible people who reserve their creeds for Sunday or election-day use. A rather plain-spoken person, Geoffrey Chaucer, once wrote, For Plato saieth, whoso can him rede, The word mote be accordant to the dede. We should then be following two eminent truth-tellers should we degrade most metaphysical, theological, and political formulas from their false estate of convictions to that of intermittently recurrent prejudices. To complete the demonstration, we need only show that the real ultimate convictions are invariably acted on. You may make a Christian Scientist out of a Jesuit, but hardly a sausage-eater out of a sausage-hater. Nor shall you win to friendly association with Germans one whose axiom it is that they

are nasty. Many persons call in a physician as an expected social form, and habitually disregard his advice. In fact, a true medicophobe will gladly pay a fee for the pleasure of flouting his doctor. At every point we shall find that the test of action will prove what we commonly call prejudices to be our genuine and most intimate convictions.

In great as in small affairs this truth holds. We know a business man who after careful scrutiny of an enterprise was on the point of a large investment. Hearing casually that the promoter's cheeks were adorned with side-whiskers, the capitalist brushed the project aside. He knew that no luck could come of association with a man who wore 'weepers.' Indeed, experience had taught him that such persons were not merely inauspicious, but positively untrustworthy. At the risk of anticlimax the present writer must avow that, saving the case of very ancient clergymen, he has absolutely no confidence in the taste or morals of any person wearing congress gaiters. Of course such a conviction, being based on a sound analogy between elasticity in principles and in footgear, is not to be confused with the more irrational sort of ultimate convictions. But at bottom the reason hardly comes in. We simply feel and act in a certain way, and that is all there is of it. We dig our last ditches where we please, and not where any moral Vauban dictates. The chaste Lucretia, it will be recalled, because of the outrage of Tarquin, killed herself. This certainly looks like the working of a transcendental ultimate conviction. Yet we should not forget that it is quite possible that the chaste Lucretia would equally have killed herself if her husband had persistently required her to eat mutton, if indeed, in proper resentment of such persecution, she had not killed him.

Shortsighted people will feel that

this reversal, by which, according word with deed, our prejudices become our convictions, somehow degrades human nature. To which the answer is, first, that the truth is no respecter of persons; and next, the counter-query, Does it degrade? On the contrary it exalts. By an instinctive altruism we dig our last ditches where they will endanger few but ourselves. If the theological and political creeds which we profess really guided our conduct, New York soon would be a new Constantinople, with massacre hanging on the presence or absence of a grammatical prefix. To build your ultimate convictions too high is socially dangerous. The man who stands on his notion of the substance or essence of divinity will appeal to the fagots if he may; the man who would perish before eating snails or frogs' legs is content with a subjective superiority. In fact, while dissent is only an offense to our philosophical and churchly prejudices, it is actually a salve to our ultimate convictions. We pride ourselves in those who vulgarly breakfast on smoked herring; they are our background, the conspicuous evidence of our own gentle tastes. It might seem that some Providence had deliberately set our more rigid principles in the field of the wholly inconsequential, in order that men might differ without hating. Lest, influenced by reason, we should act too unreasonably, a great gulf has wisely been established between the proud heights of reason and the pleasant table-land of our ultimate convictions.

OF WALKING

WITH SOME THOUGHTS ABOUT SITTING ON FENCES

WALKING is fundamentally a matter of boots. Nay, friend, I do not mean top-boots, but boots in the sense of the English, who, being most perfectly

enfranchised for walking, have thence the right to name the gear in which they travel. But I do not here discourse of fine details. So the boot fit, the sole be adequate, and the heel not loftily inclined, choose your own wear, and you shall know content. There be that favor rubber heels, and here again each man is his own arbiter; yet this, at least, is not to be forgotten or lightly overpassed: there is a tang in the sharp crunch of a hard heel on fair road-metal that greets not him who goes delicately on rubber. Let temperament decide.

