GOOD WALKERS.

Southern Cross, Volume 8, Issue 32, 1 December 1900, Page 11

GOOD WALKERS.

It is said that the best footmates of the nineteenth century were William and Mary Howitt, the writers of so vmany charming bits of literature. They began to walk on their wedding day, and kept on walking daring nearly sixty years of married life. In 1824, when walking was far from fashionable, this sturdy Quaker pair walked five hundred miles among the Scotch mountains, carrying necessary luggage on their strong young backs. They climbed Ben Lomond, waded streams, crawled over bogs, scrambled through bracken, and slid down sheer defiles in the course of this wild tramp. Doubtless the peasants fancied they were mad. In the fifty-first year of their married life, when Mrs Howitt was over seventy, and her husband almost eighty, they started out one summer morning to climb an alp of the Tyrol. From the village of Taufers they climbed a road too steep for vehicles, walking steadily for five hours. At dusk they came to a farmer’s chalet; there they were cordially invited to supper, and there for two nights they slept on the sweet fresh hay in the barn, and employed the days in twice climbing to the mountain top. An excursion which had been planned for William Howitt’s birthday after he bad passed his eightieth year was reluctantly abandoned because of the rain. A year or two later his wife wrote : —■ ‘ Father and I have just come in from a pleasant walk right into the country, amongst picturesque houses and such ancient orchards and parklike fields scattered over with grand old Spanish chestnuts.’ Mr Howitt died in 1879, aged eighty-four. For a few years more his faithful footmate took quiet •strolls, and gathered the flowers her husband loved. And when she had lived to see eighty-nine years she fell asleep.