HOW TO ENJOY A SHORT HOLIDAY.
ACORRESPONDENT of a Pall Mall Gazette of last week— the issue of the last day of March—wrote a most affecting appeal to the editor of that journal, and to the world in general through him, to reform the conditions imposed on those holiday- makers, who, like the many ' favourers' of Sir John Lubbock, have only a short holiday to spend. The case the correspondent made out was a most lugubrious one. You could not go to big places where there is plenty of hotel competition, because there you find so many vulgar persons enjoying themselves,—Israelites, he said, though why he thought vulgarity especially Israelite he did not even hint, and we at least have found it pretty equally diffused through all races; moreover, you cannot go to smaller places, because there the only hotels which make you comfortable have a monopoly, and charge such preposterous prices, that "a married couple, dis- posed to live quietly, will find that, despite the moderate charge for apartments out of the season,' they cannot calculate on spending much less than £30 for board and lodging at any first-class hotel within three hours' rail of London during a sojourn of ten days." Why, then, voluntarily seek, and not only seek, but remain faithful to, a place where the charge is so exorbitant, especially when you might get five times as much change and more than twenty times as much enjoyment for two-thirds of the cost, by substituting for the "first-class hotel within three hours' rail of Lqndon," five or six ordinary inns within an hour and a half's rail of London, and so taking a lesson in geography and travel at the same time? There is probably no greater delusion than the notion that you can get a salutary change of air only at the sea-side. We suspect the value of change of air depends in no slight degree on the rapidity and continuousness of the process of change, and that if you visit five or six healthy places in ten days by a mode of travelling which is as enjoyable as the change itself, yon will get a good deal more benefit, more nervous tonic, and more enjoyment, than from staying even at the most ozonic of all sea-side places for the whole ten days together. Of course, if a small family has to be taken into account, the sort of locomotion we propose is impossible. But the writer in the Pall Mall seems to contemplate only the holiday of a single couple, and for them we believe that a short holiday may be made indefinitely more enjoy- able by means of the hire of a pony carriage and daily locomotion in it, and this at a far less cost than residence at the "first-class hotel" on which "X. S.'s" experience was founded would admit of. Of course it may be said that it is not every man who drives, but in that case we can only reply that it is every man's fault who does not drive such mild creatures as a good livery-stable keeper will alone let out for such a purpose. Driving a quiet, much-used hack and driving a fiery horse of high breeding, are two operations as different as doing " sums" and solving stiff differential equations, or as playing whist under no greater sense of responsibility than the recognition of the rule that you must not revoke and must, if you can, follow yourpartner's lead, and playing whist with all the art of a con- noisseur. Any man with eyes and moderate sense can drive for the purpose we have now in view, and can hire a safe, low trap, which will not alarm his wife, and a pony or horse which never plays a worse trick than stopping without being bid at a comfortable- looking inn, for (say) four guineas a week, or at that rate. With this and a shilling map of one or two counties in the neigh- bourhood of his residence, we can promise any man, if the weather be decent, a far more enjoyable, short holiday, at less than two-thirds of "X. S.'s " suggested cost, say, £13 for the week, and £19 or £20 at most for ten days (including the hire of the pony-carriage), than he will ever get at the " first- class hotel within three hours' rail of London." If he is wise, he will not work his hired horse every day, but give it at least two days' complete rest in the week, at the pleasantest spots on which he chances,—otherwise he may have the satisfaction, as the writerhas had more than once,—of bringing it down on its knees on the last or penultimate hill down which he has to drive it, a humiliating as well as a pitiable and expensive proceeding. But with this precaution, and with the determination to keep the other days' journeys below twenty miles, and if pos- sible not above sixteen, and himself to see his horse fed at least twice in the day, no mode of holiday-spending is so little exposed to the danger either of dullness on the one hand, or of expense upon the other. The con- stant change of inns involves, on the whole, a reasonable aver- age, and that the average not of a " first-class hotel," but only of a first-class country inn ; such an average we have found to be pretty steady,—about 10s. a head per diem, with 4s. or 5s. for the horse, all fees included,—a little more at very eligible inns in a fancy village, say, or at a river-side place with a river view, and a little less at the country town, where you are regarded with wonder mixed with pity as gentlefolks who can find pleasure in seeing what the people of the place have seen all their lives without finding out that it was worth anybody's while to look at it. If we add to these suggestions, the rule never to take a broad turnpike road when you can conveniently take a cross-countryroad, always to have an interest- ing book, or a travelling chess-board, or some amusement of that kind for the evenings, and to take a dog with you,—it gives vivacity and dignity to your morning's start, and affects the inn- keeper on your arrival with a wholesome conviction that he must ac- commodate his prejudices to yours, since you would certainly never have brought an indoors dog with you if you had been at all disposed to consult his,—you will never recall with regret the coffee-room of that expensive "first-class hotel" which you have ignored. It is true that you cannot usually have recherche dinners, that you must be satisfied with a steak or a modest joint, and a simple tart or pudding ; that your claret may sometimes be thin, and yet charged half-a-crown a pint ; that your bedroom will sometimes need an open window for an hour or two before you enter it