Country Life
7'nz EXTINCT PEDESTRIAN.
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One of the older Oxford Dons, a -Scholar of fine taste and
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catholic interests, enjoys a constant controversy with Mends alWays active in the fight for the preservation of Oxford rural beauties. He has been. a great walker about Britain and indeed, a good part of Europe. His lament is that preservatiOn of rural beauty is now useless because no one cares : The race of walkers is extinct. The motorists, always in a hurry, do not mind if they " miss the nightingale." The few who are not motorists, pure and simple, are golfers. For them preservation of rural beauty means the brushing of worm-casts from the golf greens. So this pessimiStic philosopher argues that those Who still care for the cOafitry, with an intimacy only possible to a walker, must fie content to take refuge in the past. They must read their Matthew Arnold and see Oxfordshire only through the eyes of " the schOlar gipsy."
" This strange disease of modern life, Witb its sick hurry"—
has to-day more concrete symptOmi than Arnold said._ But " sick hurry " is ingeniously prophetic of the motor. car.
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