14 MAY 1932, Page 12

Though you do not find the converted country house or

the country club in Somerset, you find more populous if less pic- turesque shrines of the cult of the country. Numbers of hostels for hikers and cyclists have been built. Doubtless the British youths who spend their holidays in walking over the country have not the picturesqueness of the "Bands of Youth" who patrol the woods in Germany and chaunt songs equivalent to Stevenson's : 'Bed in the bush with the stars to see.

Bread to dip in the river, That is the life for a man like me, That is the life for ever."

The hostel is superficially an ugly equivalent to the bush, but it is perhaps a better in many respects ; and as real, though less self-conscious a love for the best things in the country animates its unpicturesque votaries.