94 WAYFARING NOTIONS 



At the same time, if you, the trespasser or depre- 

 dator, don't mean any harm, well, where is it — 

 the harm, I mean — seeing that you are in your 

 own estimation honest as Izaak Walton's fishers ? 

 Feeling on a safe platform of morality, I would 

 still like, as I say, to talk over the rights of the 

 case, because it is hard to read of old and poor 

 people being sent to prison for pulling a few dead 

 sticks to boil the kettle, while you, well-found, 

 deliberately help yourself to live wood which does 

 not belong to you. John Home would no more 

 dream of taking what wasn't his'n than of hurting 

 a child, if he considered the something conveyed 

 really belonged to anyone ; but when you come 

 to think it out, a pretty taste in the walking-stick 

 line might easily get you locked up with an 

 awkward difficulty before you in the matter of 

 ofettinof out agfain. At our last interview I asked 

 him if he still had natural sticks all over Sussex ? 

 Yes, he had ; and forthwith he wanted to give 

 me a holly sapling with a natural knob, one that 

 had been in a midden for months, he said, and 

 up a chimney for a year. Wherever he went he 

 would mark out a stick, and in due time cut and 

 season it, usually with the future possessor to 

 whom it was to be presented already fixed in his 

 eye. At all manner of out-of-the-way houses had 

 he saplings of one sort and another stored. How 

 a man who loved the things as he did, like a real 

 connoisseur with a curio, managed to bring him- 

 self to part with them I could scarcely make out, 

 except in one regard, and that is the point I 

 particularly want to put before brother walkers. 



The veteran was of my old-time friends, the 

 warmest apostle of walking as a pleasure, exercise, 

 and health-maker, and in seeking to make a con- 



