CHAPTER I. Of Travelling Sketches. Read by Winifred Asman. Travelling Sketches by Anthony Trollope. The Family that Goes Abroad, Because It's the Thing to Do. That men and women should leave their homes at the end of summer and go somewhere, though it be only to margate, has become a thing so fixed that incomes the most limited are made to stretch themselves to fit the rule, and habits the most domestic allow themselves to be interrupted and set it not. That we gain much in health there can be no doubt. Our ancestors, with their wives and children, could do without their autumn tour, but our ancestors did not work so hard as we work. And we gain much also in general knowledge, though such knowledge is for the most part superficial, and our mode of acquiring it too often absurd. But the English world is the better for the practice. Homestaying youths have ever -homely wits, and we may fairly suppose that our youths are less homely in this particular after they have been a day or two in Paris, and a week or two in Switzerland, and up and down the Rhine, than they would have been had they remained in their London lodgings through that month of September. So weary to those who are still unable to fly away during that most rural of months. Upon the whole we are proud of our travelling, but yet we must own that as a nation of travellers we have much to learn, and it always seems that the travelling English family, which goes abroad because it's the thing to do, with no clearly defined object as to the pleasure to be obtained, or the delights to be expected, with hardly a defined idea of the place to be visited, has as a class more to learn than any other class of tourists. In such family arrangements daughters of course predominate. Sons can travel alone, or with their own friends. This arrangement they generally prefer, and for it they are always able to give substantial reasons in which their mamas may or may not put implicit confidence. Daughters can travel alone too occasionally, as I hope to be able to show by and by, in a sketch of that much abused but invaluable English lady, the unprotected female tourist. But such feminine independence is an exception to the rule, and daughters are generally willing to submit themselves to that paternal and maternal guidance from which the adult male tourist so stoutly revolts. Pater familias of course is there, paying the bills, strapping up the cloaks, scolding the waiters, obeying but not placidly obeying the female behests to which he is subject, and too frequently fretting uncomfortably beneath the burden of the day, the heat and the dust, the absence of his slippers, and the gross weight of his too matured proportions. And he has, too, other inward grievances of which he can say nothing to any ear. Something of