Persons who are wise proceed on a different plan; they wish to make the most of every moment, and, while they value exercise, they like to make the quickened currents of their blood feed a receptive and perhaps somewhat epicurean brain.  To the judicious man our lovely country affords a veritable harvest of delights—­and the delights can be gained with very little trouble.  I let the swift muscular men hurry away to the Tyrol or the Caucasus or the Rocky Mountains, or whithersoever else they care to go, and I turn to our own windy seashore or quiet lanes or flushed purple moorlands.  I do not much care for the babble of talk at my elbow; but one good companion who has cultivated the art of keeping silent is a boon.  Suppose that you follow me on a roundabout journey.  Say we run northward in the train and resolve to work to the south on foot; we start by the sea, and foot it on some fine gaudy morning over the springy links where the grass grows gaily and the steel-coloured bent-grass gleams like the bayonets of some vast host.  The fresh wind sings from the sea and flies through the lungs and into the pores with an exhilarating effect like that of wine; the waves dance shoreward, glittering as if diamonds were being pelted down from the blue arch above; the sea-swallows sweep over the bubbling crests like flights of silver arrows.  It is very joyous.  You have set off early, of course, and the rabbits have not yet turned into their holes for their day-long snooze.  Watch quietly, and you may perhaps see how they make their fairy rings on the grass.  One frolicsome brown rogue whisks up his white tail, and begins careering round and round; another is fired by emulation and joins; another and another follow, and soon there is a flying ring of merry little creatures who seem quite demented with the very pleasure of living.  One bounds into the air with a comic curvet, and comes down with a thud; the others copy him, and there is a wild maze of coiling bodies and gleaming white tails.  But let the treacherous wind carry the scent of you down on the little rascals and you will see a change.  An old fellow sits up like a kangaroo for an instant, looking extremely wise and vigilant; he drops and kicks the ground with a sharp thud that can be heard a long way off; the terror of man asserts itself in the midst of that pure, peaceful beauty, and the whole flock dart off in agitated fashion till they reach their holes; then they seem to look round with a sarcastic air, for they know that you could not even raise a gun to your shoulder in time to catch one of them before he made his lightning dive into the darksome depths of the sand-hill.  How strange it is that meditative men like to watch the ways of wild things!  White of Selborne did not care much for killing anything in particular; he enjoyed himself in a beautiful way for years, merely because he had learned to love the pretty creatures of fen and meadow and woodland.  Mr. Russell Lowell can spend a happy day in watching through his glass the habits of the birds that haunt his great garden; he does not want a gun; he only cares to observe the instincts which God has implanted in the harmless children of the air.  On our walking tour we have hundreds of chances to see the mystic mode of life pursued by the creatures that swarm even in our crowded England; and if we use our eyes we may see a score of genuine miracles every day.