Tes. (hastily running over his papers,) · Thank you, thank you, Sir:-Aye, here they are, biting, and stinging, wherever I set my finger!-Well, well! no matter to business. I begin, I see, with some of the delights of walking in the country:-what say you, then, to GROAN 1. (TESTY.) The sole of the shoe torn down in walking, and obliging you to lift your foot, and limp along, like a pig in a string :-no knife in your pocket, nor house within reach ! 2. (T.) The boot continually taking in gravel; while, for a time, you try to calm your feelings by believing it to be only hard dirt, and hoping, but in vain, that it will presently relieve you by pulverising. 3. (T.) Suddenly rousing yourself from the ennui of a solitary walk by striking your toe (with a corn at the end of it) full and hard, against the sharp corner of a fixed flint:::-pumps. Ned Tes. Nay, father, such a kick as that would pay you for the pain, by driving out the corn: 66 segetem ab radicibus imis Expulsam erueret." Vir. Sen. Nay, If you are for corns, listen to me: 4. (SENSITIVE.) Walking all day, in very hot weather, in a pair of shoes far too tight both in length and breadth :-corns on every toe. Tes. There beat you me, to be sure; but it is the only triumph you will have, and so make the most of it.-Beat what fol lows, if you can. 5. (T.) When you have trusted your foot on a frozen rut, the ice proving treacherous, and bedding you in slush, to the hip. 6. (T.) Walking thro' a boundless field of freshploughed clay-land; and carrying home, at each foot, an undesired sample of the soil, of about ten or twelve pounds weight. Ned Tes. Ah! this is, as Dryden says,→ "A trifling sum of misery New-added to the foot of thy account!”. Stooping, tearing, floundering, and bleeding your way, thro' a boggy, briary copse, with here and there a rushy pool, which takes you by surprize; so that you are more and more entangled and engulphed as you advance, till you are, after all, necessitated to turn back, and encore all your sufferings; and so emerge at last, looking like a half murdered beggar : Ned Tes. Quem "circum, limus niger, et deformis arundo, tardâque palus inamabilis undâ Alligat, et novies Sticks interfusa coercent." 8. (T.) Vir. Walking obliquely up a steep hill, when the ground is what the vulgar call greasy. Ned Tes. Sad work,!" Labitur, et labetur!"-Hor. 9. (S.) Feeling your foot slidder over the back of a toad, which you took for a stepping-stone, in your dark evening walk "Pressit humi nitens, trepidusque repentè refugit!" Vir. In like manner, crushing snails, beetles, slugs, &c. whether you will or no. Tes. Bad enough, Sir, bad enough; but this, and all the specimens of bad footing that we have yet mentioned are carpeting, compared with what follows, as you will presently confess : 10. (T.) While you are out with a walking-party, after heavy rains having one shoe suddenly sucked off by the boggy clay; and then, in making a long and desperate stretch, (which fails,) with the hope of recovering it, leaving the other shoe in the same predicament:-the second stage of ruin is that of standing, or rather tottering, in blank despair, with both feet planted, ancledeep, in the quagmire. The last (I had almost said the dying) scene of the tragedy,—that of deliberately cramming first one, and then the other clogged polluted foot into its choaked-up shoe, after having scavengered your hands and gloves in slaving to drag up each, separately, out of its deep bed, and in this state proceeding on your walk-is too dreadful for representation. The crown of the catastrophe is, that each of the party floundering in his, or her, own gulph, is utterly disabled from assisting, or being assisted by the rest. Sen. "O, horrible ! O, horrible! most horrible!" (Shak.)-If, however, it may afford you any consolation, under the recollection of a calamity so dreadful, to hear an accurate description of it from the master-hand of Tacitus, attend, while I recite it: "Miscetur operantium clamor-cuncta pariter adversalocus uligine profundâ, idem ad gradum instabilis, procedentibus lubricus; corpora neque librare inter undas poterant.-Non vox, et mutui hortatus juvabant: nihil strenuus ab ignavo, sapiens a prudenti, consilia a casu differre:-cuncta pari violentiâ involvebantur !"—And now, my friend, let me relieve your mind, by a meaner, though by no means a tolerable misery.— |