"The use of travelling is to regulate imagination by reality, and instead of thinking how things may be, to see them as they are.'

JOHNSON.

I

A PEDESTRIAN ON THE UPPER CROUCH

WROTE this originally for yachtsmen under the title A Landlubber's Voyage. The title was absurd. It should really have been called The Adventures of a Sailor Ashore, but I hesitated to do so because a wrong impression would have been given at once. It would have been anticipated as a tale of high jinks at the Pig and Bottle, or the vagaries of a Master of Craft in some small haven of Kent or Essex; whereas my story was immensely serious, and was written to fill a long-felt want on the part of the week-end small-yacht cruiser.

Has he not ridden at anchor off a mud-encumbered shore and been busy with his telescope, picking out "bits" in the distant landscape and trying to imagine what those places are like, if he could only get there? Many a time and oft

have I been brought up by the tide in the Lower Hope and scanned the dim landscape, looking out for impossible and vicarious adventures upon terra firma. There is that funny little windmill seen across the fields before you make Mucking Creek, and there are distant traces of old farmhouses, inns, and other delights. There is, too, the mystery of the Claudian Aqueduct, visible from afar but quite inexplicable. It crosses the creek, where it becomes a stream flowing out of Stanford-le-Hope. I felt I must inquire into these things, and so I started on a tour with my sketch-book. My notes were written, however, rather from the sailor's point of view and dealt primarily with harbours, sea walls, mud, lighthouses, and all things pertaining to the adventurous life of sailing and exploring so dear to the hearts of many of us.

If you should hold, when you have looked at my sketch on page 39, that I have chosen a somewhat strange centre for expeditions written for a yachting paper, I am prepared with a spirited defence of my method of exploration. In the first place, I can claim that outsiders see most of the game, and that from a position so far away from the water I can see everything. There are the distant masts of Burnham, a few small sails upon the upper river, and a stumpy" making her way towards Battlesbridge.

From these hills I can look down upon the waters of the Crouch in a spirit of detachment and offer advice about the affairs of tides and kedge anchors with the confidence of an elderly maiden lady giving hints to mothers on the upbringing of babies. Moreover, my host, a resident of Hockley,