Most men walk merely to arrive. To such the right flavor of walking is not known; though chance may reveal to them the unsuspected good, and so kindle a longing for the proper bliss of the walker. The true pedestrian knows that the means is itself an end. Not for him 'so many miles and then begins the actual business,' but so many miles of utterly fulfilled content'; and if at the road's end he find some pleasant hostelry, with fire and food and all manner of cheer, this is but the fair setting of the stone, not the gem's perfect self. Not that the walker scorns good entertainment, or fair weather, or congenial fellowship. His feet are on the earth; he is no detached dreamer; and all these things may be accounted part and parcel of his pleasure without disloyalty to the pedestrian creed.

Walking is not merely moving two legs rhythmically over certain intervals of ground. It is the primal and the only way to know the world, the deliberate entering into an inheritance, whose parts are wind and weather, sky and prospect, men and animals, and all vital enjoyment. The bicycle has some advantages in point of speed, but it is a foe to observation. All carriages, whether propelled by horse or motor, destroy all feeling of achievement. The

very word 'mile' is a walker's word, -mille passus - a thousand doublepaces. So the Roman legions measured their conquering advances; so the legion of pedestrians estimates its conquests of the day. 'So many thousand buffets have mine own two feet given the resisting soil 'twixt sun and sun; so many thousand times have the good muscles of calf and thigh lent their elastic force.' What has the dusty reader of figures on a dial to match with that? Another element, of grave importance and unquestioned worth, is the privilege, nay, the imperative necessity, of sitting on a fence from time to time. Literature hints at this. Lewis Carroll's aged, aged man a-sitting on a gate' had, by the sunset of his days, at least, acquired this wisdom. Poor Keats owned to a hankering to 'sit upon an Alp as on a throne' — although the German school of critics, keenly sensing the discomfort which inevitably disqualifies a mountain pinnacle for the scene of prolonged sessile repose, suggests metathesis, and would amend the reading to 'sit upon an Alp as on a thorn'; adducing as collateral argument Keats's well-known admiration for the nightingale, and that bird's familiar practice of artificially stimulating the centres of voice-production by causing its breast to impinge upon a thorn or similar sharp object. Leaving this delicate problem to the competent consideration of the wise, we may safely conclude that our first thesis is correct, and that to sit on a fence beside a road is of itself a satisfaction and an inspiration. For, be it posited again, the walker walks not to arrive, but to be in the world, to contemplate the same, and to take sufficient leisure for the formation of his judgments. To do this, he must sit. Sitting on a grassy bank is not, indeed, barred, although to the unwary it brings perils of ants, rheumatism, and (in some re

gions) snakes. It is, indeed, provocative of idleness; it leads one to forget that the interlude is not the song; and he who sprawls may ultimately sleep.

But the fence and cursed be he who first conceived the hellish scheme of substituting barbed wire for honest rails! the fence invites no such relaxing pose. The feet on their supporting rail are still in contact with reality, and it needs but a spring to be on the way again; while the seat, none too soft, gives perpetual reminder that the stay must be transitory, and that wits are not to slumber. To rest, and as he rests descry, discern, and fill the mental eye through the gateway of the physical that is his portion who sits upon the fence. I will not mention the gain that comes from elevation, or even hint at the scenes which to have missed were to have suffered loss, revealed to him who climbs even to this humble post of vantage.

Only to those who will drink is the water good; one does not describe beverages to the thirsty: they would rather taste. So to the uneasy loiterer at home, to him who has found in gasoline only vanity and a striving after wind, to all who hunger for they know not what diversion, I offer no guidebooks of the journey, seek to convey no colors of the walker's paradise; enough to point the entrance of the way, and give the password: 'Forward, march!'

THE VANISHING VILLAGE

WANDERING along an oily roadthere was no walk-in an attractive New York suburb, the other day, pursued by chugging motor-cycles and madly hopping this way and that at the honk of speeding automobiles, an appalling thought struck me: is the village, still so dear to New England, becoming extinct? Will succeeding generations know only as ancient history