for the night ; that you will usually find cream an unheard-of luxury ; that your tea (unless you take your own) may now and then be "herby," and your coffee not groundsless ; but such things have been known even at private hotels, where a couple of people spend £30 in ten days ; and per contra, you have the mild excitement of a constant change, of finding your own way through a new country, of forming some real conception of its lines of hill and valley, in short, of achieving with something like sincerity that agreeable feat which Mrs. Elton, in Miss Austen's Emma, thought so delightful, even when it was a pure sham,—" exploring " a world hitherto known to you only by name, if so much as that. What stretches of picturesque river scenery, of beech-clad chalk downs, of rolling heather, what violet-scented lanes, what acres of primrose-covered woodland, what historic memories of the past of two hundred years ago or of yesterday, of famous battle-fields, of the haunts of the statesmen of the greatest period of English ora- tory, are accessible in a few days' drive of this kind through almost any English county ! You may see the Thames between Walling- ford and Maidenhead, with its long succession of fair, rounded downs and picturesque mills and tall watchful poplars, and richly- wooded banks, delightfully in a three days' drive. You may drive over a long succession of the wildest and most breezy heaths in England, by choosing skilfully a route through Surrey, in that time. You may follow the fine steeps of the Chiltern Hills all along their course, or make the delightful glades of the North or South Downs the chief object of your interest and feel that you know something of them in that time. Or if you care more to visit the homes of eminent writers, you may make acquaintance with the scenery described so delicately by White of Selborne, or make a pilgrimage to where Milton's cottage still stands in Chalfont St. Giles, or to where Pope visited his friends the Blounts at Maple Durham, or to where Cowper mused and de- spaired amid the quiet scenery of Olney, or to where Shelley wrote some of his most wonderful lyrics among the words of Bisham and Marlowe, you may see where Charles James Fox retired after the fatigues of gambling and oratory, where Burke lived and died and
hoped in vain to found a family, or where Mr. Disraeli still occasion- ally discourses to an astonished tenantry of the wisdom of "cross- ing Downs with Cotswolds," of the succulence of root-crops, and of the three virtues of a good cottage, "the tank, the oven, and the porch." These, and much more than these, are all within a very moderate distance from London ; and it must be remembered that it would be neither necessary nor wise, for a little holiday of this kind, to make the point of departure London itself, when Read- ing, or Hertford, or Guildford, or Watford would make points of departure so much more eligible.
The real pleasure of this sort of holiday is its unusual sense of freedom. You set out every morning without any obligation to arrive at any particular place before you put up for the day. If you see an inviting country and an attractive inn, after you have been driving but an hour, there is no reason why you should not stop. And if the place at which you intended to stop looks repulsive,—and it be still, as it ought to be, early in the afternoon, —there is no reason in the world why you should not go farther and fare better instead of worse. There is, moreover, a curious and most irrational addition to the enjoyment of this sort of holiday, in a deep sense of personal meritoriousness, which enhances the pleasure of a chance discovery of a beautiful neighbourhood or a hospitable inn. You feel something as Columbus must have felt about America,—that a retreat so discovered is in some sense the rightful reward of your enterprise and faith. You are dis- posed to regard the inhabitants of such a country as proteges of your own, in relation to whose existence you have a certain sense a pride and self-satisfaction, while the beauty of the country evidently reflects the highest credit on your own discern- ment and good-fortune. These feelings are, of course, in the highest degree irrational, but they add all the more to your pleasure on that account. To have a pleasurable feeling which has no reason in it is itself a stroke of good-fortune not easily to be overrated. There is no stimulus in feeling happy in the proper way, compared to the stimulus you get from feeling happy on utterly untenable grounds, of which every well-regulated mind could at once expose the hollowness. That indeed is making fairy gold out of withered leaves. We remember, for instance, an excursion of this kind in which the journey was singularly productive of finds of splendid birds. One comfortable inn unexpectedly contained an aviary with the most splendid paroquets, tropical pheasants, and other birds of great beauty. In another part of the excursion,—it was among the Chiltern Hills, where the writer was grieving over some of those gorgeous " improvements " of the Rothschilds which have carried a broad carriage-road over the wildest hills and planted " lodges" and stiff ornamental shrubs where only beeches and firs were formerly to be seen,—a peacock-farm was suddenly discovered, containing some twenty-five gorgeous birds of the most brilliant plumage, just as they were taking their evening flight into the trees to roost. Both these finds produced a modest glow of self-approval, the latter at a moment of some depres- sion,—in the sense of having discovered such pleasant and rare sights without the help or instigation of any guide-book or other authority. Indeed, it is this delightfully groundless self-satisfaction which comes of free exploring in an un- known country, that gives it its greatest piquancy. You admire yourself for finding what you have found, besides enjoying it, and you do not admire yourself the less for knowing that a more ridiculous bit of ungrounded vanity is hardly to be discovered in human experience than this. On the whole, we are sure that a much greater pleasure, and we believe a much cheaper pleasure, than the residence at any "first-class hotel" for ten days will produce, is within the reach of any couple who can enjoy a drive, and look alter a quiet hack with tolerable sagacity and diligence.
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