Now, the true charm of pedestrianism does not lie in the walking, or in the scenery, but in the talking.  The walking is good to time the movement of the tongue by, and to keep the blood and the brain stirred up and active; the scenery and the woodsy smells are good to bear in upon a man an unconscious and unobtrusive charm and solace to eye and soul and sense; but the supreme pleasure comes from the talk.  It is no matter whether one talks wisdom or nonsense, the case is the same, the bulk of the enjoyment lies in the wagging of the gladsome jaw and the flapping of the sympathetic ear.

And what motley variety of subjects a couple of people will casually rake over in the course of a day’s tramp!  There being no constraint, a change of subject is always in order, and so a body is not likely to keep pegging at a single topic until it grows tiresome.  We discussed everything we knew, during the first fifteen or twenty minutes, that morning, and then branched out into the glad, free, boundless realm of the things we were not certain about.

Harris said that if the best writer in the world once got the slovenly habit of doubling up his “haves” he could never get rid of it while he lived.  That is to say, if a man gets the habit of saying “I should have liked to have known more about it” instead of saying simply and sensibly, “I should have liked to know more about it,” that man’s disease is incurable.  Harris said that his sort of lapse is to be found in every copy of every newspaper that has ever been printed in English, and in almost all of our books.  He said he had observed it in Kirkham’s grammar and in Macaulay.  Harris believed that milk-teeth are commoner in men’s mouths than those “doubled-up haves.” [1]

1.  I do not know that there have not been moments in the
    course of the present session when I should have been
    very glad to have accepted the proposal of my noble friend,
    and to have exchanged parts in some of our evenings
    of work.—­[From a Speech of the English Chancellor
    of the Exchequer, August, 1879.]

That changed the subject to dentistry.  I said I believed the average man dreaded tooth-pulling more than amputation, and that he would yell quicker under the former operation than he would under the latter.  The philosopher Harris said that the average man would not yell in either case if he had an audience.  Then he continued: 

“When our brigade first went into camp on the Potomac, we used to be brought up standing, occasionally, by an ear-splitting howl of anguish.  That meant that a soldier was getting a tooth pulled in a tent.  But the surgeons soon changed that; they instituted open-air dentistry.  There never was a howl afterward—­that is, from the man who was having the tooth pulled.  At the daily dental hour there would always be about five hundred soldiers gathered together in the neighborhood of that dental chair waiting to see the performance—­and