(I fancy, by the by, that the latter term has somewhat fallen out of use in these latter days, whether from any change of the methods used by printers or publishers I do not know.  But it strikes me that many youngsters, even of the scribbling tribe, may not know that the phrase “a token” had no connection whatever with signs and wonders of any sort, but simply meant two hundred and fifty copies.)

And being thus equipped, I began to think that it was time that I should attempt a book.  During a previous hurried scamper in Normandy I had just a glimpse of Brittany, which greatly excited my desire to see more of it.  So I pitched on a tour in Brittany as the subject of my first attempt.

Those were happy days, when all the habitable globe had not been run over by thousands of tourists, hundreds of whom are desirous of describing their doings in print—­not but that the notion, whether a publisher’s or writer’s notion, that new ground is needed for the production of a good and amusing book of travels, is other than a great mistake.  I forget what proposing author it was, who in answer to a publisher urging the fact that “a dozen writers have told us all about so and so,” replied, “But I have not told you what I have seen and thought about it.”  But if I had been the publisher I should at once have asked to see his MS. The days when a capital book may be written on a voyage autour de ma chambre are as present as ever they were.  And “A Summer Afternoon’s Walk to Highgate” might be the subject of a delightful book if only the writer were the right man.

Brittany, however, really was in those days to a great extent fresh ground, and the strangely secluded circumstances of its population offered much tempting material to the book-making tourist.  All this is now at an end; not so much because the country has been the subject of sundry good books of travel, as because the people and their mode of life, the country and its specialties have all been utterly changed by the pleasant, convenient, indispensable, abominable railway, which in its merciless irresistible tramp across the world crushes into a dead level of uninteresting monotony so many varieties of character, manners, and peculiarities.  And thus “the individual withers, and the world is more and more!” But is the world more and more in any sense that can be admitted to be desirable, in view of the eternity of that same Individual?

As for the Bretons, the individual has withered to that extent that he now wears trousers instead of breeches, while his world has become more and more assimilated to that of the Faubourg St. Antoine, with the result of losing all those really very notable and stiff and sturdy virtues which differentiated the Breton peasant, when I first knew him, while it would be difficult indeed to say what it has gained.  At all events the progress which can be stated is mainly to be stated in negatives.  The Breton, as I first