Stout shoes are preferable to boots always, and a wise traveller never omits to grease well his leather before and during his journey.  Don’t forget to put a pair of old slippers into your knapsack.  After a hard day’s toil, they are like magic, under foot.  Let us remind the traveller whose feet are tender at starting that a capital remedy for blistered feet is to rub them at night with spirits mixed with tallow dropped from a candle.  An old friend of ours thought it a good plan to soap the inside of the stocking before setting out, and we have seen him break a raw egg into his shoes before putting them on, saying it softened the leather and made him “all right” for the day.

Touching coat, waistcoat, and trousers, there can be but one choice.  Coarse tweed does the best business on a small capital.  Cheap and strong, we have always found it the most “paying” article in our travelling-wardrobe.  Avoid that tailor-hem so common at the bottom of your pantaloons which retains water and does no good to anybody.  Waistcoats would be counted as superfluous, were it not for the convenience of the pockets they carry.  Take along an old dressing-gown, if you want solid comfort in camp or elsewhere after sunset.

Gordon Cumming recommends a wide-awake hat, and he is good authority on that head.  A man “clothed in his right mind” is a noble object; but six persons out of every ten who start on a journey wear the wrong apparel.  The writer of these pages has seen four individuals at once standing up to their middles in a trout-stream, all adorned with black silk tiles, newly imported from the Rue St. Honore.  It was a sight to make Daniel Boone and Izaak Walton smile in their celestial abodes.

A light water-proof outside-coat and a thick pea-jacket are a proper span for a roving trip.  Don’t forget that a couple of good blankets also go a long way toward a traveller’s paradise.

We will not presume that an immortal being at this stage of the nineteenth century would make the mistake, when he had occasion to tuck up his shirt-sleeves, of turning them outwards, so that every five minutes they would be tumbling down with a crash of anathemas from the wearer.  The supposition that any sane son of Adam would tuck up his sleeves inside out involves a suspicion, to say the least, that his wits had been overrated by doting relatives.

“Grease and dirt are the savage’s wearing-apparel,” says the Swedish proverb.  No comment is necessary in speaking with a Christian on this point, for cold water is one of civilization’s closest allies.  Avoid the bath, and the genius of disease and crime stalks in.  “Cleanliness is next to godliness,” remember.

In packing your knapsack, keep in mind that sixteen or twenty pounds are weight enough, till, by practice, you can get pluck and energy into your back to increase that amount.